Our house has been in a state of chaos for the past couple of months. We moved into a new-to-us house and have been doing lots of renovation work. The process has had its ups and downs, mostly having to do with how long things can take in a new environment.
Often, when there are lots of changes and difficulties in life, we can find it extremely difficult to navigate through and want deeply to find the way back to some sort of normalcy.
The seasons of the Christian year are a wonderful way that can help us do the navigating. I thought it might be helpful to backtrack a bit and do a quick review of the Christian year, both the symbolic aspects as well as the practical aspects.
We all use TIME as a measurement. We look at our phones many, many times during the day to see what time it is (among other things). I still wear a watch, but I do also look at my phone or iPad for the time of day. We mark the days, weeks, and months of the year. We mark significant days on the calendar so we don’t forget someone’s birthday or anniversary. We mark the calendar with special holidays, Christmas, Easter, 4th of July, etc.
In scripture, “time is marked by God’s saving events. “An event time is called Kairos (from which we get our word crisis). The time between Kairos events is called chronos (from which we get our word chronology)”. 1 We mark time in an orderly fashion because God set it up that way from the beginning.
Scriptural time is rooted in the Christ event—when Jesus came to earth. His birth is the fulcrum from which time is calculated both backward and forward.
There are three ways to think of the Christ event and its relation to time:
1. Christ came to fulfill time. He came to fulfill the prophecy and expectation of the Messiah found in the First Testament.
2. Christ’s coming brought salvation. It was the moment in time “when God dethroned the powers and established salvation and healing for the world (Col 2:15).”2
3. Christ’s coming introduced anticipatory time. We live in the time between the cross and the disarming of the powers of darkness on the one hand and the second coming and the destruction of the evil powers on the other. As such, believers live in hope of the future, and waiting on the final judgement on evil. 3
Biblical, Christian time revolves around three key events: the birth of Christ, the death and resurrection of Christ, and Pentecost and the second coming of Christ.
“The most common term for the yearly celebration of time in worship is the Christian year. The Christian year, developed in antiquity, was a vital part of worship until the Reformation when Protestants abandoned much of it because of the abuses attached to it in the late medieval period”.4
If we approach the year with no sense of what happens when and give no thought to spiritual events, then what is life shaped by, and what is its purpose? I was recently asked why this matters, what are these seasons and what do they mean? In my next couple of blogs, I will try to flesh this out.
In the meantime, in this season of Ordinary Time – the time between significant seasons – I encourage you to think, anticipate and expect, wonder what the new year holds for you as you walk your spiritual journey and in the life of your spiritual community, the church.
Shalom!
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