The Gift of Ordinary Time

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Third Sunday After Pentecost by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean & Rector.

Today is the second Sunday of Ordinary Time--that vast swath of the Church year when we wear green (so I’m told), and mark the weeks by the number of weeks after Pentecost. That’s what “ordinary” actually means. These are numbered days, the ordinal days, after Pentecost. So if we’re being strictly literal, that’s all there is to “Ordinary Time.” But there is another sense in which “ordinary time” is a precious opportunity to see God in the midst of our ordinary everyday lives. The spiritual life, simply put, us about surrender to whatever is just as it is. It’s the ability to say ‘yes’ to life, even the hard parts. The peace that passes understanding comes from embracing everything with an alleluia… however trembling and shaky-voiced. And ordinary time, ordinary life, is where we learn to stop our fight with the way things are: Let it be with me according to your word. In a day of constant interruptions, or stuck at an interminable traffic light, we can practice just letting things be, ease up on our demand that things be other than they are. Those little moments prepare the way for facing the more acute instances of things not being the way we’d prefer them to be: the loss of our health and vitality, the loss of a job, the fracture of a relationship, the loss of a loved one, our own inevitable death. We practice with the ordinary everyday resistances to letting things be as they are so that when the 800-pound Gorilla arrives on the doorstep we can say, “Oh, it’s you. Uh, welcome. A banana smoothie, I assume?”

In Mark’s account of the crucifixion, when Jesus gives a loud cry and breathes his last we find that curious, gnomic, little sentence: “And the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom” (Mark 15:38). The curtain, or veil, is what separates the Holy of Holies--the sacred, God’s Presence--from the mundane, the ordinary. Only the High Priest can go behind the curtain. But at the crucifixion, that separation between the sacred and mundane is erased. Each and every place, each and every moment is revealed as it truly is:  soaked, saturated, with the Divine Presence. The author of the Letter to the Hebrews picks up on this image when he says, “we have confidence to enter the sanctuary… by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain” (10:19). The indescribable intimacy of Jesus with the Father in the Spirit--Abba, Father, Poppa, Daddy--is now ours. The way has been cleared, the barriers removed, the curtain not just ripped but torn in two from top to bottom. It takes open plan architecture to a whole other level. And it makes the drapers and the curtain hangers and interior designers very nervous.

And, if we’re honest, the staggering realization of the sacramental nature of each and every moment makes us quite nervous as well. It’s easy to fall into a kind of divided thinking where God sits in God’s neat little God box--between 10:30 and 11:45 on Sundays. Church is for Holy Things and we just muddle through the rest of the week. I remember in Philadelphia there was a man who always sat in the front row and would say to the rector as he came in--“You’ve got one hour!” and would start demonstratively tapping his watch as soon as the sermon eclipsed twelve minutes. Christ pierced the veil, revealed every place to be the sanctuary of God’s presence, and yet we unconsciously go about re-hanging curtains--dividing our lives up into sacred and mundane, holy things and ordinary things, us and them, clean and unclean, our spiritual practice and our workaday life. The One Body--the reality all in things in God and God and in all things--chopped up into a cubicle farm. 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her poem “Aurora Leigh” puts it this way:

Natural things

And spiritual,--who separates those two

In art, moral, or the social drift

Tears up the bond of nature and brings death,

Paints, futile pictures, writes unreal verse,

Leads vulgar days, deal ignorantly with men

Is wrong, in short at all points. We divide

This apple of life and cut it through the pips

Not only does such a habit of dividing up our lives lead to misguided social policy, bad art and worse poetry, it brings death. The apple of our life reduced to a few bitter seeds--literal poison if you eat enough pips! Arsenic anyone?

When you look at our passage from Ezekiel, you see a familiar trope of Israel being compared to a noble cedar. The Cedars of Lebanon are thousands of years old and hundreds of feet tall. They withstand anything the weather throws at them. They are a symbol of God’s steadfast covenant faithfulness to Israel, of God sticking Israel through thick and thin until the little dry tree of Abram and Sarai in the old folks home flourishes--a home for every kind of bird… every kind of winged creature nesting in its shade. 

Jesus, being Jesus, takes that prized, precious, treasured image of Israel as a great cedar and turns it on its head. “With what can we compare the Kingdom of God?” He asks. “Uh, I dunno, could it be… Cedars?” is what is running through everyone’s mind. No. A mustard seed. The smallest of seeds. A weed that renders unclean the Victory Garden in the backyard according to the Levitical code. The Kingdom of Heaven is like a dandelion, like morning glory, like the grass that keeps poking up through the weed tarp and layers of mulch on your parking strip. 

The Kingdom, Jesus says, is not reserved to the tall and mighty cedars or the Holy of Holies. You don’t have to travel to the Redwood National Forest to see the Kingdom. It’s everywhere. Just like the curtain is torn in two from top to bottom spilling the sacred over everything, the kingdom is like a weed that respects no human created boundaries, dualistic demarcations, or dividing lines--it invades the vegetable plot and reasserts itself even after we’ve expended much effort to eradicate it. God no more confines Godself to an hour on Sunday than the mustard seed stays in its appointed spot. We live in a sacramental universe, each spot the spot when we see in a new way, free from what Paul calls, “a human point of view.” “Take off your shoes,” God says to Moses as he strays off the beaten path of mechanical routinized perception, steps away from human point of view, “for the place you are standing is holy ground.” 

Nowadays, in popular media we call it mindfulness--and Jon Kabat-Zinn teaches it to the “Silver Fox” Anderson Cooper live on CNN stripped of any religious context. The Church Fathers call it nepsis--watchfulness--keeping awake, waking from our slumber of living in the future (“Do not worry about tomorrow”) or dwelling on the past (“Shake off the dust from your shoes”). We recognize in our own experience that God is in this place and I did not know it because I was crafting a devastatingly witty retort to a person with whom I had an exchange a week ago. Ephrem the Syrian, the 4th century deacon from Turkey, calls Jesus the “Wakeful One” and describes the Christian life as the path of putting on the Wakeful One. “Wake up sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you” (Ephesians 5:14). Practicing the Presence of God, coming to our senses, coming home to the present moment, we see that indeed, “everything has become new” as Paul exclaims. Christ shines.

I included an image in your bulletin of “Christ in the Wilderness: Consider the Lilies” by the English painter Stephen Spencer (1891-1959). In it, you see a rather chubby, wild-haired, almost Samurai-looking Jesus “in the wilderness.” What did Jesus do in those forty days? Well, according to Spencer, he spent his time on his hands and knees marvelling at the wonders of God’s good creation. “Consider the lilies of the field,” is taken absolutely literally. “Don’t think. Look!” as St. Ludwig Wittgenstein says. Stop. Be still. Drop your thoughts. Come home. Abide. Notice the birds of the air. The wild geranium by the door. The morning glory you could swear you weeded out last week unfurling and tracking the first rays of the morning sun spiraled on your porch rail. God breaking in when we’re not too busy dividing up our lives, dicing the apple of life into God-bits and not-God bits. Cedars, sure. But mustard plants too.

If Jesus spent forty days looking at the lilies, what, I wonder would the temptations by Satan be? I wonder if they would be any habitual train of thought that breaks absolutely unmixed attention: “You know, I bet I could collect these lilies and sell them at the street fair in Capernaum for a tidy sum!”; “If I study these lilies long enough, perhaps I can become the world’s foremost expert on lilies and enjoy widespread recognition and acclaim!”; “Lilies, lilies, more lilies…. All the time with the lilies.” Satan, then, as the Tempter who tries to turn the experience of simple, child-like, unselfconscious being-with into something we use for profit, bolstering our reputation, or entertaining ourselves to death.

Elizabeth Barret Browning ends “Aurora Leigh” with these lines

Earth’s crammed with heaven,

And every common bush afire with God;

But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,

The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries,

And daub their faces unawares…

That’s the true gift “Ordinary Time” has to offer us. We practice the presence of God and find Him soon enough where He always already is: among the pots and pans. The curtain torn in two from top to bottom. The apple of life whole, seamless, and undivided. The sudden recognition that all the way to the altar to receive communion is communion. Jackson Pollock in gum splotch, spilt soda and still smoldering cigarette butts on the sidewalk. The whole world the sanctuary and each person a little Christ. Us and them torn in two from top to bottom. Sacred and mundane torn in two from top to bottom. Cedars trees and mustard seeds drinking in the same sun and even the pesky morning glory taking on a different hue. The liturgy of dailiness celebrated on the countless altars in the world. If that’s ordinary, I’ll take it every time.