God our creator who goes before us
You draw us forward in faith
Like a pillar of fire across deserts
A rock of assurance
As we journey
Speak to us with your words of comfort and wisdom.
Prayer of confession
God of love and forgiveness
Save us by your tenderness
From each deed that is destructive
From each act that grieves you
From each thought that is careless
From each idea that is unloving
From each word that hurts.
Help us to face up to your call on our lives, by creating love and
goodness, community, society where it has been broken. In Jesus Name, Amen.
The Lords Prayer in our own language
Mark 1v12-13
12 And immediately the Spirit brought Him out into the wilderness. 13 And He was in the wilderness for forty days, being tempted by Satan; and He was with the wild animals, and the angels were serving Him.
Preparation for Lent
This week we begin the period of time known traditionally as Lent. It is named after the Anglo Saxon word, Lenten meaning the lengthening of days. In the first three centuries of the church a few days were set aside for strict fasting. By the 4th century this preparation time had developed to 40 days, like the 40 years of the Exodus that the people of Israel spent lost in the desert, like the 40 days of fasting of Moses, Elijah and Jesus. 40 days is a long time to go without food and drink. It's really the maximum a body could stand.
Lent is about self-discipline preparing ourselves to be closer to God through fasting and reading the scriptures and meeting together to pray. It has traditionally been seen as a time of personal meditation, a cleansing of the soul and also a time of preparation for those receiving baptism on Easter Sunday. It begins with a time of penitence, of saying sorry, on Ash Wednesday when we receive a cross on our forehead in ash and we say the words “from dust you came and to dust you will return”.
In the Roman Catholic Church fasting is still practiced on Ash Wednesday and on Good Friday. In the Eastern Orthodox Church not eating eggs, meat and fish is still common throughout Lent, which is why painted eggs are given out on Easter Sunday.
There are spiritual disciplines that can help us in our Lenten journey. Silence, prayer, reading the scriptures, fasting. Ignatian prayer.
Our Muslim neighbours celebrate Ramadan with a month of disciplined fasting from dawn to dusk. What about us? How are we going to give this Lent to God, to allow the Spirit of Christ to work something new in us, to learn more about our faith, to seek God in prayer about our life together as a church, a community of God's people? The number 40 represents a change. We have 40 days to reflect and to enact change, with God's help.
We may choose to go into a desert or we may be driven there like the Israelites and like Jesus. We may already be in a desert, a Covid wilderness, or on the edge of it.
The Israelites in the Exodus moved from a situation of slavery but where they had food and shelter into a situation of great risk, not knowing where they were going, how they were going to be fed, where they were going...into a desert.
God is there through the trauma, through the storm, yet how do we access that spiritual resource, especially now? Circumstances can through unemployment, tough times, cause us to sink into despair, to wish we were back in the old normal days. Will they return?
The Christian journey requires we take risks otherwise we stop growing as people of faith. We may move away from being respectable and risks are taken with no guarantee of success otherwise they would not require faith, they wouldn’t be risks. It is easy to trust God when things are going well but when the going gets tough then many of us look down and start to sink.
Lent is a journey. It's a journey from the wilderness, to encountering
God, to the question of identity "Who am I? A journey that takes us
through to the healing of others, the denial of those called friends,
accusation, trial, torture and death.....and finally resurrection.
It's a journey we all can identify with, we can all opt in to one or
other of the experiences of Jesus.
Song “The Lords my shepherd”
Our Prayers for our world, others and ourselves.
May God’s hand be upon us, angels protect us and the Holy Spirit work in and around us. Amen
Blessing
Loving God help us to follow you
Into a place of quietness,
Where we may face beasts and wilderness
But we will know the presence of angels
Even in the desert times. Amen.
We will begin Lent on Wednesday at 8pm with Ashing.
If you want to be part of this zoom service
email pat.nimmo@live.co.uk with your name and your home country. May God be with us all at this time.
