Images Of The Season - Summer

SUMMER

IMAGES OF THE SEASON

The Community of Hope ( a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America)

500 Hickory Street Dayton, Ohio 45410 937/228-5191

April, 2007

In the season after Pentecost we explore what it means to live in the eternal day that is ours through baptism into Christ’s deathless and eternal life. In the season after Pentecost we explore what it means to be: to be children of God, to be in Christ, to be on fire with the Spirit. In the Northern Hemisphere we are in the midst of summer: we are no longer eagerly anticipating the sprouting of the seed to green; we are surrounded here by the lush green of the present. Not yet do we expect the dying of the year; for now, the green is with us. It is a bountiful time of being. It is a time of isness, as the Christian medieval mystic Meister Eckhart would say. Like the year, we too are allowed to be during these days. To be here. In this moment. A transformed and empowered people. While the experience of the first half of the church’s year of grace has been intensely an experience of becoming, the green season after Pentecost is a time to be aware of just who we have become. And the opening festival of this season

directs us in remembering how we have become, how we have come to this place, who has guided us, who fills us, who is our being: God revealed to us in the persons of the Holy Trinity. On this festival Wisdom calls us from the ordinary places--the roadside, the crossroads where we have been traveling--and cries out the wonder of God, creator of all from the beginning, whose love has been poured into our hearts by the Spirit of Christ. This is who we have become: people whose hearts are filled with God's burning love. How then, do we live as such people? How are the ordinary lives we lead shaped by this being? For many Christians, these weeks after Pentecost are called Ordinary Time, “ordinary” meaning in regular rows or ranks undistinguished from one another. Day after day of ordinary days, week after week of ordinary weeks undistinguished from one another, unbroken by major festivals or feasts. Just like life. Day after day of being in ordinary places: home, school, work. This is the character of ordinary time, the days after Pentecost, the largest part of the church year, and of most of life. Not a time of celebration, that draws us into wonder, not a time of crisis, that draws us into change, but ordinary time, a time of being. It is quite a discipline to resist the temptation to manufacture festivals during these weeks, to simply be. Just what characterizes a life of being, a life as God's enthusiastic people (en=in, theos=God: in God), is taught by the biblical readings that surround and embrace us in these days, especially the Gospel stories and parables. We meet Jesus as a person keenly alive, in tune with his surroundings, aware of people, feelings, sensations; he saw, he felt, he heard, he sensed, we are told. We meet Jesus as a person aware and present in the moment, who, because he feels on his skin the tears of the woman with the jar of ointment, can forgive; who, because he hears the voice of the man tormented by demons, can release; who, because he is aware and present and sees the woman crippled for eighteen years, can heal. To be is to be aware, and to be aware is to be fully present in the moment; to be present is to value and notice the messages of our senses, which pull us into the present. It is why in worship all the senses are engaged--we see the worship

space and the cross; we hear the music of praise and the biblical readings; we touch the hand of a neighbor and trace the cross on our body; we smell the incense and the flowers; we taste the wheat and the grape. And we are pulled thus out of the meandering mind of worry into Here; pulled out of the clinging mind of regret into Now. For it is only here where we are that we can be God's people, to heal and to bless. For it is only now that we can be Christ's body of love, to forgive and release. God's love has been poured into our hearts, and, according to the season's scripture readings, the ordinary lives lived out of that love will be lives of forgiveness, courage, endurance, mercy, hospitality, prayer, humility, renunciation, trust. When we live lives intensely aware, in tune with the present, filled with God's love toward all around us, our lives take on the vibrant green of the season, of ordinary life deeply alive.