Why Ordinary Time Matters for God’s Mission

Rogers Hornsby was one of the greatest second baseman every to play the game of baseball. He won Most Valuable Player awards while playing for both the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago Cubs in the 1920s and 1930s. A reporter once asked him what he did in the offseason, and he replied, “People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”

Don’t do Ordinary Time like Rogers Hornsby did winter.

We currently find ourselves in the season of Ordinary Time (or Kingdomtide, in some traditions) in the Church calendar. It comprises the six months from the end of Easter season all the way to Advent. If we’re not mindful, we might find ourselves thinking something like Rogers Hornsby. Advent and Christmas are beautiful and amazing. Lent and Easter are deep and rich.

And now we stare out the window and wait for Advent again.

But nothing could be further from the reality of Ordinary Time.

Ordinary Time isn’t “boring time.” It’s not “nothing time.” To borrow the immortal line from The Shawshank Redemption, Ordinary Time is “get busy livin’ time.”

Because we’ve allowed ourselves to be enveloped in the darkness of Advent, in the waiting, in the hope, in the anticipation that God has something to say about the broken state of the world…

Because we’ve shouted with the angelic chorus at Christmas “Glory to God in the highest!” to celebrate the unfathomable miracle of Almighty God becoming a human being…

Because we’ve turned on all the lights at Epiphany as our defiance against the darkness in declaring that Jesus the Light of the World will have the final word…

Because we’ve drawn near to the heart of Jesus during Lent, making our souls vulnerable to the grief and sorrow of our neighborhoods, crying out in lament at the horrific reality of the sin that corrupts the world and that is lodged deep inside our selves…

Because we’ve thrown the raucous, champagne-soaked party of Easter celebrating the empty tomb, that Death is toothless and incompetent, that Life beats Death…

Because we’ve been caught up in the whirlwind and tongues of fire at Pentecost, witnessing the new story of life breaking out all across the world, that the Church is God’s plan for making the whole world new again…

…now we live.

Ordinary Time completes the cycle of the year.

Ordinary Time is the great “so that” of the Church calendar. For six months we live into the story of what God does in Jesus. For six months we live into the story of what God does in us, the people of Jesus, the Church. Ordinary Time represents what’s next.

We revel in the story of the Incarnation during Advent and Christmas. When God made the world, he spoke, “Let there be light!” And God became a human being, in all our frailty and vulnerability: “The Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood” (John 1:15, The Message).

We soak in the story of Resurrection as we journey with Jesus to the cross in Lent and then through the empty tomb in Easter. As Paul writes, “The Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you. And just as God raised Christ Jesus from the dead, he will give life to your mortal bodies by this same Spirit living within you.” (Romans 8:11, NLT).

These two pillars of Christian faith—that God became a person, and that in the life and death of Jesus, God undoes all the evil in the world—lead us to what’s next. Incarnation and Resurrection are not the end of the story.

Ordinary Time invites our participation.

The plot of the biblical story is not about people going to heaven but about heaven coming to earth. So, our Christian lives on earth are spent not in waiting until we go to heaven, but participating with God as God brings heaven to earth. Each time we pray the Lord’s Prayer, “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” we participate in this subversive work.

In the book The Drama of Doctrine, theologian Kevin Vanhoozer uses the metaphor of the theater to talk about the work of theology and the life of faith. At one point, he discusses improvisation in acting. An actor receives an offer from another, and spontaneously builds on it. The mantra in improv is “Yes, and now…” Vanhoozer writes, “What we do with our freedom at any given moment is not an arbitrary ad-libbing but rather the result of who we are. Our spontaneity reveals our spirituality.”

And this is Ordinary Time. We receive the offer from the God of Incarnation and Resurrection, and we take the next step. “Yes, and now…” Our lives as Christians are lived by faith and freedom in continuity with what God has already done and will continue to do in reconciling all things to himself.

The council at Jerusalem, found in Acts 15, is a perfect example of this kind of improvisation. How do Gentiles becomes Christians? I’m baffled why Jesus didn’t just give explicit instructions about how to deal with this crisis before he left. But he didn’t. The apostles and elders discern together, make it up in the moment, how to move forward in this new cultural moment for the Gospel. They received what Jesus had offered and came to a conclusion together, something brand new.Again,Vanhoozer writes, “Theology is thus a matter not only of thinking God’s thoughts after him but of improvising God’s improvisations after him.”

Ordinary Time invites us to make stuff.

Why did God think human beings were such a good idea? Why does God keep filling the earth with more and more of them? That we are made in the image of a creating God, as Genesis 1 describes, implies that our own creativity reflects God. We are made to make. When we are making stuff, we’re being like God. We’re doing the stuff God does.

The story of God in the Bible begins in a garden and ends in a city. The city represents the end result of the creativity, ingenuity, and hard work of human beings bearing the stamp of God’s image.

This is the culmination of God’s invitation to human beings: “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground” (Genesis 1:28). We receive from God and do something with it. We leave the places and things and people we encounter better than we found them. God’s desire for the world isn’t scripted. We each get to play our part.

It’s Ordinary Time.

Throw parties. Tell stories. Listen to stories. Go to weddings. Write poems. Learn musical instruments. Watch live music. Make children laugh. Grow food. Plant gardens. Take naps. Meet your neighbors. Be reckless with forgiveness. Be generous with grace. Play. Love deeply.

Create something no one has ever seen before. Make something beautiful. Do cool stuff. Go on adventures. Solve a problem in your neighborhood. Surprise someone. Relentlessly pray for others. Invite strangers to your table. Advocate for the marginalized. Serve the poor. Proclaim the year of Jubilee. In the words of poet Wendell Berry, practice resurrection.

It’s Ordinary Time—time to get busy livin’.

If you want to learn more about the Church calendar, you should check out Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year by Robert Webber.