Lent

It’s Shrove Tuesday already so I’ll be making pancakes tonight while we watch NZ play England at 20/20 cricket on the TV. Tomorrow, Ash Wednesday, is also Waitangi Day here in NZ so all six of us will be off work and school for the day.

Over the years I’ve done various different things for the season of Lent (see here). This year I haven’t really got anything planned beyond a simple Bible reading plan and sending off for the (free) MDG praying cards from The Social Justice Commission of the Anglican Church. With all the changes coming up in the next month or so, keeping it simple is preferable.

Greenflame · Lent contains various posts relating to to the Lenten season, and links to related resources and studies (some of which is downloadable). Here are some more I’ve come across recently to add to the mix:

• Caritas Lenten reflection programme 2008 | Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand - Catholic series
• Assembly of Confessing Congregations – Following Jesus - Discipleship in the Gospel of Mark. Link via Uniting Church (South Australia) - UC E-News - January 16, 2008. Related link Pancake Day - What is UnitingCare Pancake Day?
• UCA VicTas - Lenten Resource 2006 - Description of using “a series of Retablos styled boxes that contain images, objects and stories to allow the community to reflect, and remember Christ life and teachings as we move towards Easter.”
• e~mergent kiwi: Lenten 7-pack a spiritual resource for your Lent
• Church Mission Society (CMS) | Lent resources | Mission Shaped Intro - Free course which could fit with a Lenten series - link via jonnybaker: mission shaped intro. See also
  • Church Mission Society (CMS) | Get involved | For churches | More church resources | Lent Resources
  • Church Mission Society (CMS) | Lent resources | 40
  • jonnybaker: lent

Andii helpfully points to the UK Just Church site.

Just Church is a free programme for use by churches, Christian groups and ecumenical bodies. It’s designed to help you embed a concern for poverty and social justice issues in the life of your community.

It looks like it’s well supported by various church and para-church organisations. The course material can be downloaded free, though printed copies are available for a small fee (and there’s a DVD you can buy with additional material, such as video, to supplement the base course materials).

There’s also a (free) package for doing a Lenten series using the materials. Definitely worth checking out for a look.

The antipodean Lent starts tomorrow with Ash Wednesday, where the nights, and not the days, continue to lengthen, and we move into autumn and towards winter. Not that you can tell at the moment, with all the heat and humidity.

In the past I’ve tended to give things up for Lent (coffee, I think) to serve as a reminder to myself to be more reflective as I approach Easter. In the past couple of years I’ve tried a different tack, to add something into Lent rather than taking something away. Recently, this has been to commit to a daily series of reflections specific to Lent. One year it was a book by Tom Wright, last year it was Faith Odyssey (see Greenflame: Star Lent). Sometimes not filling the gap left by giving something up, leads to it being unconsciously being filled by something else - like the year I found I had upped my cola intake without noticing, while giving up coffee for Lent.

So, yesterday I walked down to my local Christian bookshop to see what things they had that might be good to use this season. However, they had nothing (it was all arriving sometime soon, they said), and so today I tripped across town to another bookshop who had a selection of Lenten and Easter books on display and picked up a couple. I have no idea what they’ll be like, so it’ll be an interesting journey, I hope. the first is Voices from the Desert - A spirituality for our times by Leslie Griffiths (SCM Canterbury Press), while the second is Mirror of the Soul , a series of 40 reflections from the Psalms.

And speaking of filling things up, with today being Shrove Tuesday, we had pancakes tonight, cooked in the new frying pan I bought today. A bit of an experiment while I got the hand of the pan’s thermodynamics, and definitely no tossing of pancakes until I’m used to the pan’s weight. Pancakes turned out okay, and were eaten simply with lemon and sugar.

By next year, maybe I’ll have had some more thoughts on writing a Lenten series oriented around comic books - Lent by Lantern Light?

Related links:

• Maggi Dawn’s posts over the past couple of days - maggi dawn: Giving things up for Lent and maggi dawn: Fat Tuesday.
• Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand // Resources for Ministers: Special Services
• e~mergent kiwi: Lenten resource: together or separate

The PCANZ web site has some resources on it for Lent available from Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand // Resources for Ministers: Special Services. Interestingly they also have a couple of links to services for Matariki which I’m going to look at for examples of how the Antipodean winter might be engaged with.

I like Maggi’s posting on Lent as a time of recognizing our dependence upon God, rather than a time of stressed self-improvement (maggi dawn: just (don’t) try harder). A thought I’ll keep with me for the season, particularly here as the days shorten as we move towards winter.

Pancakes were a success yesterday - though one of the visiting children suggested we should change churches if we had to give something up during Lent. In actuality, it’s more Kim and I who recognize the church seasons rather than where we attend where they aren’t really part of the culture.

And the blog should have seasonal purple on it now - try refreshing the browser a few times if it doesn’t appear when you get here initially.

Inspired by Steve’s use of the book (e~mergent kiwi: spirituality resources) I’m going to use Richard’s Burridge’s “Faith Odyssey: A Journey Through Lent” for my Lenten reflections this year. A quick skim of the back of book shows a significant lack of Babylon 5, Firefly and Stargate references though I might be surprised when I actually read the book.

Pancakes tonight with the kids and their friends too.

I’m always on the lookout for new material that I can use with our house group. With it being Lent I wanted to focus on the person of Jesus and how we should live. In looking for resources I came across Spirituality of Jesus by Jon Horne (Agapé) (scroll down the page).

A series of modules looking at John’s Gospel and how one might be “at home” with God. The book is aimed primarily as an evangelical tool to connect with people in the workplace but we’re adapting the material to work with our more devotional group. The things about it that struck me positively included:

• It is presented in an engaging fashion - mixing text, images, activities.
• It treats the people using it as intelligent persons.
• It shows its “exegetical underwear” (Thanks to Steve for the metaphor)
• It had a sample chapter I could download to have a look at. (http://www.agape.org.uk/workplace/downloads/soj.pdf)
• David Wenham (NT Scholar) consulted on it and I loved his little book The Book of Signs : John’s Gospel : Good News for Today
• Inside the cover it says “Multiple copies of this document may be made for group use.”
• It respects the literary devices and imagery in the text.

We took a stab at it for the first time last night and it seemed to go well. I don’t know what the other Agapé stuff is like but this book seems like a good resource for getting into John’s gospel.

Already. It’s still 25 degrees Celsius in the office and it’s midnight (ignore timestamp on posting - NZ daylight saving confuses MT). Did the pancake thing tonight with house group, talked about traditions, Lent and Jesus’ time in the desert. Leading into dipping into John’s Gospel as we journey toward Easter and autumn.

If Lent is linked with “lengthen”, as in days heading into spring, should the Antipodean equivalent be called “Short”, as we lose the sun a little more each day. Looking for some Aus/NZ Lenten poetry that captures this.

A few doors up the road one of our neighbours sells fruit and vegetables at his front gate. Recently it’s included passionfruit which gets its name from Christ’s Passion for several reasons.

Jesuits in South America saw the hammer and nails of the crucifixion in the flower, St. Francis is said to have seen visions of the passion flower vine entwined around the cross, and early Spanish missionaries recorded accounts of seeing the flowers during church holiday seasons, especially during the Lent and Easter holidays.

Thinking about symbols for Antipodean Lent & Easter the passionfruit might be one that has a southern hemisphere “taste”. Passion Week might be “Passionfruit Week” with Easter eggs replaced with the new fruit of the vine.

Very busy day yesterday capping off a very busy month or two. Mark and Christopher’s soccer season started for the year, visitors dropped by for the afternoon unexpectedly (very nice to see them) and then we hosted a gathering of people for friends who graduated from BCNZ yesterday.

Would have been good to get to Palm Sunday service today but health-wise and energy-wise not a good idea for any of us. I wonder how the disciples and others felt that day. Several years of following Jesus around the countryside and then a big climactic entry into Jerusalem. I imagine once the hype died down the tiredness set in with a bang. Definitely “Hosanna” - “Save us”.

Lord, in this Passion Week may we be passionate about you no matter what our circumstance.

A while back (Battlestar memories) I said I’d blog about Babylon 5 and theology. Today as I sat in church we had some Gospel readings from the Passion week and I remembered the B5 episode Passing Through Gethsemane. To me it has much in it that fits with the Lenten season.
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Lent is bizarre down here in the Antipodes.

It starts when summer is ending - during it the clocks are set back as daylight saving time ends - and the days get shorter. The temperatures drop and by Easter it can be getting cold and wet. So the imagery of Easter as heralding in new life, a new springtime, new birth sort of gets lost. Lent becomes the long, spiral into winter, towards Gethsemane and Good Friday and not necessarily out of it. When Eastertime is done the world here enters winter.

I’ve been thinking about this and about how Easter might signify not merely the entering of the long dark but instead the power to live in the winter, when there is no spring.

Flicking through Joan Chittister’s little book “In a high spiritual season” I came across this meditation on moving through autumn and into winter. While it says November it could be April/May here instead.

On the East Coast, November is a sear month, beautiful for its bleakness. The skies hang gray and heavy, the wind gnaws and bellows. Life changes drastically from the velvet days of early autumn. The things we love begin to die right before our eyes. The roses begin to shrivel on the bush, the sun draws away, the colors around us start to darken. Then the streets get quieter, the neighbors disappear inside their houses, and the days darken before the light has had time to seep through the mist of morning. The earth rests.
Autum is a time of great life learnings. We learn that we cannot control the passage of time in life. We learn to accept each of the stages of life with serenity. We learn to look to new moments in life with hope rather than dispair.

Saw these tonight

The Grace Lent Blog where “every day during lent someone from the grace community/network will (if they remember) post a scripture, a thought, a reflection, an animation, an insight, a photo or a space to be silent….”

And Maggi’s nice summary of Lent, Ash Wednesday and Shrove Tuesday.

Today is Ash Wednesday - a time of self examination as Lent begins.

A collect for Ash Wednesday from the New Zealand Prayer Book.

God of the desert, as we follow Jesus into the unknown,
may we recognise the tempter when he comes;
let it be your bread we eat,
your world we serve and you alone we worship.

An excellent contemporary collect for urban dwellers is A Collect for the City Desert by Matt Humm.

More about Ash Wednesday at BBC - Religion & Ethics - Ash Wednesday.

For more on Lent and why “purple” see BBC - Religion & Ethics - Lent. (Some Christian traditions use different colours for Ash Wednesday and Lent (including unbleached linen)).

Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) today. On Saturday while at Cityside Baptist we were all given a small black envelope with a fold-out series of reflections for Lent inside it. Some thoughts for milestones through Lent with suggestions for reflective activities on that day.

Today’s entry reads

SHROVE TUESDAY - 24 February. Day before Lent
Sometimes know as ‘pancake Tuesday’ from the tradition of using up the eggs and fat in the house before the Lenten fast.

Suggestion: Gather friends together to make and eat pancakes. Talk together about changes you would like to make to who you are and how you live your life.

Sounds like a plan to me.

We’re having house group here for pancakes tonight - must go and get some lemons off the tree in the garden.

More info on Shrove Tuesday at: BBC - Religion & Ethics - Shrove Tuesday.

Some links to activities and reflections for Lent and Easter from the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand. They’re pretty trad but they can either stand on their own or as a starting point for variations upon the theme. See presbyterian.org.nz: Lent and Easter 2004

From the blog A Cup of Rich I see that the outfit that brought the great Follow the Star Christmas devotional site has one for Lent (with the same cool Jazz).

Check out Journey to the Cross: A Daily Online Devotional Guide

For those of you whose churches don’t follow the Church year (like the liturgical traditions do) you can find out more about the Christian Holy Days at BBC - Religion & Ethics - Christian Holy Days.

Found the link the other day when I was searching for some Lenten stuff on the net and the articles are good for beginners.

The next one is Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras) next week, BTW. We have house group that night so hopefully pancakes all round.