By Lilly Lewin
This week Freerange Friday is Sacred Saturday depending upon where you live! I just finished a very long day setting up a sacred space prayer room for the Warmth in Winter Conference here in Nashville. Please pray for the 2000+ jr high and high school students who are here this weekend to MOVE towards Love! Move is our theme. Since I’m in “conference land,” I am posting a Shrove Tuesday article I’ve posted before. It’s great for helping us get ready for the Lenten Season! Lots of ideas to try and encouragement to find some friends and eat pancakes! And you’ll even find a recipe video link at the end!
It’s hard to believe, but this coming Wednesday is Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent…now for many of us, we grew up with “Lent” as LINT, you know, something you’d find in the dryer or your belly button, rather than a season of the Church Year.
So if you are new to experiencing the season of Lent, you might be excited to know that we first get to celebrate with pancakes! Yep! I said pancakes, chocolate chip, strawberry and whipped cream, or just plain old flap jacks! This Tuesday, Feb.13th, is Pancake Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday.
Pancake Tuesday is better known in Britain. In the USA it’s also known as Shrove Tuesday. But we know it mostly as Fat Tuesday or Mardi Gras…Either way, the Tuesday before Lent is the day of celebration and confession before the fasting of the forty days of Lent begins.
So what is Shrove Tuesday and why should you care? Besides the fact that you get a good excuse to eat pancakes? As the youth pastor at Christ Church Glendale, I became a fan because the youth group helped host the annual Shrove Tuesday pancake dinner each year. But people have been participating in Shrove Tuesday since the Middle Ages.
People would clean out their pantries of all the fat, all the butter, eggs, milk, sugar etc in preparation for the Lenten fast. Pancakes became a good way to eat these things that wouldn’t last through the Lenten season. The word “Shrove” comes from the word “to shrive” to confess and/or hear a confession and thus, be forgiven. So people would seek out forgiveness on Shrove Tuesday so they could begin Lent with a clean slate. Check out a broader history here and here
I like to celebrate Shrove Tuesday because it is a great way to get your family, and/or your community together for fun and an opportunity for a time of confession ( We Protestants are not very good at confession so we need all the help we can get!)
Here are some ideas to help you start a tradition of Shrove Tuesday with your family or Church community:
• Invite some friends over or just gather your family.
• Make up a batch of pancakes (throw some scrambled eggs, bacon/sausage on the menu for those who need more protein than carbs, and add a fruit salad to make it healthy.
• Or if you don’t feel like cooking, go out with your group and have pancakes at Denny’s or IHOP. We’ve actually done this the last few years and had our devotion right in the middle of the restaurant! Last year we met at Fido’s in Nashville because they have amazing gluten free pancakes!
• Before the meal, Take time to celebrate all that God has done in your life so far this year.
Share these things with one another
• Have some cards or post it notes for folks to write down their celebrations and thanksgivings.
• Put post its’ on a poster or on a window making a thank you/celebration stained glass window that you can keep up and add to through the season of Lent.
• After dinner, take time to reflect on what hasn’t been great in your life this year, this month, this week, today…take time to confess these things.
• Have some paper and pens available and take a few minutes to write down and confess your “junk” to Jesus.
• If your group is a “safe” group, ( you know each other well) you might confess your “sins one to another” and then pray for each other.
• Some other tangible ways to do confession
After writing down your sins, the junk that separates you from Jesus, and the burdens weighing you down,
1. burn these confessions in the fireplace or in a fireproof dish
( you can use the ashes from these in your Ash Wednesday gathering to mark foreheads with a cross of ashes)
2. shred them in your paper shredder
3. or lay them in front of a cross.
However you choose to do your confession, actually do it and let God carry the junk, not you! Then celebrate together that Jesus has got this and don’t have to carry it any more!
While you are praying, remember the folks on the gulf coast and in New Orleans, the Mecca of Mardi Gras, who are still in recovery from the hurricane Katrina years later. Pray also for the Houston area and the Islands in Caribbean still recovering from Hurricane Maria. Pray also for other places in the world that see only the party side of Fat Tuesday and not the opportunity to connect with God. Pray also for the places of unrest throughout our world to be healed with God’s peace and reconciliation. (you can even use a map of the world and/or a current newspaper for inspiration as you pray!)
Now if you’re thinking, I wish I’d known about this LAST week, so I’d have some prep time, don’t be frustrated.
Be creative!
I’m a practitioner, not a legalist.
So why not have a pancake dinner, lunch or even breakfast some time in the next week. Doesn’t have to be Tuesday. At thinplace this year, we are celebrating on Sunday night since that is our regular time to gather. Stay at home, or go out like I said before. Whenever you have the pancakes, make it the beginning of your Lenten season either as a family or a group.
And as we are looking at Ash Wednesday and the start of Lent next week, take
today as a great opportunity to consider a Lenten Practice for the next 40 days before Easter.
If you’ve never “celebrated” Lent before, why not give it a go?
And if you grew up with a “sack cloth and ashes” view of Lent, let 2017
be a Lent “reimagined. “ One of my favorite authors, Ed Hayes, says to use the 40 days of Lent as a honeymoon, to fall more in love with Jesus!
My friend and former boss, Roger Foote, used to encourage us to add rather than
subtract during Lent. Rather than giving up something for Lent,
do something you’ve been meaning to do or neglected to do as your Lenten practice.
Rather than just giving up something like chocolate or TV, add something like:
• taking time for silence
• taking time to journal
• taking time to write, call, visit people you’ve lost contact with…..
• practice real Sabbath rest
• practice giving and serving the poor
• add in exercise
• add in more silence, less noise
• add more time with friends and family, less time on social media
• practice…..
you fill in the blank.
Just remember that if you choose to give up something as a part of lent,
like chocolate, or tv, you can participate in this on Sundays during Lent because Sundays are feast days not fast days…
but if you give up cussing, or whining, etc you might neglect this gift of freedom.
Another Practice we do in preparation for Lent is to clean out our refrigerator and pantry. This is something you can do on your own or get the kids involved too. My husband is the cook so we did this together. Take time to clean out the old jars of jam and things hiding in the back. Think about anything that might be hiding in your life, or anything that has expired. Take time to clean the shelves too. If this seems too daunting all at once, do this over the course of a week as practice of slowing down and cleaning out your fridge and your heart!
Look through your cupboards and pantry for food you don’t use or don’t plan to use.
Check the dates on packaging and throw out the expired food and give the rest to your local food pantry/food bank. This is a great practice to do in preparation for Lent. And it’s like the original idea of Shrove Tuesday!
So go find your spatula and buy some syrup…and celebrate a 1000 years of tradition and have a great Pancake Tuesday! And why not choose to fall more in love with Jesus during the weeks before Easter while you’re at it?
Our Lenten prayer kit is ready to go! Download 40DAYS toward Love at freerangeworship.com
It’s a way to pray each day using Prayer Hearts. There is an edition for person use and one that can be used with church communities.
For recipes and how to videos for Shrove Tuesday!
For more of the history, check out this post from ManyEats.com.
by Christine Sine
One of the things I like to do periodically is reflect on the scriptures I have read in the last few weeks. As I contemplated Maria Egilsson’s poem from this morning, a couple of scriptures caught my attention. I read through a post I wrote several years ago about this and felt I needed to respond with an updated post and prayer.
The first was 1 Kings 19:18, the story of Elijah fleeing from Jezebel into the desert. In the New Revised Standard Version it reads:
Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stoood at the entrace of the cave.
How do we hear silence and find stillness in our souls? When we do what makes us want to respond by going out of the caves in which we have hidden in order to listen to God?
We live in a world that is full of noise. This morning I am writing to the sound of Tom vacuuming in the background on top of the ever present traffic noise. Silence is hard to find in our world and most of us don’t know how to listen or hear what it is saying to us. But if we sit in stillness and reach deep within our hearts there we can always find the silence of God. This is not a silence that makes us ask Why can’t I hear the voice of God? Nor is it a silence that blocks out the world around us. Rather it is a silence, a stillness that resonates with the peace, joy and love that can only be found when we walk close to God. It is a silence that calls us to intimate relationship with the creator of the universe. It is a silence that calls us each day to move out into God’s world in compassion and love.
The second scripture that came to me was Matthew 14:22-33, the story of Jesus walking on the water. Thinking about both of these today this prayer/poem welled up within my heart.
Christ you come to me
Not in the wind and storm
Not in the earthquake and fire
But in the sound of sheer silence.
You come in a breath of calm
That stills the sea
And calls to my heart;
Be not afraid peace be still,
Come walk on the water,
Follow me across the waves.
No noise is too loud,
No task too impossible,
No pain too unbearable,
When I hold your hand,
And enter the silence of your presence,
Then peace will be the pathway for my feet.
By Maria Egilsson —
In the stillness
Shadows sweep
Edged in
Filigree gold
As Grace
Calls us
To come
Out of the
Hiding places
That suffocate
The soul
To slip
From the confines
That imprison
And in the turning
Of moments
The Christ
Who rent the veil
Has come to
Ravish your heart
Maria Egilsson is a poet and artist at heart, loving to pen and paint about the redemptive love of Christ. Maria was born in the northern part of England but now calls Manitoba, Canada home.
Where do I start writing about where to start? My jobs list for ‘post Christmas’ already ran at two pages before Advent had begun. I am swamped with what feels like an endless series of administrative and financial tasks and decisions to make, and yet all I want to do is pick up a paint brush, which I have not done since last August. I try breaking down tasks into smaller and smaller units as all the business advisors seem to suggest, and I am no further forward to ticking them off. And so things slide, projects slide, and worse of all, people slide off the bottom of the list. My time/energy quota is so unbalanced by chronic illness and depression that most of the time I feel I am wallowing in the sludge at the very bottom of an extremely deep dark tank, with no hope of getting out; and so there seems little point in wondering about how this year might bring new ideas, projects, possibilities, people to me.
And yet, and yet, and yet … for all the days ‘wasted’, resting in bed with curtains drawn against the sunlight, days where I am unable to muster much more of a prayer than the random thoughts tumbleweeding through my mind, or a migraine insists that even journalling and centering prayer are practices that are beyond my poor head that day … for all that, there always comes a day where there is a spurt within that sometimes feels too angry to be hope, but eventually, eventually, becomes a minute spark providing just enough determination to pick up my mobile phone, turn on its camera, and see what I can see through its lens. I long to see how I might see God this day, this place, this time, within and through and despite my pain levels and grumpiness.
For whilst New Year celebrations, calendar year turnings, resolutions and new beginnings are being talked about all around me, I have come to realise that the way I get through January, what now even allows me to welcome January, is understanding it as Epiphany Tide: the season of celebrating God’s continued breaking into this world, God’s continued revelation through the people, places and creations of this world as God’s gift to us, with us. This time between Christmas and Lent might then be treated as a different sort of festive season which is especially designed to make us all seers. Whether we might call ourselves photographers or not, creating a deliberate retreat time, which may be as little as five minutes, for a masterclass in ways of seeing will, without fail, end up enriching our spirituality. For this is the promise of Epiphany: that we too might see God.
So my question becomes each Epiphany: What is it I dream to see? What is it I need to see? What is it I cannot see because of all the assumptions and blinkers I drag along behind me? What is it that my false expectations might blind me to? What is it I failed to see since last Epiphany?
And what is repeatedly revealed to me, over and again, is the knowledge of God being in the small things right in front of me; God is in the details. Seeing the mundane minutiae of a breakfast tea tray through the lens of a camera might reveal this miraculous assurance: God is with me, in this, here and now.
This tiny creation of an ‘act of daily seeing’, receiving images on a device that can be at my fingertips wherever I might happen to be, allows me to start again with God. It is also a very physical reminder of what my Mum repeatedly says to me, ‘small steps, Katie’. This in turn always reminds me of going on the journey of faith in the way the old French pilgrims called ‘pas a pas’, step by deliberate step. So that what begins as one small image builds up into a week of images, then into a month of images and so on. Before long I can see I have a collection, a mosaic of some of the minute ways in which God has met me in the past weeks in gifts of line, colour, texture, shape and light.
I have adopted the phrase ‘the epiphany of the ordinary’ to cover this contemplative practice, and it always drives me to praise and thanksgiving. (Sharing my ‘acts of daily seeing’ on Facebook and Instagram also reminds me to continue this gratitude practice: I give them away in the hope that they might help provide a pause in someone else’s day, a kind of ‘showing forth’ space where the Spirit of Seeing might rush in, bringing someone to the God who lovingly waits for them in their here and now). For, like a toddler who needs to be told over and again, I so easily forget just how much there is to Wonder at and about in this world. I groan out loud at my own ridiculousness, swallow, breathe as deeply as that day allows and, receiving the Grace of beginning again, ask for the gift of Epiphany, the gift of eyes being opened to see.
By John Birch —
May your feet tread lightly
within this precious garden,
and imprints left behind
be simply where you paused
to sow a seed of love,
where now a flower blooms.
by Christine Sine
You are probably sick of me telling you that Lent begins on Valentine’s Day and Easter Sunday is April Fools Day and that we have chosen For Love Of The World God Did Foolish Things” as our Lenten theme. However, I am s strong believer in our need to transform the celebrations of the culture into celebrations of our faith and this seems like a perfect occasion on which do to this so I will not apologize for mentioning it again.
Here is what I am considering doing for Lent that you might like to try or suggest to your congregation.
For Valentines learn about and buy fair trade chocolate
Some of us are conflicted about giving up chocolate this year but as you do bite into that luscious Valentine’s chocolate give more than a thought and a prayer for the people who produced the cacao that it is manufactured from. It is estimated that more than 15,000 child slaves work on cacao farms in West Africa, farms that have also stripped thousands of acres of rainforest. We can make a difference however. Here in Seattle we are privileged to have Theo’s Chocolates, the first Organic and Fair Trade certified chocolate factory in North America. If you live in the Seattle area think of doing a factory tour during Lent to educate yourself. If you don’t, plan a chocolate party with fair traded chocolate products (there are lots of brands out there) and watch The Dark Side of Chocolate,
or watch Chocolat in which a woman opens a chocolate shop in a small French village at the beginning of Lent and shakes up the rigid morality of the village. It is one of my favourite Lenten movies and I love to watch it every year at this time. It is a great foundation for talking about chocolate, and the real meaning of sacrifice during Lent.
What could you do during the season of Lent to make a difference not just in fair trade chocolate but in other areas of inequity too?
Do a Bible study on the “foolish things” God did for us.
Read 1 Corinthians 1: 18-31. Death and crucifixion seems such a foolish thing for God to do to a beloved Son, yet it was the wisest thing that God ever did for humankind. Talk about the foolishness of God in this walk towards Jerusalem and the Cross and how it impacts your life. What other scriptures come to mind when you think of the foolishness of God? Get each person in your small group or congregation to come up with a list of verses that talk about different aspects of God’s foolishness. Talk about each of these and siscuss the implications for your lives.
Talk about all the “foolish” things God has done for us.
The death of Christ by crucifxion was not the only “foolish” thing God has done in the history of the world. It seems foolish to me that he chose a group of runaway slaves as special and chosen people. It seems foolish that Jesus chose a group of fishermen rather than scholars or religious leaders as his disciples. What else comes to mind for you? Discuss the “foolish things” God has done in the history of humankind, and in the history of the church that have unveiled the wisdom of God. How have these impacted your life?
Talk about the foolish things you have done for God.
It is not just that God has done foolish things. God also asks us to do foolish things. In my own life it seemed foolish to leave a successful medical practice in Christchurch New Zealand to join a seemingly derelict ship in Pyraeus Greece. I had the privilege of building a hospital on board this ship, the M/V Anastasis and establishing the medical ministry of what has become Mercy Ships, still impacting the lives of thousands around the world. What are the foolish things you have done that show the wisdom of God?
Think too of the foolish things Christ followers throughout the centuries have done too. St Francis foolishly gave up his wealth to work amongst the poor. St Kevin reputedly stood with his arms outstretched for days because a bird had laid its eggs in his hand. Foolish monks and nuns who ministered to the sick, exposing themselves to contagion and often dying as a result. So many foolish people who have followed Christ and kept the faith alive and vital.
What foolish things might God ask you to do this year? Lent is a great season not just for giving up trivial things, but for helping us and our congregations refresh our faith and refocus our lives. The suggestions above may not appeal to you but I do challenge you to take Lent seriously this year and consider ways to make a difference in your neighbourhood and our world.
For those in the Seattle area don’t forget our Retreat day this coming Saturday.
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