One of the many things I love about our particular way of following Jesus in the Episcopal Church is the emphasis on the church calendar or the liturgical year. We are one of several traditions that follow the ancient practices of the church year. It may seem a bit esoteric at times, maybe a bit insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but I think it is a valuable tool to help us in our faith and in our lives as we try and follow Jesus.
The church year gives us some structure, and one of the things it does is take us on a journey with Jesus through his life every year. The first half of the liturgical year is walking with Jesus through his life. It begins at Christmas, when Jesus was born in that manger in Bethlehem, and it continues on as we walk with him as he grows up, as he is baptized, as he calls his first disciples. We listen to him as he teaches and preaches. We watch him as he heals. We walk with him up the mount of Transfiguration and we walk back down that mount on the journey toward Jerusalem. Every year on this journey with Jesus we spend forty days out in the desert wilderness of Lent, and every year we walk that very special final Holy Week, the last week of his life. We are there, waving our branches, shouting out “Hosanna, hosanna, hosanna,” as Christ triumphantly enters into Jerusalem. We are there, walking with him, eating the Last Supper, washing feet, praying in the Garden. And there we are in the sorrow, the grief, the pain of Good Friday as he tragically exits Jerusalem, carrying his cross. We sit in the discomfort and the grief and the confusion of Holy Saturday. We walk with the women down to the tomb on that Easter morning in the darkness of the hour, the darkness of their hearts, and the darkness in our own hearts as well.
And we see that darkness transformed into light. We see the sorrow transformed into joy. “Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning,” the psalmist says, and we experience that every year in our journey with Jesus as Easter comes and we celebrate that he is raised. Throughout Easter we learn what it means that he has risen. We walk to Emmaus with him. We’re locked in the room in our fear with the other disciples that Jesus enters. It is a journey with Jesus.
This past Thursday was the Feast of the Ascension, and today in the first reading from the Book of Acts we hear about this Ascension. The Ascension is that moment when the journey ends. We watch with the disciples, looking up into the skies, watching the end of the journey.
For me, Ascension doesn’t make a lot of sense on its own. All of the meaning of Ascension comes when we look back at this journey that we have been taking, the arc of Jesus’s life. Jesus, the Incarnation of God in this world returns back to God at the end. “Love came down at Christmas,” the old hymn says, and now that love is returning. In between those two moments we see love wrapping itself around us: That love that was taught, that love that healed, that love that was transfigured, that love that went down to the depths of darkness that we experience in this life, that love that died, that love that rose, that love that surrounds us and wraps us in care and comfort and support and peace for whatever we face in life.
Now we find ourselves having gone through this journey with Christ, from his birth to his ascension, the first half of the church year. And we are at a pivot point right now between the two halves of the year. What the church calendar does for us is that we move from this time, which has been following Jesus’s life chronologically, and we will pivot into this moment called Ordinary Time.
In Ordinary Time we take all this stuff that we have been learning, this journey that we have been walking, and apply it to our ordinary lives. We take Jesus’s life into our lives and the day by day living that we do. It is a brilliant and beautiful structure that the church year, the church calendar gives us. We focus on Jesus’s life, the Body of Christ in this world, for half the year. And then we take the other half of the year to say that we are now Christ’s Body in this world. At Pentecost, the beginning of the second half of the year, the Holy Spirit is going to come down, which we will hear about next week. The Spirit is going to send the disciples out into the world to be Christ’s Body, to embody that love that came down at Christmas, to embody that love that taught and healed, to embody that love in the day to day realities that we experience. The church calendar reminds us that it is not just faith in an esoteric sense, but it is the faith embodied in our living.
“Do not be surprised by the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you,” First Peter says. In the middle of this fiery ordeal that we find ourselves, how do we take Christ’s love, how do we take that life of Christ and embody it ourselves? That is the question that Ordinary Time will ask of us.
How do you do it, day in and day out? How do you embody Christ in this world? As we begin this second half of the church year, it is time to find out.
AMEN
