The 2nd Sunday after Pentecost
We are now in the 2nd half of the church year, which is commonly called Ordinary Time. The 1st half of the year is shaped by Jesus’s life. It is marked by a series of fasts and feasts that commemorate the moments in Jesus’s life, from his birth to his death and resurrection and ascension. The 2nd half of the year is different. It is not shaped by Jesus’s life, it is not marked by fasts or feasts. Now there are feasts that happen along the way, but they are different. In the 1st half of the year the feasts are the point. We move from feast to feast to feast to fast to feast. The whole time is marked by those things. But in Ordinary Time the feasts happen on the side. They are incidental. They don’t really affect what we are doing in this time.
This time is marked by the ordinary thing of the ordinal numbers: today is the 2nd Sunday after Pentecost. Next week will be the 3rd Sunday after Pentecost, and after that will be the 4th Sunday after Pentecost, so on and so on, week after week, month after month, 19th Sunday after Pentecost, the 24th Sunday after Pentecost. It is a time of simply putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward. It is ordinary.
There is a profound wisdom in giving up half of the church year to Ordinary Time, because it reminds us that God is present in the ordinariness of life, which is really the bulk of life. Most of life is filled with boring mundane tasks, and the church calendar reminds us that even in that boring and normal and mundane stuff, God is in it. God is a part of it, and even that can be holy, whether it is washing dishes, or pulling weeds, or brushing your teeth. God is there with you, and it can be holy.
And yet, this particular Ordinary Time this year is quite extraordinary. A pandemic is not ordinary. It is not unique or unprecedented. Pandemics have happened before and will happen again, but it is not a yearly thing. It is not ordinary to have a pandemic. It is extraordinary to have one.
Racism is, unfortunately, far too ordinary in our world, and the tragic problem we are facing. And yet there is this extraordinary thing that has happened, unlike anything that has happened in my life, a movement of people larger than anything ever seen. A cross section of people crossing all kinds of boundaries, people from different backgrounds who don’t normally agree with each other, all are seeming to say enough is enough. We need to do something to end racism, to eradicate the sin of racism from our lives. They don’t agree on the methods or the ways we’re going to accomplish it, but they are saying we want to try. It is time to do something. It is time to get out there and try. It is an extraordinary moment.
In this extraordinary Ordinary Time, it is hard. The work of fighting a pandemic is hard. The work of eradicating white supremacy is hard. It is hard work, and it is easy to grow weary along the way.
Our first reading today is from the Book of Exodus, and it is another extraordinary Ordinary Time of the forty years in the wilderness. The forty years are ordinary in that it is what they are going to experience, forty years, day in day out, week in week out, year in year out as they journey through the desert. And yet it is quote extraordinary. It is a time when things are not going as they want, not going as they expected. They had gotten out of slavery, but now they are in the wilderness. There is little food, and the food they have isn’t any good, and there is not enough water. This is not what they expected, and they are understandably frustrated.
In our reading today, Moses and God get together and chat about what they are going to do. God says you need to remind the people who I am and what I have done. I bore them out on eagle’s wings. I liberated them from their slavery in Egypt. I’m not going to abandon them. They will be a holy nation, they will be a holy people. Put your trust in me.
It is a remarkable thing that God did, but it is what God does whenever God’s people are facing difficult times. God says remember what I have done. Remember that I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and all I did for them. Remember I am the God that brought you out of your slavery in Egypt. Remember I am the God who brought you into the Promised Land. Remember I am the God who brought you back from exile. God is always saying remember, remember, remember all these things. It’s going to happen again, but I am with you through it all. I care about your flourishing. God made this world for us to enjoy. God does not want us to suffer in it. God wants us to find a way out of that suffering and into joy, into flourishing in this world, not just part of us, but all of us to be able to flourish. That is what God is trying to work towards, and that is what God was achieving in Jesus Christ. In his very first sermon Jesus said the blind will see, the captives will be free. This is the year of the Lord’s favor, and it is being fulfilled in your eyes, in me, in Jesus, where the fullness of God dwells. Jesus’s life, his teachings, his actions, his healings, his death and resurrection are all about trying to show people, and to bring people out of whatever it is that is causing suffering, pulling them out of whatever is oppressing them into new life, out of that death of oppression and into the new resurrected life. That God, who has done all those things has not abandoned his people, not then, not now.
As we face these difficult things that confront us, we are reminded today that God is with us, helping us, supporting us, bearing us on eagle’s wings as we work through them.
These two things we are facing, these extraordinary things in the middle of this Ordinary Time, the pandemic and the fight against racial injustice, at the core come back to the same place, which is that both of them invite me to look outside of myself. They invite me to look towards the other, to look to the common good, to consider the most vulnerable and not just myself. The things I need to do sometimes don’t even benefit me. Take the pandemic: I am not particularly afraid of getting the virus. Wearing a mask doesn’t protect you from getting it as much as it protects other people in case you happen to have it. It is an act of trying to reduce the communal spread, even if individuals keep getting it. It’s not about me, it’s about the common good. So as I wear the mask, which is uncomfortable, as I engage in social distancing, as I stay home more, as I do all these things which I am growing weary of, I am reminded that it is not about me. It is about trying to look past myself to those who are most vulnerable, to whom the virus is an existential threat to their life.
The same thing with racism. It is not about me. It’s going to be hard and uncomfortable to face my own complicity, to see all the ways I’ve benefitted from it, to give some things up in order to help bring justice to other people. It will be hard work, but it’s not about me. It’s about me shifting my focus to someone else, to the common good, to what is going to make a fully just society for all people. I have to do things to make that happen, even if it makes me uncomfortable at times.
In all that hard work, in that shift of mind from myself to the other, God is reminding us that is the work of God, that God cares about that liberation, that black lives matter to God, and God wants a world where black lives matter to all of us. And in the midst of it, God is with us, God is supporting us, God is bearing us on those eagle’s wings.
In our baptism we are asked the question, will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being? We said we would. But do you remember the complete answer is, I will with God’s help. God will help us through this. God will be with us as we begin to trust in God. We’ll find the work just that much easier. As we begin to get weary, we need to remember who God is and what God has done, and keep moving forward, one step in front of the other through the ordinary days of our lives, even when they are extraordinary ordinary days. Keep moving one step in front of the other to bring about God’s vision, God’s dream. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done” we pray every single time we gather together to help bring about that will, bring about that kingdom, bring about God’s dream for this world. God is with us, he supports us, and loves us.
AMEN
