“Nothing Terribly Ordinary About It”

A Sermon Preached at First Presbyterian Church

By Dr. James R. Henery

Sunday, June 1, 2008

“‘Therefore, I tell you: do not worry about your life – what you will eat, or what you will drink, or about your body and what you will wear.  Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?  Look at the birds of the air – they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them.  Are you not of more value than they?  Can any of you, by worrying, add a single hour to your span of life?  Why do you worry about clothing?  Consider the lilies of the field – how they grow.  They neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon, in all his glory, was not clothed as one of these!  But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, you of little faith?  Therefore, do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?  What will we drink?  What will we wear?”  For it is the Gentiles who strive for all of these things, and indeed, your heavenly father knows that you need these things.  But strive first for the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all of these things will be given to you as well.  Don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.  Today’s trouble is enough for today.’

An Englishman a Scotsman and an Irishman are arguing about what they thought was the most perfect, useful invention of all time.  The Englishman said, “No doubt: the toilet.”  The Scotsman said, “I disagree.  It’s the telephone – the absolute best invention.”  The Irishman said, “No.  ‘Tis the ordinary thermos.”  The Englishman said, “You’re daft!  How do you conclude that?”  The Irishman said, “Well, when you put something hot in it, it stays hot.  When you put something cold in it, it stays cold.  How does it know?”

Nothing Terribly Ordinary About it.

Most likely, being the kind of members that you are – inquisitive, smart, urbane, savvy – you already observed on the front of your bulletin cover this morning that this is the ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time.  Okay, go ahead: look.

So, thus, you can conclude that last Sunday was (the eighth) and next Sunday is (the ninth).  Well done!.

There are about twenty-five more of these Sundays to go, until we reach about thirty-three.  But you’re probably already thinking, “Well, there’s certainly nothing ‘ordinary’ about this church on a Sunday morning.  Nothing mundane or common.

Permit me to be a teacher just for a few minutes this morning.  In the Church’s liturgical calendar, when there isn’t a specific season such as Advent or Lent or a particularly named Sunday such as Pentecost, Trinity, Reformation, Christmas, Easter, and so forth, the other Sundays of the year are counted.  They’re counted as “in-between Sundays” or until the next particular, specific Sunday comes along.  The word “ordinary” comes from the Latin word ordinalis, meaning “numbers in a series.”  The root, ordo, is used in English to mean “order.”  For the math people, it’s “the ordinal numbers” (first, second, third); for the rest of us, who didn’t do well in math, think of it versus “cardinal numbers” – you know, cardinal numbers (how many); ordinal numbers (position).

One might jest, theologically, and theorize that when we can’t name a particular Sunday, we simply give it a number, and we pronounce it to be “ordinary.”  One might also be somewhat more, perhaps, witty, and conjecture that Ordinary Time is the distance between and after the two principal Church holidays, as in the absence of one who visits between Christmas and Easter.

It’s not a contemporary invention, either, or post-Reformation.  Perhaps as early as the second and third centuries, with those early Church writers that we call “patristics,” they were already beginning to refer to Ordinary Sundays, from the Latin classification of something that is ordered.

So it’s the ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time.  Similar to the thermos bottle, there’s nothing terribly ordinary about it, I think.

I’m reminded of a story about a visiting preacher who had preached one Sunday, and a man came up to him after church and said, “You are much better than the preacher we had last Sunday.  He spoke for about an hour, and said absolutely nothing.”  The visiting preacher, feeling pretty good about that, said, “Thank you!”  The man continued, “Yep.  You did it in fifteen minutes.”

Just another Sunday, in between all the others, with just a number on your bulletin cover.  Guess what?  Doesn’t it sound just a little bit like life itself – sort of like living in between work, school, appointments, busyness, and even primary elections?  It’s just another day to be counted in the fabric of our living, whenever and wherever we keep calendars and day planners, that we so routinely and methodically structure and order our lives, which we do around vacations and weekends and holidays and birthdays – unless you’re retired and you still have about three hundred more days to do something with in the course of an average year.  It’s as if we are just living between events.  Then again, there’s nothing terribly ordinary about that, is there?

This morning’s scripture, from the Sermon on the Mount, I find to be a profound overture to challenging our sort of complacent attitude of commonality and routine – even a colloquial understanding of what we simply call “ordinary.”  These words and images that Jesus uses place an extraordinary value on the smaller, daily, and even mundane activities we observe: birds, flowers, growth.  “Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing” (and the associated worry that comes with it)?  Just ask people this day or this week if they experienced tornadoes.  Ask the Burmese.  Ask the Chinese.  Ask someone about life issues – if they are ill or suffering or dying.  Nothing too ordinary about any of that.  Likely, their answers will transcend just the common, everyday stuff.  Most of us, however, seem to live in those segments of a.m. and p.m., or work shifts, or day and night, or all the days in between the celebrations and the weekends.  An ordinary day that brings a plethora of experiences that cannot be listed – just felt; cannot be structured – just endured; cannot be calibrated – but sustained; cannot be counted – for we live it.

I want to imagine, in that first-century setting, Jesus teaching that crowd about ordinary time, when their existence was not so much about accumulation or property or cost, but mostly about fundamental survival: just making it through a basic day, where “the day’s trouble” (as Jesus puts it) was certainly enough for them, in a first-century, ordinal kind of way.  “Don’t worry,” he tells them.  “Strive first for the Kingdom of God: for a change in one’s life, in one’s culture, in one’s environment.  Expect that kind of change, and everything else will just happen.  Things will be given to you as well!”  For, you see, it was about a hope for a future that they had no control over, and a faith that would fill up the paucity of their existence.  All of these things, all this stuff, and all the plans that we try to cram into a day or a week of living – which we often count and inventory and account for (possessions, keepings, and egos) – and we sometimes end up muttering, nostalgically, those throaty words of the jazz singer Peggy Lee: “Is that all there is?  Is that all there is?”  Yet, if we’re honest about it, we did it to ourselves.

But there’s nothing terribly ordinary about it.  Each Sunday that we open up the doors into this sanctuary, we basically do the same thing.  It’s somewhat routine.  There is an order.  We are Presbyterians; we have bulletins.  But between the obvious holidays – between Christmas and Easter, Reformation, Pentecost – in essence, when we come in to this place, we essentially shut the doors to the outside world for just a brief time.  We shut out some of the craziness and the dissonance of our normal world.  Every Sunday, I think, represents the possibility of an extraordinary discovery and discernment.  If one is willing to leave behind all the agendas and all the baggage and all of the opinions – if we can leave it behind, even for a brief moment, and not carry in the aggregate of all that we sometimes store – then we can come into a worship not so much wanting more, but of a different quality.  We want less, so that, strangely, when we leave, we have more. 

So we come in here, not counting or assessing or controlling what we are about for an hour or so, but affirming that we already have more by coming here; that we need less.  Here, we seek change and Christ to reshape our journeys and our passions, not counting the minutes in an ordinary service, but doing something with the minutes and the hours that we have after worship – that makes more of a difference in someone’s life or some place.

Perhaps the best verses in this scripture this morning are the questions: “What will we eat?  What will we drink?  What will we wear?”  Of course, we know the answers, but, after all, we are moderns, and we count.  We put life in order to satisfy us.  So Jesus answers for us: “Strive for the Kingdom and right living, and you’ll get the rest.”

I don’t think there’s anything terribly ordinary about a Sunday or this Sunday.  Of course, that’s the pun in this sermon – the pithiness of Ordinary Time.  That is, unless we expected little or nothing and our reluctance to leave our narratives outside this building impeded us from realizing the sacredness of what we are about – the sacredness of our gathering, the sacredness of our fellowship, the sacredness of our potential spiritual encounters.  If we miss the sacred culture that we are about on a Sunday morning – having sort of tuned the world out, even for a brief time – then it will simply be another ordinary day where we go counting until the next one and the next one.

I recently read a nun’s perspective on writing about life in a convent.  She was comparing Ordinary Time (liturgically) to ordinary time in the convent.  It’s very interesting.  She writes the following:

“Ordinary Time was the longest period of all, as I remember.  It was the time when life went its long, dull way to the ultimate.  On Monday, we did the laundry.  Tuesday, we did chapel, and then we made beds and breads and housecleaning.  Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, we did it all over again – more of the same, week after week, month after month, year after year.  But every once in a while, of course, life was punctuated by a celebration – a feast day – with its special meals and liturgies.  But in the end, just the normal – the daily – predominated, as it does for all of us.  The commute, the paperwork, the housework, school, classes, eating, cleaning, day after day, with mind-numbing regularity.”

Then she writes this – this is profound:

“Yet, it is in the ordinary time that the really important things happen: love, creativity, children growing up, marriages and relationships growing older, our sense of life changing, our vision expanding, and our souls ripen.”

Isn’t that beautiful?  “In ordinary time... our souls ripen.”

And there you have it.  Isn’t that why we come on Sundays?  What a marvelous expectation for any Sunday, if one is willing to invest in that Sunday: that your soul will, possibly, ripen!

I see nothing terribly ordinary about it.

Amen.