Rector’s Study - June 2009

From the Rector’s Study~ June 2009

Order is a gift of God. Long ago, when I was in seminary, a fine priest of much experience enlightened me to an important he fact of life. “For many of the people in our churches,” he said, “the one thing that they can count on in any given week is the familiarity of the service of worship service in their parish church on Sunday.” If change was something attractive to us neophytes who were about to graduate and then ‘fix’ all the faults of the Church, regular order was a tremendous blessing to all those whom we hoped to serve.

In the messy zeal of the first decades of the Church, Christians needed to know this. For example, the city of Corinth was, at the time, a center of cosmopolitan chaos. The Christians there were accustomed to it. The Apostle Paul, himself familiar with some exciting events in the lives of the communities of the Church that he had helped to nurture, recognized that, for the Corinthians, community life and worship had become not only exciting, but also competitive and even contentious. So Paul reminded them that “…God is a God not of disorder but of peace” (1 Cor. 14:33) and that “…all things should be done decently and in order” (1 Cor. 14:40). These first-generation Christians needed to know that order is a gift from God. Christians today need to know it, too.


The world today is experiencing escalation in hostilities on the Korean peninsula, continuing animus in the Middle East, the largely unforeseen economic distress here in the U.S. and around the world, and the unanswered questions that surround each of these situations. Each offers opportunity for a sense of chaos to overtake our general experience of the world and our perception of ourselves therein. In the midst of it all, God offers to us the gift of order.

The Church’s liturgical year is a vehicle for this gift. The Holy Days from Advent to Pentecost and the seasons named for them comprise half the liturgical year. The other half is named Ordinary Time. The name means ‘time that is ordered.’ Thus, the week that begins with the Sunday following Pentecost Sunday is identified as Second Pentecost, and every week thereafter named accordingly.

In addition, Ordinary Time is coordinated, or ordered, according to dates on the secular calendar, even though those dates are not seasonal Feast Days. Each Sunday has a particular set of scripture readings and prayers. These are known as ‘Propers’ and are arranged by specific dates. The Propers are used respectively on the Sundays whose calendar dates fall closest to the dates assigned to each, ensuring that the scriptures and prayers ‘proper’ to each Sunday are read sequentially, orderly, through the remaining half of the Church’s year. No matter the nature of the secular season around it, through Ordinary Time, God continues to offer the gift of order.

To some degree or another, each of us is experiencing unexpected, unpredictable, and unwelcome change all around us. It is an experience with echoes of that chaos over which the Spirit of God first moved in the season of Creation. It is the chaos that the power of God has always opposed, the uncertainty that God’s grace has always overcome.

‘God is a God of order and of peace.’ Therefore, you and I continue here in our community of ECR the orderly experience of our Christian faith and Episcopal tradition. As a Protestant tradition, are roots are planted in reasoned and considered change. We have rejected the notion of religious dogma that rises somehow above our right or ability to examine it. Our Book of Common Prayer is the very definition of innovative worship. At a time when the Church everywhere used Latin, spoken and understood by few, it turned instead to the spoken language of the people in order truly to engage the worshiper. As a Church we Episcopalians have continued to express our faithfulness toward God primarily in practice, in what we do and in how we pray, rather than in written formulas of orthodox belief based on intellectual assent or on affective sympathies. We may be rightfully proud of the unique blessings that we offer the world as the Episcopal Church.

At the same time, we offer the regularity and predictability of a way of worshipping God that basically is the same in every brother or sister congregation of the Episcopal Church. So, not only do we know what we will find at an Episcopal Church congregation, we know also who we will find. People around us are experiencing hints of chaos, just as are you and I. The orderly faithfulness to God that blesses us is a powerful blessing that we are able uniquely to offer to the world around us. It is God’s gift moving through us, God’s Spirit still moving over the face of the earth.

Current events are by definition, limited in duration. Someday, somehow, every current event ceases to be current. It becomes the past. The events that currently are disordering the world will someday pass. You and I will notice their passing, and we’ll give thanks to God. And when we do, and until we do, we will find our lives ordered by faithfulness toward God and by God’s faithfulness toward us. Thanks be to God, God’s faithfulness, God’s Love, is the order of all things. Thanks be to God, it always has been and it always will be.

God’s Peace. Jim +