And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him. [Romans 12:1 (NLT)]
I grew up in a church with hymn boards in the front of the sanctuary that displayed the liturgical church date and the day’s hymns. I loved seeing “First Sunday in Advent” because that meant there were only three more Sundays until Christmas. While “Lent” meant six weeks of no candy, “Palm Sunday,” with its promise of Easter (and Easter baskets) in just a week was always welcome. For most of the year, however, that sign was uninspiring. The weeks after Easter were simply noted as the first through the seventh Sundays of Easter until the arrival of Pentecost 50 days after Easter.
Yesterday was Pentecost Sunday which commemorates the receipt of the Holy Spirit by the early church [Acts 2]. A mighty wind filled the house where the believers were meeting, what looked like tongues of fire settled on each person, and everyone was filled with the Holy Spirit. Because of the uproar, people gathered, Peter preached, and 3,000 new believers were added to the church that day. Pentecost was the day the Christian church was born! On the hymn board in our church, Pentecost also was the last notable event for the next six months!
From then on, that board marked time by how many Sundays it was after Pentecost until the church year started over again with the first Sunday in Advent. For a child, those months between Easter and Advent pretty much lived up to their church name: Ordinary. It felt like we were just marking time until something important, like Christmas or Easter, happened. What I didn’t understand as a child is that Ordinary Time in the church year doesn’t mean dull or commonplace. “Ordinary” comes from the Latin word ordinalis and refers to numbers in a series. It’s called “Ordinary Time” because ordinal numbers are used to count the Sundays as they relate to major church celebrations like Easter and Pentecost.
Granted, days like Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost commemorate significant events in the life of Christ and the church but that doesn’t mean any other worship service is less special or significant. Rather than celebrating specific events such as His birth, death, resurrection, ascension, and the descent of the Holy Spirit, the season of Ordinary Time celebrates the presence of Christ in our lives throughout the year. It is during this in-between time that we learn, grow, mature, witness, and serve as we live out our faith in Christ. If we think about it, the really extraordinary events in our lives usually happen in ordinary times!
Nothing in Scripture demands observing the liturgical year—it just is a tradition followed by several denominations. Nevertheless, whether or not we observe Ordinary Time, our worship should never be ordinary, sporadic, or missing altogether. Too many of those who claim to be Christians are little more than “birth and resurrectionists.” The message of the resurrection doesn’t end once the eggs are found nor does the significance of the risen Christ stop when the last of the jelly beans and chocolate bunnies are eaten. The promise of our salvation doesn’t disappear when Easter dinner is finished only to reappear at Christmas and disappear again when the tree is taken down. Christ’s birth and resurrection bring us love, grace, peace, forgiveness, redemption, and salvation, not just on Easter and Christmas, but in every ordinary day of our lives. Following Jesus isn’t limited to two days a year and the gospel message isn’t limited to a few events in Christ’s life. None of the days He walked on earth were ordinary and every day with Him is extraordinary!
The discovery of God lies in the daily and the ordinary, not in the spectacular and the heroic. If we cannot find God in the routines of home and shop, then we will not find Him at all. [Richard J. Foster]
In one of those viral, supposedly true but probably not, inspirational stories, a wealthy man is said to bend over and pick up any and every coin he spots on the ground. When asked why he bothered to collect mere pennies, the man explained he didn’t pick up coins for their monetary value; he picked them up for the value of the message on them: “In God We Trust.” He believed the penny’s words to be God’s way of reminding him to trust the Lord rather than his wealth and considered every coin he found an opportunity to acknowledge his faith in prayer.
The wading birds of southwest Florida are absolutely beautiful, especially this time of year when they’re wearing their mating plumage. We’ve lived here eleven years and I still haven’t tired of their beauty as I encounter them daily in our ponds. 115 years ago, however, I would have been hard put to see any of these beautiful creatures anywhere. In the late 1800s, bird feathers became the fashion craze in women’s hats. Along with a plethora of plumes, some hats even featured an entire exotic bird! By 1900, more than five million birds were being killed every year and plume hunters had nearly wiped out the entire egret population. It wasn’t just the egrets with their white mating plumes—herons, roseate spoonbills, flamingoes, and peacocks were among the fifty North American species being killed for their plumage. No bird was safe.
Although crucifixion probably began with the Assyrians and Babylonians, the first historical record is of Persia’s King Darius I crucifying 3,000 political opponents in 519 BC. Alexander the Great adopted the practice when he crucified 2,000 survivors of the siege of Tyre in 332 BC. In 88 BC, the Hasmonean king of Judea, Alexander Jannaeus, crucified 800 Jewish rebels after killing the rebels’ wives and children in front of them. Following a massive slave revolt against Rome in 71 BC, 6,000 rebels were crucified along the Appian Way. The crosses stretched for miles and the bodies were left there as a clear message that any rebellion would end in a violent death. After the death of Herod the Great in 4 B.C., a failed rebellion in Judea led to the crucifixion of 2,000 rebellious Jews.
In less than five minutes the house was ready for Easter. I’d hung out the spring wreath with its silk tulips, placed the resin Easter rabbit with his cart and eggs on the hall table, and put the three ceramic bunnies around the flowers on the table. With no grands visiting this year, I didn’t even have eggs to boil or baskets to fill! Since it took me days to ready the house for Christmas, I wondered why Easter doesn’t get the same amount of decoration and celebration. Granted, most of the holiday traditions for both holy days have pagan beginnings. Nevertheless, those customs have become part of our culture and Christmas seems to overshadow Easter by a mile.
Jesus knew that one would betray Him, another deny Him, and all desert Him. He knew the people He’d fed, healed, taught, and loved—the people who just a few days earlier had greeted him like a king with palm branches and shouts of “Hosanna”—soon would prefer a thief over Him. Because of His anguished prayers later that evening in Gethsemane, we know that He knew the suffering and torment that lay ahead for him. Nevertheless, he sang with the disciples during their Passover meal that last night and it wasn’t a sorrow-filled psalm of lament.
Devotions of the Heart 