Grace and peace to all of you, my beloved in Christ. Often, when I hear people who participate in the Christian calendar each year describe their favorite season, many will say Lent; others will say Advent; and then, of course, Easter. I love those seasons. But as I’ve grown older, I have to admit that my favorite season, which happens twice every calendar year, is Ordinary Time.
Ordinary Time makes up the longest season, dramatically so, especially when you include the Ordinary Time after the Epiphany up to Ash Wednesday. Ordinary Time also has the plainest color, green, which is also the most dominant color in the world. But I love Ordinary Time because that’s where most of our lives are lived. I don’t mean in terms of the number of days on the calendar. I’m referring to the reality that most of us spend the majority of our days doing ordinary things, lived out in ordinary relationships. How we walk out our Christianity during the ordinary times of life really clarifies where we’re at spiritually on a personal level.
I often get to do what people would consider extraordinary things in extraordinary places all over the world. But more often than not, I’m at home with the people who know me with the greatest familiarity, doing just ordinary tasks that are part of the flow of life. Even on the trips, I spend time in hotel rooms and have meals with people, carrying on casual conversations, just doing ordinary stuff.
Having said all that, I believe Ordinary Time is so significant because at the heart of the gospel is that our Christlikeness should be manifest in extraordinary ways when we’re doing the most ordinary things. Our journey to the cross during Lent, which culminates on Easter Sunday, reminds us that Jesus died for us so that, risen from the dead, He could live His life through us. The Easter season is a 50-day journey of exclaiming with great joy that He is risen indeed. Hallelujah.
But the wonders of Easter continue through the Ascension and on to Pentecost Sunday, when Jesus pours out the promise of the Father that those who follow Him would be filled with the Holy Spirit and power from on high to live a life of Christlikeness supernaturally in purity and power, impacting a lost and dying world. Easter is a season of white vestments declaring new life and ends with the flaming red vestments of Pentecost that speak of the power of heaven released in the believer by the indwelling Holy Spirit. In reality, Easter is consummated at Pentecost.
For it is there that the Christ who’s come to live in us, in dynamic power, is realized experientially in the filling of the Holy Spirit, who makes vividly real in us the person and power of Jesus. The whole point of Easter, the Ascension, and Pentecost is so that the next day after Pentecost Sunday, when everything is ordinary and green, we’re able to live out ordinary lives in extraordinary ways, manifesting newness of life, because of our union with the risen and ascended Christ that’s being worked out in us daily by the power of the Holy Spirit.
When I go somewhere to minister to people and pray for someone who’s deaf, or crippled in some way, or even blind, and they get healed, that is an explosive manifestation of the risen Christ finding expression through my humanity. But when I get stuck in traffic coming back from that trip and I don’t get angry, impatient, or frustrated, or when speaking to someone who’s not fulfilled a task given to them, and I do not become irritated with them, but show them kindness, even in correction, then that too is evidence of the Holy Spirit living in me, manifesting in power the risen Jesus through me.
Those are the kind of days I live most of the time, just like you. And the whole point of being in Christ, in union with His resurrection life, is so that we can manifest Christlikeness in extraordinary ways in doing the most ordinary things that make up daily living. This is at the heart of Christianity.
So I pray that each of you daily experience His manifest glory as you abide in Him during ordinary time, which, because of Jesus, is not so very ordinary at all.
Happy Ordinary time, beloved,
+ Chuck