Ordinary Time

Most people assume the church year is built around the big events: Advent and Christmas, Lent and Easter. And those are important. They anchor the story. But they are relatively brief. Between the celebration of Pentecost and the beginning of Advent, there are roughly twenty-three to twenty-seven weeks when the church is not specifically preparing for or celebrating the core events of the gospel. This is Ordinary Time.

The word "ordinary" here does not mean "unimportant" or "mundane." It comes from the Latin ordinalis, meaning "of the ordered count." It is simply the numbered weeks. The first Sunday after Epiphany is the First Sunday after the Epiphany. The second is the Second. It is numbering, not evaluation. This is week two. Week ten. Week twenty-two. That is all.

The Green Season

Visually, Ordinary Time is represented by the color green. Not the brilliant green of spring, but the steady, enduring green of evergreen trees, of leaves that do not fall, of life that continues whether or not it is being celebrated. Green is the color of growth, of constancy, of the ordinary faithfulness of a plant that does not need dramatic weather to keep being alive.

This is fitting. Because most of the Christian life is not a dramatic event. It is the quiet, daily, unglamorous work of growing in love, of staying close to God in the middle of days that look like every other day. It is showing up to prayer when nothing dramatic is happening. It is reading Scripture when there is no crisis prompting you to open the Bible. It is choosing kindness when no one is watching and nothing is at stake except the kind of person you are becoming.

What Ordinary Time Teaches Us

The church calendar, by including Ordinary Time, makes a theological claim. It claims that the Christian life is not meant to be a constant high. It is not meant to be a perpetual emergency. The normal state of the believer is not always preparing for something or recovering from something. The normal state is living. Growing. Staying.

This challenges two common extremes. On one side, there are Christians who are always chasing the next experience, the next feeling, the next revelation. For them, Ordinary Time feels like a letdown. On the other side, there are Christians who only engage faith during crisis or during the big holidays. They show up for Christmas and Easter and otherwise leave the faith on autopilot.

Ordinary Time is for neither of these. It is for the person who prays on a Tuesday in March when nothing special is happening. It is for the person who reads their Bible on an ordinary afternoon not because they are struggling but because they want to stay close. It is for the person who shows up to church on a plain green Sunday and worships without any special music or dramatic message, simply because worship is what they do.

Living in the In-Between

The ancient church understood something that modern Christians often forget. The story of faith is not built only around the dramatic moments. The disciples spent three years with Jesus, but most of that time was not the mountaintop transfiguration or the triumphant entry into Jerusalem. Most of it was walking from village to village, teaching, healing, doing ordinary things with extraordinary patience. The ordinary was the context. The extraordinary was the interruption.

When we reclaim Ordinary Time, we reclaim the dignity of the daily. Your prayer life this morning, if it happened at all, probably looked nothing like Paul's shipwreck or Luther's tower experience. That does not mean it was less important. The God who shows up in the dramatic is the same God who shows up in the quiet, and often, the quiet is where He does His deepest work.

A Prayer for Ordinary Time