Now that the Sundays of Pentecost and Holy Trinity have passed, our church enters a season which we call “the Sundays after Pentecost.” How’s that for an original name? It’s a long season – up to 24 weeks, give or take, stretching all the way until Christ the King Sunday in late November. Of course, “Sundays after Pentecost” isn’t a very inspiring name, is it? Unless boredom is your thing. Our Roman Catholic friends have an equally uninspiring name for this season, by calling it “Ordinary Time.”

Now actually, this doesn’t mean ordinary as in “basic”, but instead as in “numbered,” from the word “ordinal.” For example, we simply say, “Second Sunday after Pentecost”, “Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost”, or “Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost.” These days don’t have special names. We decorate our sanctuary with the color green, which symbolizes “growth”. And for these Sundays, many of our readings focus upon discipleship, or what it means to follow Jesus day-in and day-out, when there aren’t any special religious holidays to get us all excited. I’m sure this feels like a challenge for most of us. It’s so human to wonder how we might grow in faith, or even just keep faith, when our days may feel so…. ordinary? When we wake, work, eat, and sleep, perhaps every day just feels the same. And as the dog days of summer grow long and hot, and the air gets thick, things seem to slow down even more and drain our energy.

So, maybe “Ordinary Time” really does hit the mark for us. On that note, my favorite liturgical joke (at least for church nerds like me) goes – “It’s not ordinary time, but EXTRAORDINARY time!”

But, on a more serious note, how CAN we find the extraordinary in our ordinary days? Perhaps we might look to Jesus. Sure, Jesus did some extraordinary things, like perform medical miracles, turn water into wine, and feed thousands with a few loaves and fishes. He even climbed a few mountaintops. But most of the time he just hung out in the valleys, walking from town to town and spending time with ordinary folks like villagers, farmers, laborers, and children. He laughed. He shared meals. He even got annoyed a time or two. In a lot of ways, Jesus’ life was just as ordinary as ours.

Yet, all of this was extraordinary, not because of what Jesus did, but because of who he was (and is!) – God come among us, as one of us. And, how extraordinary for this God, the creator of time and space and vast universes, to choose to linger with ordinary folks like us in the most ordinary times and places? To fill us with life and breath. To call us by name in the waters of our Baptism. To draw us to the table and feed us with God’s own life in ordinary bread and wine. To listen to even our most ordinary prayers with a most extraordinary patience and love. Even when our lives seem to slow to a snail’s crawl, God slows down with us and savors every moment of the time together.

So, may this ordinary time be made extraordinary for you, and help you to grow in the awareness of God’s extraordinary love for you.

I just got back from Emergence Christianity, a conference that was just held in Memphis. More about that later. But the main thing I want to say here is that I am a disciple of Jesus Christ. It feels really odd for me to say that, maybe because I’ve spent time as the outsider rejected by the church. Or maybe it’s because I’ve heard churches harp on it, so obviously we’re failing, right? Or maybe it’s something about that old Adam vs. new Adam thing, that actually leaves us feeling like we could never be disciples of Jesus.

Well, in the end, it feels strangely empowering to me to be able to make this statement to myself. A declaration of who I am under God, and within the church – the body of Christ. I have much reflection to do on this. But in any case, I just want to declare this for myself, because I sense it’s important, and something is changing in my thinking that I don’t yet perceive.