Here you will find information about St. Peter’s Lenten events in 2015. There are other links including a Lenten calendar which takes content from 4 sources. Another calendar is a file of our Lenten events. We also have an annotated links of resources around the web.
Our Lenten focus this year will be to deepen our life in God and with one another through scripture study and through prayer. We will be using The Book of Common Prayer and other prayer book resources to guide and strengthen our community Lenten disciplines.
What is the Daily Office? In his book, Opening the Prayer Book, Jeffrey Lee states that “if the heart of the prayer book is the celebration of the paschal mystery of Christ in baptism and eucharist, then its soul may be the daily office…the word ‘office’comes from the Latin word ‘officium,’ the performance of a task or a duty. The offices have a corporate familiarity that leads us deeper into the regular rhythms of the day and of our life with God.” During Lent this year, we are going to spend some time with the Daily Office in corporate worship in order to become more familiar with the ways in which our prayer book resources can deepen our life with God and strengthen our lives with one another in community. Hopefully, pieces of this Lenten discipline will become part of our daily spiritual practice, even after Lent is over and gone for another year.
This year we will have a Shrove Tuesday pancake supper on Tuesday, February 17, from 5 to 6:30PM in the Parish House. This custom is a remnant of an earlier tradition in which people prepared for the Lenten fast by using up food in their homes that they would not be eating during the season of Lent. This year, the ECM will be sponsoring the St Peter’s pancake supper.
Ash Wednesday, February 18, 7PM in the church. Before he began his public ministry, Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness, being tempted by Satan, and resisting those temptations. The forty day season of Lent gives us needed time and space to enter into our own wilderness spaces as we examine our lives, acknowledge the ways that evil has slipped into our lives, ask for forgiveness, and make needed course corrections in our lives so that we can whole heartedly follow Jesus. The Ash Wednesday service is our doorway into this Lenten time and space in which we come before God in repentance, praying that God will strengthen our faith. This service also includes the imposition of ashes on our foreheads to remind us of our mortal nature and to remember that everlasting life is God’s gracious gift to us, through Jesus Christ our Savior, a gift that we can neither merit nor earn on our own.
Every Wednesday during Lent—10AM until Noon Bible Study in the Parish House . Part of the observance of a Holy Lent, according to The Book of Common Prayer, is to read and meditate on God’s holy Word. If you don’t already attend Bible Study, please join this weekly Bible study for an in depth look at the upcoming Sunday lectionary.
Noonday Prayer will follow Bible Study during Lent . Noonday Prayer is a short liturgy on page 103 in The Book of Common Prayer. This short service comes from the pattern of praying that you will find in monasteries—that of setting aside time throughout the day to pray and to read scriptures. Noonday prayer includes the reading of psalms, and emphasis of the mission of the church, and to remember that Christ hung on the cross at this hour. We will also use the service of noonday prayer from a new daily office resource called Daily Prayer for All Seasons, new this year from Church Publishing, as well as from A New Zealand Prayer Book.
Evening Prayer will be every Wednesday night during Lent at 7PM in the ch urch. Evening Prayer is also part of the Daily Office. We will also be using Daily Prayer for All Seasons and A New Zealand Prayer Book for these Evening Prayer services. Evening Prayer offers us the Lenten discipline of coming together in community to close the day with scripture and prayer.
Sundays in Lent at 10AM—Christian Education in the Parish House.
Sunday, February 22 Praying with the Prayer Book. The Book of Common Pra yer is full of resources that can help us to grow, expand, and strengthen our ways of praying. We will learn more about our prayer traditions and how to use The Book of Common Prayer in our daily prayer disciplines.
Sunday, March 1 Lectio Divina is a way of praying by reading scripture prayerfully. Learning about this practice provides not only a new way to pray, but also a way to read scripture that can bring you into God’s presence to rest and to listen for what God is trying to say to you.
Sunday, March 8 We are hoping to have Bishop Goff speak to us about her own practice of prayer, and to answer questions we have about prayer.
Sunday, March 15 The Jesus Prayer. Our Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters find this practice of prayer particularly helpful. The simple practice of this prayer can structure our day by keeping us mindful of God’s constant presence with us. This prayer also opens the way into many physical ways of praying.
Sunday, March 22 Praying with Silence. Silence is hard to find in our culture, and yet it is essential to our spiritual well being and ability to feel God’s presence in our lives. Practicing contemplative prayer can help us to cultivate an inner silence that creates space for God to dwell in us and for us to dwell in God.
And on the Internet—Daily Lenten Bible Study, beginning February 18th —the Brothers of the Society of St John the Evangelist will provide a series of short daily videos in which they invite us to recapture time as a gift and to discover how to experience the joy of the present moment. Sign up for this program by going to churchsp.org and clicking on the sign up link.