Pastor's Corner: It's Ordinary Time

Everything is turning green and staying that way for a long time.

If I've kept you up to this point, you may be scratching your head.

This is no ordinary time. We are emerging from a global pandemic. And while the grass may be green as I am writing this, there is no guarantee it won't be golden brown by the time you read this. Or covered in a white blanket of snow. Stranger things have happened. (This particular strange thing happened just two weeks ago, of course.)

No, it is Ordinary Time on the liturgical calendar of the church.

Admittedly, I thought what most people probably do when first hearing this term used as a seminarian. (Pentecostals turned Lutherans, like myself, have a steep learning curve sometimes. Perhaps I will write on the concept of adiaphora in these pages another time. But I digress ... ) Oh, it's the average, boring time. The season of nothing exciting, in particular. No Day of Pentecost fire, no Lenten purple, no Advent blue, no Easter or Epiphany white, no Reformation red, just takin' it easy, being green (those are some of the seasonally-appointed parament colors for those unfamiliar with the liturgical cycle).

Ordinary, rather than "mundane" in this sense, means the use of ordinal numbers counting the number of Sundays after Pentecost (or post-Epiphany in January and February). It gets pretty high. I like to make jokes about the umpteenth, eleventy-seventh or some other made-up number Sunday after Pentecost once we get to around the 21st or 22nd or thereabouts. People sitting in pews like to groan or feign polite laughter at such jokes.

It is true that many of these green Sundays begin to feel mundane. Perhaps they should not, but in truth, they do. Festival Sundays are fun. I'll use any excuse I can get to wear a bright red aloha shirt to church on a Sunday. Or shout "Alleluia!" ... multiple times during the course of the service. I even learned about a new festival Sunday I'd never heard of last year called Candlemas and gave the rites for that one a try. The candles we use for Christmas Eve services got an extra blessing that year.

Green, ordinary Sundays are easier to justify skipping worship and going to brunch. Or skipping town and going on vacation. I recognize that. Most church sanctuaries are a little less full in the summer months where many of these "ordinary" Sundays reside.

But, as my Word and Sacrament seminary professors chided, we should not get into the habit of thinking of these Sundays as ordinary in the "blah" sense of the word. The quotation has been around long enough that no one seems to recall its origin but it's a nice bite-sized little truth nugget: "Every Sunday is a little Easter."

Regardless of the colors of the décor, the particular Scripture being read or the number of neighbors next to us in the nave, the Word is shared, the Good News of the Gospel is heard, bread is broken, wine is poured and the Holy Spirit shows up, whether we sense that presence to the fullest extent possible or not.

But green is symbolic of growth, a time to nurture our faith and see what sprouts up. If you have seen the poignant Pixar film "WALL-E," you readily recognize it represents hope. In such a time as this, as we do begin to emerge from pandemic protocols and winter weather (hopefully for good now, until at least late September), are there any more appropriate themes? According to Monsignor Bill King, the very word "ordinary" has its source in "a Sanskrit, or Indo-European, word, which entered into Latin as the verb orior, meaning "to rise up, to be stirred up and to grow." The word for "east" in Latin, oriens, conveys the same rich meaning: It indicates the rising of the sun."

A new day is dawning and it is anything but humdrum and yawn-worthy. This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

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The Rev. Sean Janssen is pastor of Messiah Lutheran Church in Havre and Christ Lutheran Church in Big Sandy.