What the Heck is “Ordinary Time” (and Why Should We Care)?

If you trawl lectionary-helps resources for long enough, you will discover during “the season after Pentecost” (see my explanation of that phrase here) a peculiarity in the naming of the Sundays. Any given Sunday may have several names: “Xth Sunday after Pentecost,” “Xth Sunday after Trinity,” or “Xth Sunday in Ordinary Time,” to name the three most common designations. On some lectionary lists, you will find all three of these, a source of confusion to many.

The earliest schema was to count Sundays after Pentecost Sunday, a practice which dates from the infancy of the Church. A peculiarity arose when the Festival of the Holy Trinity was introduced in the Middle Ages (eventually settling on the Sunday after Pentecost Sunday): due to its popularity in the churches of northern Europe, Sundays in the season after Pentecost became numbered with reference to Trinity Sunday, rather than Pentecost Sunday. This was for centuries a distinctively (though not exclusively) Lutheran practice, which remains to this day, at least in vestigial form (my source concerning the practice of counting after Trinity Sunday is Luther D. Reed, The Lutheran Liturgy (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1947), p. 521).

Another way of counting Sundays is “the Xth Sunday in Ordinary Time.” Commonly, you will find explanations that the Sundays following the Epiphany and Pentecost Sunday are not “special” or “festive” Sundays, but slog through the common “ordinary” time of the liturgical year. The fireworks of Easter and Pentecost are over, summer has arrived (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), school is out, vacations are taking their toll on worship attendance, so we touch on the ordinariness of Christian living. Thus the logic of all too many explanations.

Not so! “Ordinary” time is time counted by means of “ordinal” numbering. You remember your elementary school math classes, right? Cardinal numbers are: one, two, three, and so on. Ordinal numbers are: first, second, third, and so on. As the dictionary says, “ordinal” means “marking the position in an order or series.” So, at a first, more superficial level, “Ordinary Time” simply refers to a numbering system that counts Sundays during non-festal seasons, after Epiphany and after Pentecost. Thus, the “fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time” (A source which explains this handily, and is a fine theological introduction to the liturgical year is Laurence Hull Stookey’s Calendar: Christ’s Time for the Church [Nashville: Abingdon, 1996], esp., for “Ordinary Time,” pp. 133-35).

Plunge deeper, though, and the very notion of “ordinal” opens theological depths of meaning for this long stretch of liturgical year territory. “Ordinal” implies some sort of relationship – something is “third” from something else. They are linked by some sort of order implied in the very means of counting. With the liturgical year, that relational link is temporal. The very terminology, “Ordinary Time” involves a “from-to” dynamic, automatically placing every Sunday of our “ordinary” worship in the narrative schema of God-with-us salvation, from Creation to Consummation. Most particularly for Christian worship, “Ordinary Time” allows sustained exploration of the Christian community of faith as “body of Christ,” that is, the living embodiment of Jesus Christ’s ministry, fueled by the Spirit of the Risen Lord to perform that ministry in the world. And that includes each and every member of said community of faith.

Let me make some connections, roping in John Knox’s Jesus: Lord and Christ (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958) to help. The Christian faith declares that the human Jesus of Nazareth was the very revelation of God to us humans. Common knowledge. Knox plays with that assumption, claiming that the “event” of Jesus Christ embraces “the personality, life and teaching of Jesus, the response of loyalty he awakened, his death, his resurrection, the coming of the Spirit, the faith with which the Spirit was received, [and] the creation of the community” (p. 217). The “Christ-event” includes all of these, which means that, for the earliest followers in the infant church, this “event” was still happening in their living as a community of faith in the power of the Holy Spirit (p. 226). It was decidedly not “Jesus died for me (long ago) and I shed a fond tear for dear old Jesus.” No, the “invasion” of God’s love into the world God has never stopped loving, in the life, words, death, resurrection, and exaltation of Jesus, was now bestowed upon the community of faith – and every last blessed soul in it – with full authority and power to act like Jesus. In fact, it was understood that Jesus himself continued to serve his beloved sisters and brothers in the world through our hands, feet, and voices. Knox claims that “God through Christ brought into existence a new people – a people in which [God] could be known, in precisely the way [God] is known there, as righteous love, as grace and truth,” and this is the means by which God is actively reconciling the world to Godself (p. 267, emphasis his). The glory – and the terror! – is that the community of faith is the God-chosen continuation of servant Jesus Christ in the world, in the power of the Holy Spirit.

“Ordinary Time” injects into our “ordinary,” quotidian lives, trapped in a world rife with suspicion, exploitation, and the horrors of wars, the extraordinary excess (J-L Marion) of God, overflowing into our world, and offers to make us “new creations” (II Corinthians 5:17), “co-worker[s] in Christ” (Romans 16:9), remaking said world.

So, how do you preach during the Sundays of “Ordinary Time”? Looking through the “lens” (John Calvin) of scripture, you show how my face can show the face of Jesus, “God with us” (Matthew 1:23), to the faces of God’s beloved in the world, across the street or across the globe.