05 February 2012

A Sunday in Ordinary Time in Cambridge

The chapel and Chapel Court in the snow this morning in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2012)

Patrick Comerford

Sunday 5 February, 2012, The Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time,

6.15 p.m.: Choral Evensong,

The Chapel of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge,

Psalm 28; Numbers 13: 1-2, 27-end; Luke 5: 1-11.


May I speak to you in the name of + the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

I want to begin by thanking the Pastoral Dean, [the Revd Dr] Peter Waddell, for his kind invitation to Sidney Sussex College and for his generous hospitality here this weekend.

It is always good to be back in Cambridge, and especially here in Sidney Sussex. I have stayed here regularly over the past four summers during the annual international summer school organised by the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, based around the corner in Wesley House.

During the summer school, this chapel is used as an Orthodox Church, so it is beautiful this weekend to experience Anglican worship here ... and at its best.

Last Sunday here and last Wednesday in my own college, we experienced and celebrated Candlemas. In just over two weeks’ time, the Church Year, the Liturgical Calendar, changes dramatically at Ash Wednesday [22 February] as we begin to mark the Season of Lent. In between Candlemas and Lent, in the Church of Ireland, we are calling these Sundays the Sundays before Lent. But on the Lent Term Card here in Sidney Sussex, these Sundays have been counted as the Sundays in Ordinary Time. In the Church of Ireland, today is the Third Sunday before Lent, but on the Lent Term Card this is the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time.

Ordinary Time returns after Pentecost, but once again in the Church of Ireland we count the Sundays after Pentecost or Sundays before Advent, rather than counting the Sundays in Ordinary Time.

Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in the snow this morning (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2012)

Being back here for a few weeks now, and almost half-way through Lent Term, you must truly feel that this is ordinary time, very ordinary time, with the ordinary round of lectures and tutorials, the ordinary round of essays and assignments.

But, I have to ask, what is wrong with Ordinary Time? What is wrong with being Ordinary?

Being ordinary is a quality of the great poets. The mature style of Philip Larkin, as Jean Hartley observes, blossoms when he starts to observe “ordinary people doing ordinary things.” Hugo Williams sees the turning point for John Betjeman as the moment he took account of the harder, unprotected world of ordinary excellence.

TS Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton,’ the first poem in The Four Quartets, is set at this time of the year, when all things are full of air and grace. For Eliot, it is in the movement of time, ordinary time, that brief moments of eternity are caught.

The revelation of God in Christ, which the disciples recognise in a life-changing moment in our Gospel reading this evening [Luke 5: 1-11], is the intersection between eternity and time. Life can be very ordinary – time is ordinary – when things keep going on and on, round and round. But that life and that time, in their ordinary ways, are worth celebrating, time after time, in everyday ordinary life.

The central discussion in ‘Burnt Norton’ is the nature of time and salvation. Eliot emphasises our need to focus on the present moment and to know that there is a universal order. By understanding the nature of time and the order of the universe, we are able to recognise God and to find redemption.

He emphasises that the present moment is the only time period that really matters, for the past cannot be changed and the future is unknown. He describes how consciousness cannot be bound within time, yet we cannot actually escape from our own time, even if we waste this ordinary time. He concludes ‘Burnt Norton’:

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.


As we move on in life, we waste sad time more and more, as we settle, as we prosper, as we age. Slowly but surely, we slip away from the chores and routines that make up the reassuring rhythms of ordinary life. We hire someone else to clean our house because the amount of time it would take us to do it is “worth” more than we have to pay. We order in rather than cooking for ourselves because it saves “valuable” time. We have our dry cleaning delivered to our offices rather than doing our own errands on an ordinary Saturday morning.

And then, as we try to commodify time and to trade in time, this distortion of our values takes a grip and seeps into our lives. We start evaluating even important relationships in the same way. We miss a child’s ‘Nativity Play’ and think we can make up by buying a new game for their DS. We constantly miss dinner at home with our partner, and then think we can make up for a year’s worth of an empty chair at the table by splashing out on an expensive Christmas present.

Gifts and games can be bought. But ordinary time with those we love can never be bought, and can never be bought back.

Time and money cannot be compared. Time cannot be traded on the exchanges or bought across the street in Sainsbury’s. Jesus spends time – the difficult working time at night that was then the lot of fishermen in Galilee – with those fishermen and in this they come to realise that time spent, with them and with him, is more valuable than the fish they catch. In that time, they realise who Christ truly is.

Christ teaches us, time and again, that time spent with friends and family resists commodification. Because ordinary time is an essential part of what makes up our relationships. I cannot buy time, and I cannot buy friendship and love. And the more time I spend with people, paradoxically, the more time I must spend with people, as Christ tells Simon Peter.

A close friend is not someone I meet solely at the big functions in state, church or academic life, is not someone I exchange business cards and email addresses with, or someone who occasionally presses like on my Facebook postings. A close friend is someone I spend significant time with, and not just quality time, but ordinary time too.

Friendships are knit together not only by taking part in shared activities, but by sharing and reflecting on the memories of those activities over the course of the years in ordinary time.

For the first Christians, Sunday was not a day of rest; it was a regular, ordinary working day in ordinary time. Yes it was also the first feast; but for the first Christians, the great and joyous mystery of the cosmos and of salvation was celebrated regularly on an ordinary day, in an ordinary house, in the midst of ordinary life.

This original social context for our Sunday celebrations vividly represents how in-breaking eternity, clothed in time, truly sanctifies ordinary time, giving it a meaning that transcends our temporal trials and travails in this everyday life. This validation of human time, of ordinary time, takes place within the Eucharist, Sunday after Sunday.

No human time that has its meaning anchored in Christ’s salvific activity can possibly be commodified, reduced without distortion to a monetary value and bought and sold to further our selfish desires. Indeed, Professor Cathleen Kaveny of Notre Dame University suggests that the story of the betrayal of Christ by Judas for thirty silver coins testifies to this truth.

The liturgical calendar of the Church is designed to help us to appreciate each moment of salvation history, even while viewing it all from the eternal perspective of the resurrection. The liturgical year begins with Advent, a time of waiting, followed by the season of Christmas, including Epiphany and culminating with Candlemas. Then follows this Ordinary Time, in which the earthly life of Christ is recalled and celebrated, Sunday after Sunday.

Next we have Lent, preparing us for Holy Week’s “real time” commemoration of the events we celebrate each Sunday. Easter follows, and then Christ’s Ascension and the Day of Pentecost. Then along comes another, second, but longer season of Ordinary Time that ends with the feast of Christ the King.

Time in the liturgical year is not freely exchangeable – it cannot be traded, bought or sold. So, we do not fast at Christmas, nor do we feast on Good Friday. Each time and season in the liturgical calendar conveys something of the uniqueness of the opportunities we are presented with, the time-bound character of our invitations and obligations, and the need to lay hold of them in a moment of decision.

We cannot make up for having ignored Lent by observing our own private penitential season in the first week of Easter – no more than we can make up for having forgotten a partner’s anniversary or a child’s birthday by giving a bigger or more expensive present the next day or the next week.

And the Church fails to grasp the intersection between temporal reality and eternal truth when it misses the opportunity to hear the ordinary concerns of people when they articulate them. In missing the opportunity to listen to the Occupy protesters in London, the community of Saint Paul’s Cathedral missed an opportunity, a moment in time that can never be presented in the same way again. In this failure, a blessèd opportunity to express the mission of a cathedral – to allow the nation to speak to the Church and the Church to speak to the Nation – has been lost, never to be recovered in quite the same way again.

TS Eliot reminds us, “Only through time time is conquered.” In the economy of salvation, time is imbued with mystery. The fundamental mystery of the universe, the depth of its meaning, is the very reality of God himself. The Kingdom of God is truly but only dimly present in our midst, but will be revealed in God’s own time.

In the opening lines of ‘Burnt Norton’, Eliot writes:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.


So, enjoy being at “At the still point of the turning world.” Enjoy ordinary time, celebrate ordinary time, enjoy the ordinary things of life. Ordinary time is not a commodity to be traded or exchanged. For we are truly blessed when, in the movement of time, ordinary time, we glimpse brief moments of eternity.

And so, may all we think, say and do be to the praise, honour and glory of God, + Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.

Cloister Court in Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, in the snow this morning (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2012)

Note:

In reading and preparing for this sermon, I was grateful for ideas expressed by Professor M. Cathleen Kaveny in ‘Living the fullness of Ordinary Time: a Theological Critique of the Instrumentalization of Time in Professional Life’ (Communio, Winter 2001, vol 28, no 4, pp 771-819).

She is both Professor of Law and Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, and that paper was a revised version of the Baker-McKenzie Lecture in Ethics at Loyola University Chicago School of Law in 2001, published as ‘Billable Hours in Ordinary Time: A Theological Critique of the Instrumentalization of Time in Professional Life’ in the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal.

Other references:

TS Eliot, The Complete Poems & Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1969).
Sarah Arthur, At the Still Point (Brewster MA: Paraclete Press, 2011).
Hugo Williams, John Betjeman, Poems selected by Hugo Williams (London: Faber and Faber, 2006).
(Professor) Conor Gearty, ‘St Paul’s – reflection on the court ruling on eviction,’ 11.1.2012.

Canon Patrick Comerford is Lecturer in Anglicanism, Liturgy and Church History, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, and a canon of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin. This sermon was preached at Choral Evensong in the Chapel of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, on 5 February 2012.

1 comment:

Website Template said...

I always enjoy your blog post as a reader..Its inspirational including great fun.