The Christian Calendar

At Pearl Church, we follow the ancient Christian Calendar, with its annual cycle of seasons and feasts: Advent, Christmastide, Epiphany, Lent, Eastertide, Pentecost, Ordinary Time.

Calendars order our time around a central organizing concept to keep us oriented. What calendar most orients your awareness of the world? The academic calendar? The financial calendar? The Hallmark calendar of great American feasts? These all orient us to high and low times, they all tell a story about what matters in our lives. And, importantly, the church calendar is something we celebrate as an embodied community. It is not just something we think about; it is enacted together. We light Advent candles and decorate Christmas trees; we feel ashes rubbed into our brow on 
Ash Wednesday and experience the growing darkness of Good Friday; we speak “He is Risen Indeed” together and we join together at our Common Table and share bread and wine.

The practice of the Church calendar invites us to order our time around the central mysteries of the Christ-story: Incarnation, Atonement, Resurrection, Trinity.

Incarnation: Advent, Christmastide, Epiphany

The church calendar begins with the mystery of Incarnation - God with us, God among us, God entering human life.

We start with Advent. In the Church Calendar, Advent is set aside to name the longing for God to be with us, to make ways for peace. As we pay attention to longing, we discover that we long for peace, not only for ourselves, but for all people and all creation. Advent cultivates in us a longing for peace and goodness for all people.

And then the twelve days of Christmastide. Too important to be celebrated on one day, we join Mary before the Christ-child, and wonder: how can Divinity be pleased to dwell in our flesh? Might it be that embodiment, in all its forms, is beautiful and a fit dwelling for the divine? Christmastide cultivates in us the awe that the Divine fully embraces and dwells among the lowest, honors and dignifies the frailest, abides within all, even the forgotten.

On January 6 begins Epiphany, a season dedicated to pondering this marvelous mystery: the light of Christ shines on us from the Other, from unexpected places. Traditionally Epiphany is the Feast of the Magi, the wandering foreigners who come to see the Christ-child, who stand for all the nations. God is making a table where all, especially the foreigner, have a seat, and it is from their journeys and faith that we learn and find God revealed. Epiphany cultivates our awareness that the Divine is never the possession of one tribe, but calls all to belong and contribute their wisdom.

Atonement: Lent & Holy Week

With the close of Epiphany, we turn from the mystery of Incarnation - God abiding with, among, and in us - to the mystery of atonement. Atonement is a theological word that points us to all the mysterious ways that God restores us to relationship with ourselves, one another, and invites us back into the Divine life. We have all sorts of metaphors for this: Christ vanquishing death; Christ the new Adam; Christ bearing our sin; Christ restoring union; Christ revealing the infinite forgiving mercy of God. All of these point to a central mystery: God does not leave us wandering East of Eden, but pursues and loves us back into life.

Beginning with Ash Wednesday, when we resolve to return with all our hearts to this mystery, Lent is a season of 40 days preceding Easter. Traditionally in this season we follow the life of Jesus, attending especially to Jesus in the wilderness. We find Christ willingly joining our suffering, our exile, our loneliness, anxiety and fear. Lent cultivates in us an experience that the Divine is not demanding or harsh, but enters compassionately into our suffering and darkness, making space for our grief, uncertainty and giving us rest.

Lent ends with the climactic moment of the Christ story, Holy Week: Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday. This week we mark each event as Jesus enters Jerusalem, breaks bread and wine to give himself to his people, is arrested, mocked, tortured, crucified, and buried. We ponder his resolution, his agonizing; we see him wash feet and feed his betrayer; we see crowds adore him and desert him; we hear from the tree words of forgiveness and words of surrender. We see our Christ crushed under the wheel of empire, laid in a tomb, extinguished. Through Holy Week we are drawn to the mercy of the Divine, who would die rather than use violence, whose kingdom is not secured by power but by self-offering, who gives himself in order to save even those who betray and desert him.

Resurrection: Eastertide

But this is not the end of the story. On Easter Sunday we rise to celebration and joy as we proclaim, “He is risen, he is risen indeed!” Eastertide, a season of seven weeks, proclaims that atonement is accomplished and turns our eyes to the central Christian mystery of resurrection.

Resurrection is a mystery that embraces every particle and every person, every movement and every moment. Jesus is called the “firstborn of all creation,” for Easter tells us what the Divine intends for all that exists—not loss but restoration, not destruction but renewal. Easter is the mystery that what exists matters, not for a moment but forever; for what steps out of the tomb on Easter morning is not just one resurrected individual, but the promise that physical creation is so treasured by the divine that it will not be abandoned or lost. Easter cultivates in us delight in the Divine whose ways of peace make for life, and who pulls all creation into life, who treasures every last bit of creation.

Trinity: Ordinary Time

This cycle—Incarnation, Atonement, Resurrection—forms half the church calendar. The other half is given over to what we call Ordinary Time. And while the name comes from the numbers of the week (“ordinals”), “Ordinary” has since become a word that means “normal” and that is pretty fitting as well. For while the mysteries of Incarnation, Atonement, and Resurrection all appear as unexpected high events breaking on the human scene, Ordinary Time celebrates something much quieter, more subtle, and which takes a lifetime to live into.

Ordinary Time turns our eyes to the mystery of Trinity. It begins with Pentecost Sunday, the celebration of God’s spirit coming to dwell in the Church, and it closes with Christ the King Sunday. The long stretch of Sundays in between are traditionally full of Saint days. We remember everyone from Mary and the Disciples, Francis and Teresa of Avila, Martin Luther King Jr and Dorothy Day. This is quite to the point.

While Trinity is often presented as a very clear, hierarchical doctrine - Father, Son, Spirit, in descending order - the Church has wrestled for ages on how best to understand this mystery. And today, under the teaching particularly of theologians who are women and people of color, we are reimagining Trinity, not as hierarchy, but as relationship, not as vertical line but as circle, not as fixed roles but as dance. What Trinity points to is this - God is love, which means God is relationship. The Divine life is not lonely, but delighted; the most deeply true reality of existence is not a singular point but dynamic, moving, giving and relational energy. Reality is not hierarchical but sharing and self-giving. And so in Ordinary time we celebrate the lives of normal humans who have let themselves be drawn into the self-giving divine dance, and who have invited others to join as well. Ordinary Time moves us into a dance with the Divine who truly delights in sharing his power, knowing and being known, who is not “out there” but is right here, who is love and dwells in the love of community.