Ordinary Time

2025-35
sermon preached at Church of the Good Shepherd, Federal Way, WA
www.goodshepherdfw.org
by the Rev. Josh Hosler, Rector
The Second Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 7C-tr1), June 22, 2025
1 Kings 19:1-15a ; Psalm 42 and 43 ; Galatians 3:23-29 ; Luke 8:26-39

If you’ve been worshiping in the Episcopal Church for only a short time—or more especially if regular participation in Christianity is new to you—you may have heard only part of the story. I mean, it’s a huge story, the story of our faith. And you’ve been hearing parts of it each week.

Way back in December we began the Christian year with the season of Advent, the time of preparation that leads to Christmas. Advent is about the prophets, about their calls for justice and their frustration that the people didn’t heed their calls. Advent teaches us the necessity of Christmas, of God coming to be with us on our own terms as Jesus. Then we get twelve days of Christmas joy.

Christmas leads to Epiphany, a day and a season when we look from many angles at Jesus’ earthly life: his growing up, his baptism, his calling of disciples, his teachings, his healings. We learn with wonder about the man whose disciples came to know him as the living icon of God. We hear that they struggled to make sense of their own wonder.

Ash Wednesday begins the season of Lent, a time when things get real. We don’t shy away from talk of sin and the need for repentance. We are encouraged to make sacrifices for the sake of coming to a deeper understanding that God’s presence may be most obvious in the absence of other things.

The final week of Lent is Holy Week, the “high holy days” for Christians. We wash each other’s feet, pray at the foot of the Cross, and wait for the coming of a new light into our world.

On that Saturday night we gather in the dark to hear the stories of our faith and to baptize new Christians, and then all the lights burst on and we proclaim the Resurrection. We continue to celebrate Easter for fifty days, during which time we hear the narratives of Christ’s return to life, his mysterious appearances to his friends, and his ascension into heaven.

The fiftieth day of Easter is Pentecost, the day of the arrival of the Holy Spirit to build us up as a Church to go to every corner of the world and proclaim the Good News. And last week was Trinity Sunday, which shows us the continuing unfolding of God’s love in our hearts in ways we know we’ll never fully understand.

We share these events together every year. It’s our family history, our back story, our organizational mandate, our lifeblood. And then we spend the other half of the year doing … what exactly?

Well, now we stare down the calendar at the vast expanse of summer and fall. It’s called “Ordinary Time.” And yes, I know what you’re thinking: ordinary time? If only! We all know these are anything but ordinary times.

Well, all the more reason to come here every week and seek the ordinary. We now enter the part of the calendar when we’re not telling the Jesus story per se, but remarking on it and going deeper into certain aspects of it. It’s a subtle, less dramatic style of storytelling. From now until November 30 (with just a couple special exceptions), the color of the vestments and other trappings is green. We have entered the “green growing season,” the time from planting to harvest, the time when our faith grows within us in subtle, ordinary ways.

We still follow the same pattern of worship: gather, share the stories of our faith and unpack them, pray, share the bread and wine that become for us the Body and Blood of Christ, and then go out refueled to share the Good News of Christ Jesus with the world.

We hear today of the prophet Elijah on the run—hungry, angry, lonely, and tired. He is given divine food to help him go another forty days. He has a direct encounter with God … but God is not found in the flashy wind or earthquake or fire. God is present in the ordinary silence. Elijah may even experience that silence as a letdown, but nonetheless he is given clear instructions and hastens to carry them out.

We hear today from Paul, writing his angry letter to the church in Galatia and trying to set them straight: stop making distinctions among yourselves! Everybody belongs! It doesn’t matter where we’ve come from, what we’ve been through … God loves each and every one of us and is at work in our lives to reconcile us all to one another. The Church gets to help with that work in special and specific ways, but they’re not all flashy ways … just ordinary life. Every day we find opportunities to be with one another as fellow children of God. Nothing out of the ordinary. Just people. Just life.

Finally, we hear of Jesus entering into a chaotic situation and turning it ordinary. He casts loud, raucous demons out of this wretched man and gets rid of the demons once and for all. When the people from that area return to the scene, the man has become … well, ordinary, sitting as a student at Jesus’ feet, “clothed and in his right mind.” (I’ve always wondered where the clothes came from!) So, go figure, when the people encounter the ordinariness, that’s when they ask Jesus to please just leave. It frightens them.

We often think that “ordinary” means “boring.” But sometimes our lives can be so chaotic, so frantic and exhausting, or so frightening and devoid of hope, that we crave the ordinary with all our being. A funny side note: Many of you know that I’m a lifelong student of popular music. This week, three of the most popular songs in the U.S. are called “Anxiety” (what we’re all feeling); “Ordinary” (what we all long for); and “Manchild” (the presenting problem).

Anyway, we can seek out the ordinary here as we gather to pray, for that is indeed our calling in these times. We need to pray for our nation, which has been invaded by masked kidnappers. We need to pray for other nations as war spreads among them, and as our own leaders repeatedly demonstrate that they are not knowledgeable or capable in any helpful way. We need to pray for the people of the world, consumed by fear and desperately in need of hope—including ourselves.

You may have seen the bumper sticker on my car: “Since all else fails, love one another.” We see all else failing all around us every day, but this is only the context in which we get to share that love. Sometimes it will seem weak or insufficient—a little too ordinary!

We need to be patient. We’re in the middle. We don’t yet get to see how all this turns out. When anxiety threatens, church in Ordinary Time is the place to be. We have ritual and routine to ground your week. We have kind people who can lend an ear. Ordinary Time can be a shelter in the storm, every single Sunday.

For that matter, I don’t think I can suggest too often that all Christians are called to make weekly worship the most ordinary thing of all—the default setting. I want to urge all of you, if you haven’t done so, to set up for yourselves and your households the practice of being here on Sunday mornings. Don’t leave it up to your feelings or a last-minute decision. Just come by default … because the ordinary, repeated over and over, Sunday after Sunday, is what enables us to grow in faith and in love for one another and the world.

When we begin the season of Advent again, we’ll all be slightly different people, changed by the Gospel, always growing. And no doubt we’ll also have some new people among us who haven’t been through the story before, and we can delight in sharing it with them.

A lot of us make summer plans. Some of us travel, while others just try to change up the routine. When I travel, I enjoy checking out different churches. I might go in for something very different, but I usually stick with Episcopal churches because that’s just what I do! It’s fun to drop in on our compatriots in other places, also telling the story, also drawing closer to God through Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit.

While some of us go missing for a time in the summer, you never know who might drop in. The community shuffles a bit, and usually we have fewer extra activities going on, though this year we’re actually doing more than usual: the interdenominational Bible study … the “Why Christian? Why Episcopalian?” group … an end-of-the-summer picnic on August 31, and then Bishop Phil joining us on September 7. But in and among these opportunities, let’s not lose sight of the ordinary.

One year when I was the Associate for Christian Formation at St. Thomas in Medina, my spiritual director and I were ruminating on Ordinary Time. I confessed that I had come up with a marketing slogan for this season: “Make your Ordinary Time Extraordinary!” And we would follow that slogan with new faith formation programs! Big, exciting events for kids! A full summer of wow! Wow! Wow!

And my spiritual director said, “Stop it! It’s called Ordinary Time. Let it be ordinary! And take a vacation.”

As I said I couple weeks ago, I hope we can spend the summer just loving one another. This half of the year is supposed to be ordinary. The Good News is mind-blowing enough; we don’t have to add to it. We just need to keep reminding each other of it. For the time being, make this Ordinary Time just plain ordinary. Join us at church. Listen and pray. Reach out to others. No big deal. Just each other. Just Jesus, dead and risen. Just the unfathomable mystery of God’s grace given to us through the Holy Spirit. Amen.