By Mike Ivaska
The church I pastor has historically had, at best, a tenuous relationship with the church calendar. The generation before me was iconoclastic in every way. Many were former hippies and, in their own words, “recovering Catholics.” When I started at the church, we practiced Advent (the season leading to Christmas), Christmas Eve, Palm Sunday, and Easter. Some folks weren’t even sure we should do that much.
Time has passed, however, and this year our church is coming at things a bit differently. We have decided to follow a document called the Revised Common Lectionary in our Sunday services, primarily to incorporate more Scripture reading into our worship. Lectionaries are structured selections of Scripture readings, designed primarily for use when the community is gathered to worship. They generally follow a plan, and allow a wide range of readings to take place in a given gathering. The use of lectionaries predates Christianity by way of the synagogue. Lectionary use among Christians was adopted early, and lectionaries provide some of our earliest copies of Christian Scripture.
As a product of ecumenical labor, the Revised Common Lectionary follows the western Christian calendar. This means the readings are arranged according to the logic of the Christian year. And this means our church is about to, in one one way or another, experience Lent.
In our culture of overabundance, Lent is primarily associated with deprivation. “What are you giving up for Lent?” Because of the history of our little church, I have no intention of prescribing that sort of thing to our people. But all that fasting and relinquishing of simple pleasures has a point: Remembering what Jesus gave up for our salvation … Entering into a season of repentance and death, so that we can emerge with Jesus into resurrection and new life Easter Day.
The majority of ancient cultures experienced time as a circle. It was the Hebrew experience of God that gave time the feel of a line, or of an arrow that’s going somewhere. If time is measured by seasons and the passing of moons, it’s a circle. If time began at a certain point somewhere “back there,” and continues off into a promised future, it’s a line.
Most ancient culture’s stories and celebrations, therefore, were ways of explaining the circle – the endless and inescapable cycle of life and death. The events that were told didn’t happen only once, in one place, on a given Tuesday. They happened in the primordial past, outside time. The telling of the stories, and especially the enacting of celebrations, brought these events to the present. The dying and rising gods died and rose every year.
In the Hebrew-Christian imagination, however, things are different. The stories aren’t metaphors for the circle. The circle contains metaphors for the line. While every generation that celebrates Passover speaks as though present at the Exodus themselves, the Passover celebrates an event that took place at a certain place, at a certain time, that created a certain people. The remembrance makes the salvation experience present. But it also celebrates a past event that made the celebrants into a people. And it gives its celebrants hope for their common future.
Similarly, Christians celebrate their salvation every year in the events of the church calendar.
Many have said that Christians took over winter solstice in their celebration of Christmas, and the vernal equinox for their celebration of Easter Day. While not only the history, but also the dates these days are celebrated, undermines this theory, the incorporation of winter themes into Christmas and spring themes into Easter is filled with meaning. As I said, the circle (fall-winter-spring-summer) is filled with metaphors for the line (the birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ).
On Christmas Eve, our church lighted candles. We sang of a light that entered our darkness. Near the darkest night of the year (though not actually on the winter solstice, take note), we remembered when the darkness of this world was pierced by the light of God’s love. We remembered the birth of God’s Son.
Similarly, on Easter Day, many Christians will rise before the sun. They will ring in the day with songs of Jesus’ resurrection. The arrival of spring (not technically the same day as Easter Day, take note) will remind us of the overcoming of death once for all. The darkness of our spiritual winter (hopelessness and spiritual alienation) will have passed to the flowering of new life in a spiritual spring (Jesus’ resurrection to new life, our new life through faith in him, and the promise of our own and the whole world’s resurrections one day, too).
This year, as my church tentatively observes the season of Lent, I look forward to remembering the events that gave me salvation. I look forward to remembering that to follow a crucified Messiah is to allow myself to be crucified with him every day. I haven’t decided if I will give anything up for Lent. Perhaps I will give up my reasons not to hope.
Mike Ivaska is the pastor of Vashon Island Community Church.
