Category: Lent

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What is Shrove Tuesday?

Shrove Tuesday is a day of feasting. It marks the conclusion of the Epiphany Season. On this day, the Church feasts before she enters into a more solemn and penitential season called Lent, which is referred to as a Season of Confession.

Shrove Tuesday is celebrated with a pancake dinner, which is accompanied by eggs and syrup (bacon can be added–and it should).

This day provides the Church an opportunity to celebrate once again the abundance of the Gospel in our lives and in the world. The glory of the Epiphany season is that Jesus has given us life and life more abundantly (Jn.10:10). Following the rich feasting tradition of our Hebrew forefathers, the English speaking Church has broadly practiced Shrove Tuesday for over 800 years.

What’s the Importance of this day?

As a tradition of the Church, and not an explicit teaching in the Bible, the individual or churches are not bound by such traditions. However, if churches do practice this, it is important for members to join in this festive occasion. It provides the Church another healthy excuse to fellowship and form greater bonds through a delightful and bountiful meal.

On the day before we enter into the Lenten Story where Jesus commences his journey to the cross, Christians everywhere in the English speaking world will prepare rightly by celebrating God’s gifts to us, so that we can rightly meditate, fast, pray, confess and repent by remembering the sufferings of Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith (Heb. 12:2).

What if my Church does not do Shrove Tuesday?

Assuming the congregation is silent on the issue and has not taken any strong constitutional or theological position on the matter, then as a family you are also free to celebrate Shrove Tuesday. You may also want to invite friends over to enjoy a pancake dinner.

To Shrive

Traditionally, Shrove Tuesday is the day before Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of the 40 days of Lent (Sundays excluded from this number). Whether your Church has an Ash Wednesday service or not, Shrove Tuesday is still valid as a way of celebrating the Christ who has given us all things, including His own body for our sakes (I Pet. 2:24).

Shrove comes from the word shrive meaning to confess. As we celebrate this evening, let us not forget that the Christian life is, as Luther stated, a “life of daily repentance.” Confession is not just reserved for Lent, but it is for all seasons. But on this Lenten Season, we receive a particular reminder (through our liturgical readings and singing) that a repentant heart is a clean heart before God (Ps. 51:2).

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Lent as Psalmic Restructure

The season of Lent is upon us. While most of the world does not honor or follow the Lenten Season, I believe the principles of Lent can be followed by all. All Christians need a re-structuring of order in their own lives. All Christians need to re-balance and re-form areas where there is disproportionate indifference. If most of the year one fails to read sacred Scriptures, Lent is a time of turning back our attention to Scriptural reading. If our life of prayer has been dispassionate, 40 days of prayer can be a useful chronology for recovering this biblical act.

Another way to consider Lent is through our habits. In other words, to ask: “What habits have been unfruitful in this past year?” Practically, have we watched too much television in exchange for a more carefully crafted schedule where devotional literature or family worship, or psalmnody is included?

Lent is a form of psalmic restructuring. Where have we failed to consider God as source of all things? Where have we ceased to mature in gratefulness? The psalms, in the words of Geerhardus Vos, is the “expression to the experimental side of religion.” Lent is the re-consideration of the psalmic mission; to place the psalms in front of us and to ask whether we reflect this expression or whether we have missed the mark.

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Book Review: Lent

The Lenten Season is now behind us, but just this morning I finished a book I started in the beginning of Lent. The book is conspicuously titled Lent (Free PDF of Book). The book published in 1902 is composed of 30 short articles by 30 Protestant Episcopal Bishops.

These are fairly conservative Bishops, unlike what one may find in the modern Episcopal landscape.

The book deals with a variety of Lenten themes. Among them is the consistent themes of preparation and discipline. Lent is a time of testing. A testing–though not equally–like unto the testing of Jesus in the wilderness for 40 days. Lent requires a sacred desire to examine oneself in light of God’s Word.

The 40 days of Lent serve as a time of self-control. The Lenten man is purposeful about those sins that have overtaken him. It is not as if he has not considered his sins outside the season of Lent, but that the season provides greater opportunities to look deeply into one’s walk in the gospel.

The book also offered warnings. Some may treat Lent as the only period of self-examination and good works, thereby acting carelessly throughout the rest of the Church year, but as St. Paul so clearly states: “God forbid that we continue to live in sin!”

The Church also provides with its various liturgical services extra opportunities for repentance and sacred living. “Repentance,” as Luther observed in his 95 theses, “is the life of the Christian” (paraphrase).

Lent is a necessary season for the Christian. If all is feasting then feasting is mundane. But Lent teaches us that the reason feasting is such a fundamental part of Christian existence is because fasting exists. There can be no glory without cross. There can be no empty tomb without the crown of thorns. So too, there can be no rejoicing without repentance.

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Lenten Quotes, Day 40

Each Lent should mark a higher level of spiritual life. Each Lent should find us better equipped, when it is over, to keep our baptismal vow, to fight manfully under Christ’s banner, against sin, the world, and the devil, and to continue His faithful soldier and servant to our life’s end. –Joseph M. Francis

“No scene in sacred history ever gladdens the soul like the scene on Calvary. Nowhere does the soul find such consolation as on that very spot where misery reigned, where woe triumphed, where agony reached its climax.” C. H. Spurgeon

“We live and die: Christ died and lived!” John R.W. Stott

“Christ has not only spoken to us by his life but has also spoken for us by his death.” Soren Kierkegaard

“The marvel of heaven and earth, of time and eternity, is the atoning death of Jesus Christ. This is the mystery that brings more glory to God than all creation.” C. H. Spurgeon

{Thanks to George Grant for the latter quotes }

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Lenten Quote, Day 38

The cross of Christ which shines so brightly for the redeemed casts a dark shadow on the sin that defies God’s will. –James B. Funsten

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Lenten Quote, Day 37

The cross is not a contradiction of God’s Lordship, but its most dramatic expression and revelation. He is the Lord even in the place that is most opposed to Him, and He exercises this Lordship for us. –Douglas Wilson

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Lenten Quote, Day 36

The cross is the wood on the altar of the world on which is laid the sacrifice to end all sacrifice. The cross is the wood on which Jesus burns in His love for His Father and for His people, the fuel of His ascent in smoke as a sweet-smelling savor. The cross is the wood on the back of Isaac, climbing Moriah with his father Abraham, who believes that the Lord will provide. The cross is the cedar wood burned with scarlet string and hyssop for the water of purification that cleanses from the defilement of death. –Peter Leithart

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Lenten Quote, Day 35

The cross is the light of the world; on the cross Jesus is the firmament, mediating between heaven and earth; the cross is the first of the fruit-bearing trees, and on the cross Jesus shines as the bright morning star; on the cross Jesus is sweet incense arising to heaven, and He dies on the cross as True Man to bring the Sabbath rest of God. –Peter Leithart

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Lenten Quote, Day 34

This is a Lenten collect:

Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen