Colour Supplement

Articles by Christians around the world

Sunday 6 July 2008

 

Ordinary Time

a letter from Revd Jim Cox, Vicar of St. Andrew's Church Taunton

 

We are now in that period in the church’s calendar known as Ordinary Time. As Easter was so early this year we have 23 weeks of this, taking us up to Bible Sunday which is the Sunday before All Saints.

 

Ordinary Time does not sound very exciting and this is deliberate – for two reasons. Firstly it allows for a sense of celebration when we do have the great religious festivals to keep. And secondly it is the church’s way of marking and honouring the ordinariness of our lives. Let’s face it, most of us have lives that, for most of the time, are quite ordinary – and thanks be to God for that!

 

But what is ordinary for one is odd to another.

 

I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s in Dorset. It was pretty clear what it meant to be ordinary – it was a case of not sticking out. I lived in a town where everybody knew which was the one family that voted Labour (there might have been two actually) and that there was an odd couple who were thought to be vegetarian. They did not have many friends.

 

Recently I’ve lived in a town where it was ordinary to pray and be overtly religious (mostly within the Sikh and Muslim communities). When asked, the one child in the class who said they had “no religion” was, frankly, not believed by all the others.

 

In the Church of England it was once very easy to assume that what “we” did was ordinary or normative and that everyone else like Methodists and other “weird religions” were odd. That is less the case these days and we need to be aware that for most people what we do on a Sunday is decidedly not ordinary. We have joined that band of odd people who do things that most people don’t. Not only do we believe in God in some abstract way, we have chosen to respond to that sense of God by meeting together for corporate worship. That is not what most people do.

 

As life gets increasingly secular we may need to rethink who the “people like us” are – our intellectual and emotional and spiritual “neighbours” might look very different today than they did 40 years ago and we might need to broaden our vision to appreciate that.

 

There was a letter in the local paper recently which lamented the teaching of religion to children, asking that people be left to make their own choices when they were older. I wondered if the writer held the same irresponsible attitude towards whether children cleaned their teeth. The assumption today is that secularism is ordinary – normative – what most people subscribe to; but actually secularism has as big an agenda as faith and needs monitoring in much the same way.

 

So we should be grateful for these 23 weeks to reflect on what is Ordinary Time – to question what we think of as normal and to wonder – or braver still, ask - how we are seen from those who do not attend our church. We might be surprised at who is on our side and who is not. But at another level it is refreshing to think that ordinariness is honoured by the church and this is because we believe it is honoured by God. We are cherished not because we are special, but because, in our own peculiar way, we are all really quite ordinary.

 

Jim           

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