Structuring Time

Numbers 28-30:  http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numbers%2028-30&version=NIV

            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 put it into practiced 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-2^nd 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.

            Here’s a challenge for you:  if Lenten midweek services or Holy Week services haven't been part of your customary practice, let this be the year you make them part of it.  Tonight is already our third midweek service, and Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter are only four weeks in the offing.  What a great time to let your time be structured around the celebration of the central facts of your faith!

--updated frm February 23, 2011