Transcript
Speaker: The following podcast is a Jill Devine Media production. Christianity has become known for judgy people, strange words, ancient stories, confusing rules, and a members -only mindset. This is why I stayed away from the church for so long, but it's not supposed to be that way. I'm Jill Devine, a former radio personality with three tattoos, a love for a good tequila, and who's never read the entire Bible.
Speaker: Yet here I am hosting a podcast about faith. The normal goes a long way podcast is your home for real conversations with real people using real language about how faith and real life intersect. Welcome to the conversation. Hey everybody. Laura Fleetwood here. We are in the middle of Lent. What is Lent? Have you heard that term before?
Speaker: Do you do different things during Lent, like go to church on Wednesday nights and give up something that you like in your life? These are the questions that I'm going to be exploring today with my pastor, Jim Mueller. Welcome, Jim. Thank you. Glad to have you here. So what in the world is Lent? It's a weird word and we are in it right now. So help the listeners understand what this season of the church year is all about.
Speaker: It's the season right before Holy Week and Easter and it's a 40 day season that is completely made up. It is not something you're going to find in the Bible. It's not something to follow Jesus that you need to have, but it's something that the church made up.
Speaker: and they started doing and somebody like me, I've adopted it for myself. It's not required that I practice it. And what the church kind of said when they were even setting up its lectionary or its different readings and how the church here follows is they thought every year
Speaker: that the church here needs to follow a pattern. And so the pattern kind of starts around the time of Advent. And so you're anticipating that a savior might come and might be born. And so that begins around December and it culminates with the Christmas season and the epiphany season where we hear of Christ's birth and the coming of the three wise men. And then from when that season ends, the epiphany season ends, the church said, you know, leading up to Easter, maybe it's,
Speaker: good to have a penitential season. That's a big word. A season of repentance, a season of prayer, a season of confession. And they came up with those 40 days leading up to Holy Week, which don't include Sundays, by the way. Sunday is always Easter in the church. And so that's why we have communion on Sundays, even though we're in a season of Lent. It's because Sundays don't count. Sundays are always Easter.
Speaker: But they came up with the idea of 40, and in some ways it has to do with the Jewish people wandering in the desert for 40 years, preparing themselves for the Promised Land, being humbled by God.
Speaker: And in some ways it's very related to Jesus fasting in the desert for 40 days before he encounters the devil's temptation. He's preparing himself, he's humbling himself so that he can fulfill the mission that his father has for him. And so 40 years in the desert for the Israelites, 40 days in the desert for Jesus. And I think the church looked at this and this goes back hundreds of years and they said, maybe all Christians need that.
Speaker: And so leading up to the time of Easter, we're gonna ask them to pray, we're gonna ask them to confess, and we're gonna ask them to fast. Now fasting, it's funny, you talked about giving up something. Fasting has really become pretty neutered over time. Back in the day fasting meant literally you didn't eat.
Speaker: You might not eat for the 40 days. In some cases, they would practice what we might call, maybe we see this in Ramadan among Muslims, where they will fast during daylight and only eat when it's dark. It's a humbling of yourself. You're giving up something.
Speaker: And in the scriptures, they talk about fasting all the time, but I think a lot of modern Christians don't know much about it. It seemed like Jesus was always encouraging his followers to pray, but when they really needed to pray, he told them to fast and pray. And so for me, I'll just give you guys an example. There's times in my life where I realize I'm in a particular season, I have important decisions to make. Could be, for an example, I have a call to a church.
Speaker: Am I supposed to move my family from Texas to St. Louis? And so what I did is I spent a time of fasting and praying. I didn't eat for days in making that decision. The idea is sometimes that when you empty yourself, you're not making yourself weaker by fasting. You're actually making yourself stronger. And what I love is that fitness grooves today are starting to figure that out. That actually fasting is something that cleanses your body. Your doctors will tell you before you go to surgery, you need to fast.
Speaker: not just for the obvious reasons, but it actually helps the body heal and get ready for things. And so it seems like modern science is catching up to what spiritual disciplines have always known that we need that during this season. And so for any of you out there, you know, if truly giving up chocolate for the season of Lent,
Speaker: Really draws you closer to God, allows you to pray better and confess better. By all means, maybe that's something you want to do. I think a lot of times though, we need to make sure that we're actually connecting the thing we're giving up to the thing we're supposed to be adding.
Speaker: And I think that's our faith life, our prayer life, our confession life. So that when we get to the announcement of Jesus dying on the cross for my sins, I've been reflecting on that for 40 days. And then when Jesus rises and it gives me new life, I'm ready for that as well. And you may know the beginning of Lent in a few ways. One might be Fat Tuesday is the day before.
Speaker: Lent, right? So this is like the big celebration of carnival and Mardi Gras that you go all crazy because you know you're going to be fasting or giving up something. So you want to get in all your joy and fun right before this season of repentance. So that's how those kind of celebrations are connected. And then after Fat Tuesday is Ash Wednesday. That is the first day of Lent. So what is Ash Wednesday all about?
Speaker: I want to go back to Fat Tuesday.
Speaker: They usually said flour and sugar, but it's really any of your indulgences, maybe alcohol. You empty your cupboards, you have a big pancake breakfast. That was actually a tradition in many churches for hundreds of years. You're making all these sweet cakes and things and you're enjoying them on Tuesday because you know that the time of fasting starts the next day, which is Ash Wednesday.
Speaker: For this tradition, you're usually gonna see it with Catholics or Episcopalians or Lutherans, where we literally show up to church and we mark ourselves with ashes, the sign of the cross on your forehead, and then you walk around the rest of the day with this ashen cross on your forehead, and it's weird. But it's weird, I think, in a good way. When we mark ourselves with the sign of the cross and with the ashes, in a sense,
Speaker: we're admitting to the world and we're admitting every time we look in the mirror, hey, you know, I'm dust. I'm dust. And one day to dust, I'll return. So even in the midst of this life, I'm recognizing that life is, it's fragile. My life is fragile and I need an answer for that. And so I'm marking myself humbly with the cross or my pastor's marking me with the cross.
Speaker: so that I can remember that. There's an example in Jonah where he goes to the Ninevites and he has to preach to them, but he doesn't wanna preach to them because he doesn't like them. That country, those are his enemies of Israel. But God's like, no, no, Jonah, even if you try to turn the other way, I'm gonna use a big fish and I'm gonna get you over there. And so Jonah has to preach to them. And it's this amazing story where none of them have any understanding of the Jewish faith, but because of the prophet's words,
Speaker: The king of Nineveh told everybody, cover yourself in sackcloth.
Speaker: Cover yourself with ashes, all of you, even the children. Everybody needs to do this. And we all need to pray and we all need to repent. We need to confess what we've done wrong because we don't want this judgment to happen. And then God forgives him, which I think in a way is what Jonah was worried about the whole time. He didn't want God to forgive the Ninevites. He want him to wipe them out because those are his enemies. But we have examples like that in scripture where you're calling the whole community
Speaker: to humble themselves. And so I think in Ash Wednesday, if your church practices this, this is exactly what we're trying to do together. Each of us individually is admitting our sins and our need for a Savior, but also maybe corporately as a church. Maybe we think about ourselves as a church and say, hey, where have we let the world down?
Speaker: Where have we not been healing for the broken? Where have we not been people who go out and search for the lost? Where have we not been somebody that is a community that's a refuge for those who are so isolated and alone?
Speaker: And so it's a corporate thing, it's a personal thing, and if Lent is something that you want to adopt into your practice, I would say, hey, yeah, it's something the church made up, and it's not necessarily in the Bible. It can be something that's really good for you. At the very least, you need to find your own times of Lent in life. Like for me, when you make a big life decision, am I going to move my family?
Speaker: You gotta make sure that you're in touch with what God wants for your life. I think if more marriages could do this, I think if more prisoners could do this, I think if more executives could do this, I think we all need this time where we repent and we empty ourselves. And in cases of real need, fast and pray.
Speaker: I absolutely agree and I think it's a beautiful picture of intentionality leading up to Holy Week and Easter because
Speaker: So much happened during that week and we worship on Maundy Thursday, we worship on Good Friday, we worship on Easter. And I think of Lent as kind of like in gardening terms, like Lent is clearing the ground. It's tilling away the weeds. It's preparing the soil.
Speaker: for what Jesus did during Holy Week and Easter. And in our human selves, it's that clearing away of the clutter and the
Speaker: barriers that we build between us and God, it's purposely, intentionally clearing those away so that we can see every year anew this miracle that God did for us, that Jesus did for us. To me, that's my personal view of Lent, and I think sometimes we focus too much on
Speaker: giving up chocolate because I want to lose weight or, you know, it's like a convenient thing. It's like, no, the purpose of giving something up is so that every time you reach for that candy bar or reach for that Diet Coke, you are reminded of what Jesus sacrificed for you and how unworthy we are of that. And so it's like for me, it's always pointing me to the cross, pointing me to Easter for those 40 days.
Speaker: Yeah, and again, I don't wanna pick on anybody and what they personally choose to give up, but like if you give up chocolate for Lent but you eat gummy bears every night, you might wanna just self -analyze a little bit and say, is this actually sacrifice? Is this something that's making me spiritually better, perhaps physically better? Like I think it's okay for people to use fasting for weight loss and discipline and all of that. I'm just saying as Christians,
Speaker: We need to make sure the spiritual part of it is actually being strengthened. That's the part that matters. You can't find a religious group that hasn't in their history incorporated fasting as a major part
Speaker: of their spiritual disciplines. And it's why as Christians, we need to make sure to rediscover it, especially, especially in how privileged we are here in America, in North America, in the West, where food is at every turn and luxuries are at every turn, maybe giving up something that truly is a sacrifice to something that can help discipline you. And then, yeah, isn't Easter all the more special, like you said? Absolutely.
Speaker: Do you have any resources that you particularly like that people might want to use during the season of Lent if they're looking for something to help them reflect on these things? There's all, I mean, you can Google them and find a million. I was just curious if there was one in particular you liked.
Speaker: There's been ones that we've used through the years, and for example, in my family, when our kids were young, we found one that was C .S. Lewis' Chronicles in Narnia, and so it was like a Lenten devotional we could take our kids through, and it was short, it wasn't long.
Speaker: But it was like reflections on the stories in the books and then Lewis would have like a little commentary on it. I remember walking through that with my kids. I think since I have four kids and they're now teenagers but a lot of the years
Speaker: what we practiced for Lent, we wanted to practice with our kids. So we were willing to, whether it was intentionally making sure we opened up our picture book Bible or story book Bible, one of my favorites, by the way, story book Bible, we would open that up with our kids. So the last thing my wife and I wanted to do was to have our own thing and then to not incorporate it with our kids. If we're going to be practicing something as people of faith, we wanted to do it with them.
Speaker: But for any of you who are adults and this is just something you personally want to do, I would recommend getting into a book of the scriptures and just staying in it. I don't think the goal would be to read a 300 page book and learn lots of information.
Speaker: What I would encourage sometimes is maybe getting into something like an individual scripture or a chapter of the scriptures and just staying there day after day after day and seeing how the Spirit begins to marinate that in you and just let that steady diet come over you.
Speaker: But like you said, yeah, you could go to Google and probably find all sorts of lent devotionals or biblical devotionals that you might find helpful. I'm just telling you, remember that this season is not just for you. It's for you and your whole family. And remember that you don't have to continue your fast on Sundays. You get to break your fast on Sundays, technically, right? That's always, yes. Sunday is always a party. So that's just a little foretaste of Easter, of Easter to come. Yeah.
Speaker: Well, thank you. Jill's been taking some notes and I'm curious to hear her questions about Lent. I know that this was her first Ash Wednesday that she ever participated in this past year. So we will close this episode down. And then on the next episode, Jill will join us and we'll see what she has to say. Thanks, Laura. Thank you.
Speaker: You know, I love that this podcast is called normal goes a long way, but yet there's some weird stuff. There's some weird stuff to believing that when you die and you're buried, you're not going to stay there. There's some weird stuff to believing that when you lay hands and pray over somebody, God can heal them miraculously. There's some weird stuff to it. And so embracing some of that weirdness, it's good. It's at the very least, it's a conversation starter for somebody who walks in and says, Oh my gosh, what are you guys doing?
