Every culture dating back to the prehistoric man has had a way of telling time. Calendars reinforce reality by offering rhythm, order, and meaning to existence. They mark the things we believe to be true about ourselves and the world around us. How we tell time is in itself a formative liturgy, rooting us in a particular narrative. The ‘holy days’ or holidays that make up our calendar reinforce reality through celebrations, festivals, parades, and tributes. Think for just a moment about our American calendar. What we choose to observe says a lot about what we value: President’s Day, Veterans Day, 4th of July, Black Friday. In and of themselves these holy days may seem innocuous, but together they reinforce a specific narrative.
Most of us learned how to organize time around wars, the rise and fall of empires, and the reign of kings or presidents. Think Pax Romana, the Dark Ages, or the Age of Imperialism. But in Jesus, we reorder time itself. Our understanding of how we think about the past, present, and future are reinterpreted through his birth, life, ministry, death, resurrection, and promised return. As followers of Christ, we live in a different time zone.
Since her inception, the church has been telling time radically different than the world. The liturgical calendar grounds us in God’s story and it is the lens through which we read and interpret the history of the world. For starters, the new year doesn’t begin on January 1, but with Advent. It then moves to the twelve days of Christmas, followed by Epiphany, commemorating the civil disobedience of the Magi who refused Herod’s orders by obeying a different king. December 28 is the Feast of the Holy Innocents, when the church remembers Herod’s genocide, and the eternal struggle of the powers that be with the coming reign of Christ. The calendar then moves we into ordinary time, Lent, Holy Week, Easter and Pentecost. Ultimately, the liturgical year is the temporal structure within which the Church celebrates the holy mysteries of Christ: "From the Incarnation and the Nativity to the Ascension, to Pentecost and to waiting with joyful expectation for the Lord's return”.
As Christians who also happen to be Americans, it is essential to distinguish between the American ‘we’ and the Christian ‘we’, realizing that we the church are subjects in a Kingdom that is often times at odds with the kingdoms of this world. In fact, almost everything in God’s economy is upside down—the last are first, the poor are blessed, the meek inherit the earth, and the hungry are filled.
The liturgical calendar reminds us that we live in the world, but we are most definitely not of it. It shapes our lives around an alternative narrative with contrasting formative practices and liturgies. In so doing, we remember that we are citizens in God’s pluralistic kingdom, a kingdom that transcends time, race, color, creed, and language.
In particular, this new way of telling time begins with Advent, a period of longing, anticipation, and hope. Advent is the seasonal recollection that “God has made us a people of promise in a world of impatience.” It is the recovery of how to live in a world of impatience as a patient people. Advent reminds us that things are not as they are supposed to be: that war, violence, poverty, and injustice are passing, but not quite yet. It calls to mind that the world itself is experiencing birth pains, that the present order is dying and a new creation is being born. It is the faithful practice of living in the ‘here but not yet’ Kingdom as patient people who know how to hope in the midst of despair. “Our task in Advent is to journey in hope and expectation of the God who breaks open the heavens and descends in power and glory so that we fallen creatures might know healing and salvation.”
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