Ordinary Time

From your lofty abode you water the mountains; the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work. You cause the grass to grow for the cattle, and plants for people to use, to bring forth food from the earth, and wine to gladden the human heart, oil to make the face shine, and bread to strengthen the human heart. 

            Psalm 104:13-15

Ordinary Time.

Ordinary Time is what liturgy folks call the Season after Pentecost—that long, leisurely path through the summer and fall, where we go through all the stories of Jesus that couldn't fit between Christmas and Easter. Unlike Advent and Lent, we're not building up to anything special. Unlike the Seasons of Christmas and Easter, we're not extending a celebration that is too big to fit into one day. Ordinary Time is filled with parables and stories and sayings: nothing flashy, just good, solid spiritual comfort food. Altar Committees like Ordinary Time because they don’t have to change the altar cloths for months. There are a few weeks after Epiphany which are also considered Ordinary Time, but the Season after Pentecost is what usually comes to mind.

Too often, we equate 'ordinary' with 'not special'. Church isn't as special right now. It's summer. Not much seems to be happening. We get busy with all the things we couldn't do when school was in session, or when the weather was cold, or whatever. We forget that without the ordinary, nothing would be extraordinary. Nothing would be special.

It is fitting for us that the color of Ordinary Time is green, for in our part of the world Ordinary Time is the season of green and growing things, of God's abundance once again being poured out for us through what we can raise and harvest. Ordinary Time is the time of life. It is the time when we move forward and upward and grow without even realizing it. That growth isn’t always evident from day to day, because the changes are small. But then school is about to start and suddenly your child needs a new wardrobe because nothing fits any more. Or you give them a hug and suddenly realize how much taller they have become.

Not all growth is physical. Ordinary Time is also a time of learning. Sometimes, the best learning happens when you aren’t in school, or Bible study, or Confirmation, or Sunday School. Sometimes the best learning happens when you’re doing everyday things—ordinary things, if you will—and you realize that something has changed. You realize that God has touched your life in a way that you hadn’t noticed before. You realize that you have a new awareness, a new sensibility about things. And you realize you have grown because of it. And now those ordinary things will never again look quite the same as they did before.

Ordinary Time is the heart of Jesus’ ministry. In the church we tend to concentrate on the liturgical seasons that celebrate the big moments of Jesus’ life, because those moments are also so full of meaning for our own lives. But really, the bulk of what Jesus said and did falls in Ordinary Time: teaching, healing, spreading the good news that the Kingdom of God is even now breaking in upon creation. Jesus spread that good news—Jesus was that Good News—just by interacting with people, by doing ordinary things: eating and drinking and talking and telling stories. Things that everyone does. Things that make us human. Because of Jesus, even the ordinary is special, and every day is worth celebrating for its extraordinary beauty as a part of creation. The Good News in Ordinary Time is that Jesus celebrates the ordinary, and that we are called to love and serve Jesus not by special things we may accomplish, but by the everyday things that we do. Ordinary Time is perhaps the most precious of all.

Pastor Shawn