(Not So) Ordinary Time

The church calendar and its divisions are not biblically mandated stuff. As the apostle says in Romans, “One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. (Rom. 14:5 ESV).” But I do think there is a reason that it was created rather early, that it perpetuated, and that it keeps coming back. Even Calvinist Presbyterians and Free Will Baptists tend to have Christmas and Holy Week these days. Which is basically how that calendar originally started. And then everything else fell into place around those “High Holy Days.”

And there is a fundamental division in that Calendar that we have gently passed. From Advent to Trinity the focus is on the life of Christ. And so our meditation tends to be about the 2^nd article of the creed. It is the proclamation of who God is and what he has done for us. But when you pass into the long green season, for us the season after Pentecost – others have called it the season after Trinity and still others “Ordinary Time” – it is more about the 3^rd article of the creed, what the Holy Spirit is doing. And that is calling, gathering, enlightening, sanctifying and keeping. That is the Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sin, the preparation for life everlasting. As so last week opened the season with the Call of Matthew the tax collector. The Holy Spirit calls sinners and only sinners. And the readings early will continue in that discipleship vein. How exactly does following Christ work?

And so reading Romans all summer and into fall – and that is what our lectionary does – creates a realistic problem. Summer is when we all check out, right? We’ve made it through the High Seasons, this is me time. When the livin’ is easy. And yet the calendar and assigned reading are serious stuff. We’ve received the call. What the heck does that mean for us…for me? Can’t we just kick back and let it be for a bit? It’s summer.

Most of Paul’s letters have an immediacy to them. He’s responding to some crisis in a baby congregation he founded. He writing to a young kid and the young leaders of congregations how to pastor and be a congregation of God’s people. He’s doing what we all can do, putting off the reflection and ordering of things, to react and respond to the squeaky wheel. And that wheel does need oiled. It will always need oiled. And then one day the question of why the heck am I doing this oiling of this stupid wheel at all sneaks up. Romans is Paul’s answer. Romans is an invitation to: why does this Jesus and church thing work? Why does it work for me?

And it simply starts out with a reflection on the law. Think about the law as simply “the way the world works.” And this is the trouble with that law. It works 95% of the time. If you follow it, your life will actually be better. The Taoist knows this, be water, conform yourself to the shape of the world. The living is much easier. But the problem is I don’t want to do that. I want to do what I want to do. Or the problem is the 5%. I have kept all these things since my youth, why is my life a complete mess? Paul the Jew asks, “What is the value of circumcision (the covenant marking of the Jew)?” Has God lied to me? Because exactly when I needed it to work – that 5% – it kills me. I can’t do it, or it doesn’t work. Something has gone wrong with creation because the good are punished and the evil prosper.

Why does this following Christ work? Why do I keep walking the discipleship way? Because the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law (Romans 3:23). The creation was subject to futility that it might be set free from its bondage to corruption (Romans 8:20). We are more than conquerors through Christ who loved us (Romans 8:37). The hope of the disciple is not this world, but the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Which are freely given to us by faith. Because God loves us

The Good in Front of Us

I rarely appreciate the last three Sundays of the church year. I understand why their texts are full of the eschatological end of the world. The non-festival half of the church year is laid out from beginning to culmination, from Pentecost to Judgement. So, spending 3 out of 25 Sundays on last things doesn’t seem terribly out of proportion. The problem is honestly two-fold which I think the Apostle Paul gets around to addressing as he closes our Epistle lesson this week (2 Thessalonians 3:1-13). First, the “last things” – death, judgement, heaven and hell – are just too interesting. We know little about them, only what has been revealed by the prophets and Jesus. And even then most of that is in apocalyptic language which is always tough to decipher. But people repeatedly lose sight of what is before them while pondering those last things. And that is the two-fold problem: losing sight of what is before us because of things outside of our control or even understanding.

In both letters to the Thessalonians – letters which are assumed to be the first written parts of the New Testament – Paul has to address concerns about death, judgement, heaven and hell. People who accepted the faith have died. Did they miss something? Why did Christ not come back and take us? Where are they? Will we see them or did they miss out? Lots of tough important questions that had not been answered. And honestly the inherited Jewish tradition just didn’t have elaborate answers. Jesus himself gives an “eschatological sermon.” Our gospel lesson is the start of that from Luke. But unlike our popular fiction – say the Late Great Planet Earth or Left Behind or even Pope Francis’ favorite 19^th century Lord of the World – what Jesus says just doesn’t slake our desire to know. So we tend to collect the equivalent of the National Enquirer. What Paul says at the start of today’s epistle is the foundation of all Biblical apocalypse. “The LORD is faithful. He will establish you and guard you against the evil one (2 Thessalonians 3:3).” The promises of God are good. Whatever comes, your life, your eternal life, is safe with Christ. The various tyrants will rage at that, but they can do nothing but speed you on your way to God.

That truth should allow us to turn our attention away from those fascinating and foreboding end things. We know how it ends. Christ wins. We win with Christ. Knowing the end, should allow us to pay attention to what is before us. But we so often don’t. Paul addresses a problem among the Thessalonians. The Christians were the first to create a “community chest”, a food bank to support those down on their luck. But as in all these things people figure out ways to abuse it. In this case some of the Thessalonians, so fascinated by the last things, had given up work to prepare for them. They were relying on the food bank to support their fascination. “For we hear that some among you walk in idleness, nor bust at work, but busybodies (2 Thessalonians 3:11).” And the people of God are remarkably generous. It feels wrong to deny charity to someone in need regardless of the reason. We get this all the time in our political fights. “If you were a real Christian, you’d support this.”

The Apostle doesn’t have much time for such arguments. “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat…now such persons we command and encourage in the LORD Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living (2 Thessalonians 3:10,12).” Don’t lose sight of what is in front of you because of things outside of our control. You can’t control the end, although you know who does – Jesus. And he’s got you. The Christian has no religious debt to support those who won’t work.

At the same time though things are placed before us. “As for you, brothers, do no grow weary in doing good (2 Thessalonian 3:13).” Not everything can be dismissed as idleness. And even if you are supporting the idle, their fault does not steal the intent, the goodness, of the charity. We all have enough to do in one day without worrying about the next. Have faith in Jesus for the next. Do the good placed before you today.

Proper Wonder

“Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look at the earth beneath…- Isaiah 51:6”

Every landscape has its own features that if you look at them – see them – cause you to fall into wonder about time and distance, about how short and small are yours and how long and far is the earth. As a child of the Midwest being able to stare into the distance and see all the way to the horizon. Growing up on the Mississippi, and having known a kid swept away by the river, its power unknowable. The age of the Allegheny mountains worn down and centuries of mines that haven’t come close to exhausting the supply. And when moving out to Arizona, seeing actual mountains for the first time gave new meaning to the call for the mountains to fall on us. I remember the feeling driving through them up to Las Vegas for a baseball tournament. How the mountains, if they even noticed the cars traveling like ants through them, must be chuckling at all the hustle. They were there before anything and would outlast everything. And then you lift up your eyes to the heavens and consider the time span it took for the light of many of the stars to reach us, lengths so long that you have to make up words – light-years, parsecs – such that you can fool yourself that you comprehend what you are thinking about.

God tells his people to look at these things. Feel those feelings. And then He says, “for the heavens will vanish like smoke, and they earth will wear out like a garment, and they who dwell in it will die in a like manner (Isaiah 51:6).” As magnificent and eternal as the material world looks, to God is it temporal. Nothing more than smoke that blows away. A favorite garment that eventually becomes threadbare and hole-y. That is not only the way of all flesh, but of all matter. It is here for a time. But that time is nothing compared to its purpose.

The purpose of the material is so that we might understand the glory and righteousness of God. “My salvation will be forever, and my righteousness will never be dismayed (Isaiah 51: 6).” Our souls which are still able to be struck by the time and distance of the heavens above and the earth beneath are able to learn through them about the one who supports them all. We are able to know that God is just and his law has gone out from him, and that his law is a light to the peoples. (Isaiah 51:4). We are also able to know, because He took on our flesh, He entered our material, that His salvation has gone out. And that salvation reaches as far as the coastlands (Isaiah 51:5). The coastlands, which to the hill people of Judea were Tarshish, the unimaginable ends of the earth, hope in the LORD. The coastlands are part of the covenant.

It is the last Sunday of the Church year. The long green season is at its end. The colors go blue or purple next week. Another cycle of fast and feast begins. In the midst of the hustle of the next month, take a minute to lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look – see – the earth beneath. Let the natural wonder come. But then let that wonder attach to what it all gives witness to. The one who made it all. While thus they sing your Monarch, Those bright angelic bands, Rejoice, O vales and mountains, and oceans clap your hands.