1975. Germany. Landstuhl Army Medical Center. Multi-family military dependent housing. Apartment R. Third floor on the left. This was to be my home from first through third grades. It would be the first and, to date, the last time I would live in a foreign country. I can still remember that sense of fear and uncertainty about living outside of the United States that came the moment Dad told us we were moving. How would I make friends when I didn’t speak German? That fear was relieved the day I arrived and discovered everyone on the American Army Base spoke English including my soon to become best friend.
Second floor on the right. The fourth of five children. Stephen and I were alike in almost every way. We loved playing LEGOs and GI Joe, throwing green pine cones at our friends and riding our bikes around the playground loop, but there were a few noticeable differences about our families. The Platte family had more kids than any other family with kids my age. They had no television. They didn’t eat sugar cereals and they didn’t go to church where we went to church. They had crosses on the walls of their house with Jesus still hanging on them. They touched their shoulders, forehead and belly
after they said grace at dinner. I went to church with them one time and I didn’t understand a single word said by the preacher. Afterwards they told me he was a priest and that he was speaking Latin. Before Easter, the kids would give up something like chocolate for what seemed like an eternity and they wouldn’t eat meat on Fridays. For the older of two children who was used to eating sugar cereal in front of Saturday morning cartoons and getting stuff for Easter rather than giving something up, this was all quite different.
I was too shy to ask Stephen about the differences, so I asked mom and dad. They told me the Platte family was Roman Catholic, which simply meant they worshipped Jesus in some different ways than us. Not better or worse, just different. I was still confused about what no chocolate and no Friday cheeseburgers had to do with church and Jesus. Their best age appropriate response to this inquisitive six year old was that Catholics celebrated a season before Easter called Lent when they would give up things that were important to them for forty days. They assured me while Protestants did celebrate Lent, I didn’t have to give anything up. I was glad; I wasn’t sure I could give up TV or Cocoa Pebbles for a week, much less forty days.
That is my earliest recollection of Lent. At the time I knew I was Methodist, but I probably didn’t know that Methodists were Protestants. Church was the place you went on Sunday. Prayer was something you did before you ate supper and before you went to bed. The Bible was a green, faux leather covered book that held the coffee table down and was “Living.” Making a connection between my belief in Jesus and doing things to practice my faith apart from church, the dinner table or bedtime never occurred to me. I do remember my mother beginning to give things up for Lent after meeting the Platte family. She never watched television so for her it was always chocolate. It would be much later before I came to a full understanding of Lent. Truth be told, that understanding came through celebrating Mardi Gras and a Catholic girlfriend rather than from my faith community.
Perhaps each of you have similar recollections of your first exposure to this season of preparation before Easter. Whether we have known about Lent for years or it is a recent discovery, it is important for us to understand its origins and purpose as we embark on this devotional journey together. While we don’t need a depth of understanding that includes reading early church fathers like Eusebius or Athanasius, we do need to realize that this is a long standing tradition of the Church that predates Roman Catholicism and Protestantism for the purpose of deepening our relationship with Jesus Christ. It is to that understanding we now devote the rest of this introduction.
I would like to be able to tell you to turn in your Bibles to Acts chapter 21 verse 4 to find the beginning of Lent described by Saint Luke, but I cannot. While there are Biblical events that contributed to its practice, Lent is not in the Bible. Some scholars argue that it is a practice that dates back to the Apostles, but the earliest evidence we have regarding preparatory fasting before Easter comes from the third century Anno Domini. For the Lenten season as a regularized Church practice, the evidence comes from the fourth century.
Simply put, Lent is a season of penitence, fasting and prayer, designed to purify and prepare our hearts to receive the resurrected Christ at Easter. In the early church catechumens, those desiring to be Christians, would go through a preparatory period of instruction and purification that would end with their baptism on Easter morning. While this practice was reserved for new Christians, the church recognized that we all needed to prepare our hearts for Easter so early in the growth of the Church, a period of prayer and fasting before Easter was introduced. The traditions of this preparatory fast differed in the eastern and western parts of the church and continue to be different today, just as the Eastern Orthodox Churches celebrate Easter at a different time than the western church. Since our Protestant tradition is rooted in the western church we will focus on that history for our understanding of Lent.
The practice of prayer and fasting is the root of this preparatory season. The length and extent of the Lenten fast has varied. Some of the early fasts lasted a few hours, others a few days. The regular practice of the Lenten fast being forty days seems to have been established prior to the Council of Nicea in 313 A.D. Gregory the Great, in the sixth century, established the modern understanding of Lent beginning on Ash Wednesday and continuing through Holy Saturday. The season is six weeks of six fast days, Monday through Saturday, plus the Wednesday through Saturday of Ash Wednesday week. This makes for a total of forty fasting days. Sundays are considered feast days, as each Sunday is a mini Easter where we celebrate our resurrected Lord. Gregory is also the person who began the tradition of imposing ashes on peoples’ foreheads on Ash Wednesday.
The extent of the Lenten fast was very strict in the beginning, allowing for one meal a day around the three o’clock hour and requiring those fasting to give up meat, dairy, eggs and oil. It was the giving up of eggs and oil that led to the traditions of Christians giving eggs at Easter and of having pancakes on Fat Tuesday. Exactly what people gave up varied by area and over time, but ultimately the strictness was relaxed to the modern Roman Catholic practice of Ash Wednesday and Good Friday being the only strict fast days and meat only being given up on Fridays during Lent.
A final modern practice of Lent, the one most embraced by Protestants, has been for individuals to give up something of importance to them. The purpose of this practice is the same as a food fast. It demonstrates to both ourselves and God that He has the highest priority in our lives and helps us recognize that we depend on God to meet all of our needs. Too often when we feel lonely, angry, or even stressed we turn to things other than God to cope with these feelings. We might eat chocolate, smoke, drink wine or go shopping. When we give up these coping mechanisms, or even something that just consumes a lot of our time, we soon discover that God is trustworthy and more than capable of helping us cope. In fact, when we place our trust fully in Him, we can trade the practice of coping for the reality of flourishing.
In summary, Lent is a season in the Church Calendar designed for us to prepare our hearts to fully receive the resurrected Christ at Easter. Through Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection, God the Father reconciled the whole world to Him restoring a brokenness that has existed from the Garden. As Christians, we must fully trust in this saving act to reconcile our relationships to God. Lent is a time to condition the soil of our hearts to receive this truth for the first time or to renew this truth each year as we prepare to receive anew the miracle that is the Resurrected Christ.
This devotional has been written to create a journey of shared focus and practice to prepare our hearts this Lenten season. It will incorporate scripture, teaching, prayer, praise and spiritual discipline challenges. The focus of our study will be Saint Peter who might be the New Testament person in greatest need of God’s grace. His bold heart had to be humbled and transformed so that he could lead the Church in a boldly humble way. He knew faith, fear and failure, but he was always ready to act. He stepped out of boats, drew swords and told lame men to stand. When they met, Jesus told Peter He would build His church upon him but Peter still had lessons to learn. The three years he spent with Jesus completely transformed his life. That transformation was the beginning of the Church and is the reason all of us stand here today as followers of Christ. May our shared Lenten study transform our hearts and empower us to continue transforming the world.
