Faith Works 11-27-21

Faith Works 11-27-21
Jeff Gill

The Wheel of the Year, Cycle of the Seasons
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Full disclosure: I love the Christian calendar.

My own religious tradition is one that is not as rooted in the observance of the church liturgical sequence as others; we hold that such things are non-essential, and in truth I would never judge harshly someone who said they found the so-called church calendar unhelpful. It's something we've created over the centuries to help make spiritual sense of our annual cycle of events.

The more rigorous of my fellow believers take as their guide not so much that if something is not explicitly forbidden in the Scriptures, you can do it, but if something is not specifically called for in the New Testament, you should not mark it. Severe Calvinists like Oliver Cromwell famously banned Christmas celebrations on this basis, and our early American Puritans felt much the same way; it took a Civil War and the experience of soldiers encamped with German Americans and Irish recent immigrant enlistees to re-disperse across the country traditions of trees and decorations and feasting and carols.

By the time we got Christmas back into most of American Christianity, even the most austere faith communities started to relax about a few manger scenes and maybe a tree in the vestibule. Once we'd had our troops overseas, especially into 1940s Europe, they came back with a love of candlelight services and "Silent Night" that's still a part of what many of us think of as a "traditional American" Christmas.

I grew up in the more progressive end of my tradition, but even in the church of my childhood, I don't recall words like lectionary or Advent being very common until well after I'd left for college. Hanging out with and ultimately ministering around Methodists and Lutherans and Presbyterians in a campus ministry, I saw the role in faith formation and Christian education that the church calendar could play; the Episcopalians down the block let alone the Catholic parish around the corner certainly had more candles (or even incense) than I was used to, so our less exuberant Advent or Lent still seemed to be in keeping with our heritage.

Going out into vocational ministry, I learned in the 1980s that terms like "Year C" or paraments were still a foreign language in plenty of parishes (my word processor still underlines paraments in red), but then I'd hear the question "where do you get those red or green or purple cloth covers for the pulpit and lectern?" Yep, paraments.

Again, I'd argue strongly against anyone wanting to say you must have paraments and a liturgical year to faithfully worship God and praise Christ, but I don't think they are an obstacle, either. They're a teaching tool, and one I have come to appreciate. It's not the end of the world if you miss a Sunday when the green should be changed to purple (hint: if you do that, it's time). And if you have come to prefer the color blue, or as I've heard "Advent blue" for the Sundays leading up to Christmas and the glory of white and gold, that's fine too, just don't make a crisis out of having the wrong color out. That makes the point the anti-liturgical people make about putting human traditions over divine intention, when we worry more about parament colors than the preaching.

It's the idea of the Christian calendar, though, that I've come to value most. It starts with each day, prayers at morning, noon, and evening for many of us, the rising and setting day after day, echoing the Son's rise; then the concept we all share of a day set aside to celebrate the Resurrection each week (even if there's a bit of debate over which day, with a few holding onto Saturday). Then each week we live out a cycle of birth, death, and resurrection in a recurring celebration (some marking each Friday as a reminder of Good Friday, along with other weekly observances); Advent and Lent are each their own self-contained cycle of weeks building to Christmas and Easter, the two axles of the whole ongoing process.

And the wheel within the wheel is the Christian year from the First Sunday of Advent (tomorrow!) through Pentecost, a coherent narrative about Christ set within the wider, ongoing turning of the year itself, both part of and set apart from earthly time.

Or perhaps tomorrow is simply a Sunday: even so, every one is a gift from God. On that we can all agree.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; now he's digging out all his Luke themed sermon notes for Year C. Tell him what Advent means to you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.