Where did Lent come from?
Thats what started me out on tonights topic. The word Lent is the Old English word for Spring. Spring is the season of renewal. For us, Lent is the season of spiritual renewal, the season when we take a hard and honest look at ourselves, the season when we do a little spiritual housecleaning. It is a time of fasting and repentance. It is a time to address our shortcomings and to try again to follow the example of Christ and to model our lives as he taught us to do. What is Lent? In Old English, Lent is the word for Spring. In almost all other languages its name is a derivative of the Latin term Quadragesima or the forty days. It is the forty day period before Easter, excluding Sundays. It began on Ash Wednesday and ended on Holy Saturday. In recent years this has been modified so that it now ends with evening Mass on Holy Thursday to prepare the way for the Triduum, ( Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday). Sundays are excluded from the reckoning of the forty days because Sunda
Lent started as a preparation to celebrate Easter. 40-60 days were set aside to prepare one’s body and mind for Easter. These days would be spent working and fasting (except for Sundays and Saturdays). The idea was that the hunger would be a constant reminder to focus on God, and stay away from sin, and if you have ever fasted you know it works. So it was started as a good Godly thing, something that we should be glad to join in on. Something to remind us of what Christ did on the Cross. So why don’t we celebrate this holyday? As Baptists we don’t celebrate Lent for three main reasons. First we don’t do it because the Catholics do, and we don’t want to be like the C’s. Secondly we don’t celebrate Lent because since Lent was started it has changed. Lent is now a ritual that is done because good catholics “do Lent” and bad catholics don’t. Like the pharisees catholicism has added Lent to their list of do’s and don’t’s. It has lost it’s meaning. The third reason that most Baptists don’t d
