Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Structuring Time

            Once again, we have a listing of Israel’s ordinary worship:  daily sacrifices, Sabbath (weekly) sacrifices, and annual festivals.  (We’ve seen this before!)  I think there’s an important lesson here, namely, humans thrive on structure and order.  Now, obviously, a person who is too structured, too rigid, isn’t healthy, but maybe we don’t think often enough about the fact that a person who is too unstructured isn’t healthy, either.  With our children, we’ve practiced it this way:  there is a usual, expected pattern—bedtimes and waking times are regular, meals are at about the same times, there’s a pattern for homework and for evening routines.  Within that usual, expected pattern, we can make exceptions as circumstances arise.
            We observe the same phenomenon in Israel’s worship and we see it arise very quickly in the early church.  Acts 2:46 tells us that the earliest Christians gathered everyday in the temple and presumably in homes, too.  In the first generation, they were setting aside the first day of the week as their special day of worship (Acts 20:7; 1 Cor. 16:2; Rev. 1:10).  By the mid-2nd century, Melito of Sardis is able to talk about an annual celebration of Easter that is a well-established custom already.
            We all mark time.  Financial sorts are dominated by quarters and fiscal years and tax seasons; parental sorts are often driven by school calendars.  I’d like to just suggest today that we should make a little more of an effort to have our lives structured around the church calendar.  It’s no biblical command, that’s for sure.  But letting the rhythm of our weeks flow into and out of Sunday might change the way we see ourselves, and taking seriously the rhythm and flow of the church’s calendar, flowing into and out of Easter, might also have that same sense.  (It’s one of the reasons I have tried to tie several elements of our new Faith Crossroads children’s ministry to elements of the Church Year—for instance, first communion at the outset of Holy Week, so the newly communing can partake at the height of our year.)
            Here’s a challenge for you:  if Lenten midweek services or Holy Week services aren’t part of your customary practice, let this be the year you make them part of it.  Ash Wednesday is just two weeks from today; Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter are in the offing.  What a great time to let your time be structured around the celebration of the central facts of your faith!

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