March marked a transition in our liturgical lives. As Episcopalians we share a calendar of seasons to indicate the passing of time in an orderly fashion. As a season changes, we might note that colors and moods change also. Each season of the Church year has a particular feeling. We had our earliest Holy Week and Easter that any of us will ever see in our lifetimes. Now we are in the season of Easter. The season of Easter resonates with most believers because it speaks to the extraordinary message of hope that is foundational to our faith. “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again!” The fact of the resurrection is our basis of faith. It is our hope to live eternally in God’s love that sustains us through difficult transitions that life so often brings to us. The joy of being Christian is the understanding that God through Jesus has defeated death and sin forever. Easter reminds us that we are redeemed and that we have hope. In Easter, we use the color white or sometimes gold as our liturgical color. White reminds me that Jesus died so that all of us might have our dark blots of sin and evil washed away because of His saving act if we will only believe in Him. The faithful are Easter People. Being Easter People in a fallen world is not easy. Our calendar also provides a reminder of this to us in a number of ways.
First, being Easter People is a state of being that needs constant attention. We are in the same moment participants in the Kingdom of God but that Kingdom has not totally arrived. So the feeling is one of living in God’s now but not totally there yet! This tension is seen in our weekly lives. The first day of every week Christians everywhere in the world meet. We remember God’s grace through Jesus Christ and we seek the power of the Holy Spirit to sustain us through the coming week. As Episcopalians, we accomplish this through our weekly participation in Holy Communion in which we reenact the Great Feast of Easter. We do this every week because we are truly Easter People. We do this so that we are mindful of God’s grace seven full days not one in seven.
But the whole liturgical year is not the single season of Easter. In fact Eastertide is not even the longest season of the year! After Ascension Sunday, after Pentecost Sunday, after Trinity Sunday next month we move to the Season after Pentecost. For many years this season was known as “ordinary time.” It is this “ordinary time” that is the longest season of the year. The color of the season after Pentecost is green. Green is the color of growth. It is a wonderful reminder of God’s activity in the ordinary existence of even the least sentient forms of life in creation. While all of us love the colors of vibrant flowers, the constancy of evergreen growth is a reminder that the ordinary can be important too. C. S. Lewis used to comment on the ordinariness of his life and how much he loved that ordinariness. That is the best understanding of how we are to live our liturgical “ordinary time.” We are Easter People who live our extraordinary callings in ordinary time. Even as we recall the extraordinary acts of God, we must live our daily lives. Sometimes that seems very ordinary to others who see us. We need to remind them that under our everyday and perhaps mundane exterior God’s love resides within us through the power of God’s Holy Spirit. We live in the dynamic tension of being Easter people in “ordinary time!”
