We have entered what is, quite frankly, one of my favorite seasons of the Church Year: Ordinary Time. The season is not principally named “ordinary” because nothing “extraordinary” happens during the season. Rather, “Ordinary” comes from numbering the Sundays between the Day of Pentecost and Advent. Ordinal numbers are used to number the Sundays: First, Second, Third, etc. However, there is a delicious linguistic twist for paronomasiacs (punsters). Ordinary Time happens to be, well, quite ordinary. The church uses green as the liturgical color to mark off the season that lasts around six months. This is a time of steady growth after the waters of baptism have fallen on us at Pentecost. There are no real big parties for these several months, only the steady grace of the day-in-day-out regularity and, in many ways, imperceptible growth.
If you think about it, most of history is like this. We read about epic events in Scripture and other histories outside of Scripture, but while all that is going on, most of the world is plugging on day after day living ordinary lives. This is reflected well in the Church Calendar.
In a world of shock-jock-break-the-internet-if-it-bleeds-it-leads-and-if-it-doesn’t-bleed-we-will-make-it-bleed-so-that-we-can-have-something-with-which-to-shock-the-world-and-get-clicks, we are encouraged to be ordinary, leading quiet and peaceful lives in all godliness and honesty (1 Tm 2:2). Our media flood us with the overly hyped and sensational. Rage bait is thrown out there to the hungry masses who are waiting to feed on the anger du jour. Word porn is used as much as OnlyFans to try to get your fifteen minutes of “look at me.”
The church is not immune from this cultural disease of everything-must-be-extraordinary. We try to keep cortisol levels high like the outlandish people highlighted on Libs of TikTok. While various forms of media can be used as a valuable tool to build churches and a weapon against Jesus’ enemies, churches can fall into the trap of building social media churches. Quick growth can come from appealing to people’s sense of rage, giving them a place to congregate, feeding them “red meat” from the culture wars each week, and defining yourself as “we’re not them.” The pressure comes when you must sustain this over the long haul.
What happens to those who make it their sole mission in life, for example, to fight the race wars when they win? Many of them will begin to create issues of intersectionality and microaggressions to keep the fight alive so that they can retain their significance and possibly their income. The same thing happens with culture-war-only churches. They are fads. They must gin up issues to keep the rage or the “we’re not them” identity going.
Then there are those churches that are built on what Reformed Confessions call “the ordinary means of grace:” the preached Word, the Sacraments, prayer, and the fellowship of the saints. These churches should address the culture wars, but they are not built on them. There is a steady diet of solid, biblical teaching, meeting at the Table each week, encouraging one another, and living in relatively quiet faithfulness as individuals and families. These ordinary people go about their lives without much fanfare, fulfilling the various callings God has given them. Ordinary churches provide a steady diet of the Scriptures … even teaching books such as Leviticus that don’t have immediate appeal for the blood-thirsty culture warriors. This kind of teaching and learning requires patience and slow meditation, giving a person and church perspective on the world and not always addressing the weekly issue. The pastor doesn’t stay on cultural hobby horses. He has spent time meditating on the Scriptures, and when he has drunk deeply from books such as Leviticus, he can connect it to the present experiences of the congregation. (Paul did, and he’s a pretty good example for pastors.) That is difficult to do if you are always looking for content for your next how-can-I-break-the-internet-with-my-next-podcast.
The ordinary takes patience, a rare commodity in a scrolling world that lives more in a reel world than the real world. We have problems reading through two-hundred-forty characters. (If you’ve made it this far in this article, congratulations!) Because of this, we have become an anxious generation (to riff off of atheist Jonathan Haidt), and we are having problems living ordinary lives.
Ordinary Time, like the rest of the Church Calendar, is a means of discipleship. The church uses it to teach. One lesson from Ordinary Time is to learn how to live ordinarily. Can you be content with a life where everything is not changing all the time, where there is no new thing to chase after? Can you fulfill your daily callings as a man, woman, husband, father, wife, mother, employer, or employee without everything having to be exciting all the time? Can you be content with relative quiet, times of reflection and meditation? Can you avoid the rage of the day without always thinking you must enter every fray?
Work at being just ordinary.
