Ordinary Time with An Extraordinary God

We have just moved into a new season, following Pentecost, creatively and encouragingly named Ordinary Time. [They must have used an ecclesial focus group for that one…]

It’s a season where there are no special celebratory events, like Christmas, Easter or Pentecost, and traditionally the church follows the lectionary stories of discipleship for almost twenty weeks. At Southside in the last few years, we have had some particular themes: worshipping, preaching & conversing through Job, the Identity series and Earthed: Jesus’ Parables of the Kingdom, in association with the Faith & Art Group.

Ordinary Time is a period of “working out” our discipleship, in the light and power of the great events preceding it – particularly the arrival of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

And perhaps the name itself speaks of something valuable; that our lives do often have “ordinary moments” or periods of time, when our discipleship is not marked by anything extraordinary, but measured by the faithful, enabling grace of God.

I have been wondering about the stanza from the Lord’s Prayer we are considering this week: Save us from the time of trial and deliver us from evil. I am confident that trials for the early disciples were quite different from many that we experience.

The temptation in our age which is, perhaps, most common to many of us, is to believe that God is superfluous to our needs, that our own advancements in knowledge have rendered God largely unnecessary.

We are surprised when we [still] don’t have the “answer” to the moral and social questions which confront us, but continue to be convinced that enough knowledge and rational thought, or even political conviction will see the knot untied.

And when events are truly impossible, our return to God is frantic, or simply an attempt to blame. Discipleship is learning with Jesus how to live our lives in the ordinary and extraordinary times. It is not living our faith like a pinball.

And what about being delivered from evil? I don’t think this is only about being saved from evil events, although it is reasonable and understandable to pray for such deliverance. We know, of course, that bad things still happen despite our prayer and our faithfulness.

There is more. We are also asking to keep ourselves free from evil, to be free from participating – actively or passively – in life-destroying or life-denying behaviour. The evil of war, of poverty, of abuse, have always been part of our world, but to accept, or deny, such evil is almost as bad as participating.

As we pray our Lord’s Prayer, as we invite the Lord our God into our world every day to act and engage us in God’s action, we remember that even in this most Ordinary Time, the God of the Extraordinary calls us to follow.

Once again, we are reminded that this prayer is never a passive action, but a request for God to enlist us in the action of God in the world – to bless, to heal, to create, to forgive, to abstain from evil and instead, to counter and confront it.

May the Kingdom, the Power and the Glory be God’s forever! Amen.