The Jesus Story is Our Story:
Living By the Sacred Year

The sacred year teaches us to mark time by the human God—entering into His kind of life over and over and over again—and, by this repetition, to come to interpret existence and all our moments by eternity’s light.

So it’s simply and really not the church’s business to mark Father’s Day or Victoria Day or Canada Day, and many other cultural festivals and remembrances, whatever value they have or purpose they serve, because her music, prayer, and sacraments—her worship—elevate Jesus Christ.

July First, Father’s Day, and the like are muddled for many people, seen from all sorts of vantage points—often negatively, for good reasons—but Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, Ordinary Time, Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent and Good Friday belong to every human and invite us into the divine life, where we are all made well.

If we invite people into a way of living and marking time that is cruciform, they will see the weakness of the Cross as the only power available to anyone, and come to share in the voluntary love of God for all persons and things.

I certainly do enjoy such days as Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and the like.  These days afford focused time to do what we should always be doing—giving honour where honour is due.  That is important.  However, because of the fact that human imaginations, by and large, have not been transfigured by the way the human God keeps time—etching reality always and everywhere with His Cross—mention and celebration of these cultural holidays in the contemporary church very often becomes participating in idolatry.

The sacred year draws our time and our humanity into the time and humanity of God, and like the human who is God the sacred seasons are always new and ever-renewing.

This gift of the sacred year can be diminished—into laborious practices, into dreary competitions between Advent and Christmas, into something *we do for God* rather than, as it is intended to be, something *God does in and for us.*

We are instead drawn by the Holy Spirit into the time—the Story—God makes for us, drawn into God’s very human life among us as one of us, the One whose life is for us all, and there’s no fathom or destination in Jesus Christ.

Jesus is Himself the gift of the church year. Each passing year—in every fast, feast, and ordinary moment—we hear something in His voice as yet unheard, see something in His face as yet unseen.

And our pilgrimage together into Jesus Christ never ends, in time or in eternity.  
 
Prayer: Lord, make me have perpetual love and reverence for Your holy Name, for You never fail to keep and govern those whom You have set upon the sure foundation of Your loving-kindness; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.