Come Holy Spirit, come. Open our eyes to the mystery of Christ’s presence in these ordinary things in these our ordinary lives. May they be for us the very essence of the living Christ in our midst.
—Adapted from communion service for Ordinary Time,
The First Congregational Church of Malone, New York
Dear friends,
Welcome to Ordinary Time! Every spring, once the leaves have returned to the trees, it’s always quite a shock…just how green they are. The world seems awash in it, and it’s such a shocking contrast to the grey of the winter months. It’s a nice annual surprise that I never tire of…that reminder of rebirth, of growth, of the cycle of life.
Our Christian church year is structured in a way to remind and celebrate that cycle of life. Every year, around we go…beginning at Advent to Christmas, then Epiphany. Mid-winter we come to Ash Wednesday that ushers us into Lent. Then Holy Week and Easter, Eastertide and, finally, fifty days later, we celebrate the arrival of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.* From late November through the Spring, about half of our year, we focus on all the exciting stuff…all the holidays…the “holy days” of the church. The rest, my friends, a good 33-34 weeks of our liturgical year, is just “ordinary”.
We call it Ordinary Time. And that’s what it might feel like…especially because it also happens to coincide with things like summer vacation, and no big “gift-giving” events. Don’t be fooled, however, to think that Ordinary Time refers to the parts of the church year that are unimportant.
The liturgical color for Ordinary Time is green for hope and life, growth and rebirth…just like the green of spring and summer. The weeks are numbered. The Latin word ordinalis refers to numbers in a series, from the same root of the word order. Ordinary Time counts the weeks until the end of the church year and the liturgical cycle begins again at Advent.
We might be tempted to think that in Ordinary Time we simply mark time until the big, important, exciting things happen at church. But, in truth, this is the most important time of our year. It’s the time when we take all that we’ve learned in the year just past and weave it into our lives. It’s a time of conversation, when we dig into the life of Jesus, the stories of his ministry—his parables, his miracles, his conversations with ordinary people like you and me.
What do you make of this time? In many ways, these are the most precious times of our lives, because most of our lives is ordinary. Not big and exciting, not earth shattering, just simple and maybe even boring. The times of our lives are mostly ordinary. So how do we use this unremarkable yet deeply remarkable time, as a gift?
Friends, we are entering Ordinary Time when we are invited to find God’s presence ordinary things in the midst of these most extra-ordinary times!
In peace,
Karen Nell
* To be completely accurate, some years there’s a little bit of Ordinary Time between Epiphany and Lent, as well!