Today is the Second Sunday after Pentecost and the Christian year has moved into what is known as “Ordinary Time,” a long season that lasts until Advent.
The liturgical color for Ordinary Time is green. “Ordinary Time is a time for growth and maturation,” according the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, “a time in which the mystery of Christ is called to penetrate ever more deeply into history until all things are finally caught up in Christ.”
This is the time of verdant faith.
Genesis 12:1-9
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. Then the Lord appeared to Abram, and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord. And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.
Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26
As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, “Follow me.”
And he got up and followed him. And as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” But when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.”
While he was saying these things to them, suddenly a leader of the synagogue came in and knelt before him, saying, “My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.” And Jesus got up and followed him, with his disciples. Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, for she said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.” Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.” And instantly the woman was made well. When Jesus came to the leader’s house and saw the flute players and the crowd making a commotion, he said, “Go away; for the girl is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him. But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl got up. And the report of this spread throughout that district.
My husband and I were sitting on our back patio, appreciating the pleasant summer evening. He suddenly said, “You know, I can’t remember much from the first ten years that we lived here.”
“It was all pretty ordinary,” I replied. “Work, school, church. Commuting. Life.”
Ordinary time. So much of every life is spent doing ordinary things. It is easy to forget specifics in the flow of quotidian days. Oliver Sacks noted this phenomenon,
“When we see in everyday life things that are petty, ordinary, and banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel or marvelous. But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonorable, unusual, great, unbelievable, or ridiculous, that we are likely to remember for a long time. . . Ordinary things easily slip from the memory while the striking and the novel stay longer in the mind.”
It is too bad that we forget the ordinary.
The season after Pentecost is also known as Ordinary Time. It is pretty strange, really. The Christian story moves from Resurrection through mystical appearances of Jesus to fire from heaven and speaking in tongues to a church that sounds like a Marxist boot camp to . . . Ordinary Time. Nothing “novel or marvelous.” Just the regular rhythms of life.
At the beginning of this mundane season, the lectionary relates two stories of following. In Genesis, God asks Abram to leave his home and follow him to a new land. In the New Testament story, Jesus asks Matthew, a tax collector, to follow him. In both readings, following God is an act of faith. But following also involves some pretty regular things — packing up, venturing out, pitching a tent, having a meal with new friends. Following God — responding to the call — takes us from a known place to another place, a place that will become a new and different home.
Ordinary Time begins with two journeys — and it reminds us that a spiritual journey isn’t something odd or particularly heroic. To understand life as a spiritual journey is the ordinary state of things.
These months are an invitation to follow God through the everyday landscapes of our lives. But it isn’t a call to the spiritually humdrum. Instead, following in the midst of the ordinary is to awaken ourselves to the extraordinariness that surrounds us. We’re invited to find the unusual, the unbelievable, and the wonder of daily life. We journey through the prosaic to discover the poetry of faith. The mundane is transfigured and magical.
For all the hoopla of Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost, the truth of the matter is that God is the God of Ordinary Time. All the ordinary, regular, forgettable years. It has all been a journey. Sometimes we just haven’t noticed.
All along, we’ve been traveling to a new land — even if we haven’t gone far — that place where tax collectors and sinners are friends, where touching a hem heals, and where wakes become celebrations. Oh! Ordinary holds such promise! There’s really nothing banal in any life. It is all quite extraordinary.
Remember.
Which are the magic
moments in ordinary
time? All of them,
for those who can see.
That is what redemption
means. . .
— Tim Dlugos
INSPIRATION
Invite me to dance.
Lead the way.
Teach me the steps
And I will follow you.
Twirl me around wildly
Or do a slow glide.
Whatever the form
I will remain in step,
Heeding the gestures
Of your graced movement.
Today: I let the Lord of the Dance lead me.
— Sydney B. Carter
The people Jesus loved were shopping at The Star Market yesterday.
An old lead-colored man standing next to me at the checkout
breathed so heavily I had to step back a few steps.
Even after his bags were packed he still stood, breathing hard and
hawking into his hand. The feeble, the lame, I could hardly look at them:
shuffling through the aisles, they smelled of decay, as if The Star Market
had declared a day off for the able-bodied, and I had wandered in
with the rest of them: sour milk, bad meat:
looking for cereal and spring water.
Jesus must have been a saint, I said to myself, looking for my lost car
in the parking lot later, stumbling among the people who would have
been lowered into rooms by ropes, who would have crept
out of caves or crawled from the corners of public baths on their hands
and knees begging for Mercy.
If I touch only the hem of his garment, one woman thought, I will be healed.
Could I bear the look on his face when he wheels around?
— Marie Howe, “The Star Market”
THIRD THURSDAY AT THE COTTAGE
Paul Raushenbush, President of the Interfaith Alliance, joins me on June 15 at 3PM EASTERN for the monthly paid subscriber live gathering.
If you’d like to join the paid community, click the button below to upgrade:
Paul is the great-grandson of both theologian Walter Rauschenbusch and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. He’s an ordained Baptist minister, married to Brad, and is dad to two beautiful sons. We’ll be talking about LGBTQ issues and social justice, Pride Month, and the super majority on the Supreme Court.
We’ve been friends for a long time — first as blogging partners at Beliefnet and then he was my editor at Huffington Post.
Links will be sent out about two hours before the conversation on June 15.
God's attention is indeed fixed on the little things.
But this is not because God is a great cosmic cop,
eager to catch us in minor transgressions,
but simply because God loves us — loves us so much that the divine presence is revealed even in the meaningless workings of daily life.
It is in the ordinary, the here-and-now, that God asks us to recognize that the creation is indeed refreshed like dew-laden grass.
― Kathleen Norris
Amen to all of that.
"The rhythm of the liturgical seasons reflects the rhythm of life — with its celebrations of anniversaries and its seasons of quiet growth and maturing."
I was surprised after decades in ministry to learn that the term "Ordinary Time" actually means ordered or numbered time. Cardinal numbers tell ‘how many’ of something, they show quantity. Ordinal numbers tell the order of how things are set, they show the position or the rank of something.