Jeremy L. Berg

A repost from November 28, 2017.

Are the seasons of our lives marked by orbiting the sun? Or, do our lives find their meaning in orbiting the Son?

I droned on and on in my sermon trying to introduce our church to the concept of sacred seasons following the rhythms of the Christian Year or Liturgical Calendar. (I tend to ramble when I’m passionate about something; but I wish I could do it over again and make my points more punchy and concise.)

A profound (though largely subconscious) fact is that we are all marking the passing seasons of our lives according to some calendar or another. Whether its the School Year, or Sports Seasons, or fiscal year, or Hallmark holidays, or the four astronomical seasons (spring, winter, summer and fall), we’re all orienting our lives around some temporal rhythm. The ways we mark time will often reveal what we value, how we measure progress, what we’re longing for, and even what we worship!

Are we counting down the days until our next paycheck, or Christmas bonus, living in fear of the uncertainty of tax season? If so, money may be the central organizing force in our lives.

As a teenager, my entire existence was shaped by the sports calendar: cross country running in the fall to get me in shape for basketball all winter, and then baseball or golf in the spring, and then basketball camps all summer. When I left for college and gave up sports, I suffered a mini-identity crisis. “Now, what on earth am I here for?”

Families today seem to follow the two seasons of the school year calendar: 9 months of busy activity and classes followed by 3 months of summer vacation for fun and recreation. Are we unintentionally communicating to our children that life consists mainly in large doses of activity and performance followed by shorter periods of fun and recreation? There’s nothing wrong with these things, but might there be some higher purpose in life than work and play?

A primary point I wish to convey is this: Most of the calendars above tend to keep ourselves as the axis or center point around which other things orbit — even very important things like faith and God. My self-created universe orbits around my school activities, my sports endeavors, my financial ups and downs, etc. The problem should be obvious.

“It’s not about you.”

This is how Rick Warren famously begins his mega bestselling book The Purpose-Driven Life, and its worth repeating to ourselves every single morning. For we live in what is perhaps the most narcissistic society of all of human history.

Sadly, even the very faith that aims to change us from self-centered creatures to people who “consider others more important than yourselves” (Phil 2:3) is often practiced in ways that actually reinforce the belief that it really is all about us. Consider our Sunday worship habits and lingo.

We ask, “What did you get out of the service today?” I’m sorry, do we think the service is mainly for us? When we hear the word Sunday “service” do we think we’re somehow the ones being served? Do we show up with our spiritual bibs on and sit in the pew waiting to be spoon-fed a positive experience that tastes good and goes down easy? The old worship term “liturgy” literally means “the work of the people,” and I assume our “work” of worship is for the Lord, not ourselves. So, we might ask instead what we gave this Sunday in worship instead of what we got?

Or, we ask, “How does this sermon apply to my life?” We complain if we don’t immediately see how the pastor’s message is “relevant” to our lives. Hold on a minute. When did we start thinking the proclamation of God’s holy Word is mainly a collection of self-help nuggets to bolster our daily pursuits and help us live our best life now? Do we wake up each morning, put our feet to the floor and immediately start asking God to help us with our plans? (Yes, of course, God cares about our daily lives — families, jobs, trials, etc. But we’ve overemphasized that message and need to correct the balance.) I submit that the biblical heroes mentioned in the “Hall of Faith” in Hebrews 11 had faith-conditioned eyes fixed on God’s bigger Story and not their own temporal earthly pursuits:

“All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth….They were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them” (Heb. 13:16).

Or, James’ eternal perspective confronting our tendency to make our own plans:

“Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business, and make a profit.” You do not even know what will happen tomorrow! What is your life?You are a mist that appears for a little while andthen vanishes. 15Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord is willing, we will live and do this or that” (James 4:13-14).

Still, my favorite is Paul’s singleminded pursuit of Christ’s priorities and intense commitment to “dying to self”:

“However, I consider my life worth nothing to me; my only aim is to finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me–the task of testifying to the good news of God’s grace” (Acts 20:24).

Every believer must come to realize that God is at the center of the universe, not us. Our lives are to be placed in His service, not He in service to us.

What if we woke up everyday asking God to help us align our lives with His purposes? How about we start asking if our lives have any relevance to God’s unfolding plans in the world? What if we start pestering our pastor when sermons start to become too focused on application to our lives. What if we sent emails to the chair of the board demanding that the pastor preach sermons that help break us from our self-absorption and turn our eyes away from busy activities and unsustainable schedules long enough to see the bigger Story we’re called to be part of and to learn the “unforced rhythms of grace” God has designed us for?

Enter the practice of the Christian Year and Liturgical Calendar.

What if our lives followed a yearly rhythm that made Jesus’ life and saving work the center of our existence? What if each season of the year helped bring us closer to God as we remember and re-enact the various seasons of Jesus’ own earthly pilgrimage?

The Christian Year is an ancient practice of letting our own lives be shaped and transformed by meditating on and participating in the great moments of redemption: Jesus’ incarnation, life & ministry, suffering, death, burial, resurrection, ascension, outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and anticipated second coming. As Don Saliers puts it:

“Entering into the cycles of the liturgical year is a way of unfolding and exploring the gospel itself: opening the treasury of who Jesus is and what he does in and through human community called forth to conversion and transformation. So we enter Advent/Christmas/Epiphany precisely as a way of expectation, reception, and manifestation of the love of God in human form. But in doing so the Scripture itself opens new dimensions of reality to us. The same is true of Lent/Easter/Pentecost. In this case, the central mystery of participation in the death and resurrection of Christ is at the heart of the journey… Our lives are constantly being  reinterpreted into the story of God with us” (From The Services of the Christian Year edited by Robert Webber).

Two great sins continue to plague the church today. First, our sense of time is being shaped by secular holidays and self-centered calendars that keep our own activity as the center of our existence. Second, we are characters living inside various false narratives imposed upon us from the world (e.g., The American Dream, etc.) or we’re weighed down and weary trying to be the authors of our own lives. (Playing God is exceedingly exhausting.)

The two great gifts the church can offer people this Christmastide is 1) an invitation to live in our lives according to the seasons of Sacred Time in following the Liturgical Calendar, and 2) to let God’s Story of redemptive history be the controlling story that gives shapes to our lives. One helpful tool for helping immerse ourselves in the Big Story of the Scriptures is by following the 3-year reading cycle of the Common Lectionary. Read more on the significance of lectionary-based worship and devotion here.

Let me conclude with a piece of calendrical trivia and a spiritual challenge. We don’t know what day Jesus was actually born on. December 25th might have been chosen because the Winter Solstice and the ancient pagan Roman midwinter festivals called ‘Saturnalia’ and ‘Dies Natalis Solis Invicti’ took place in December around this date. Dies Natalis Solis Invicti means ‘birthday of the unconquered sun’ and was held on December 25th (when the Romans thought the Winter Solstice took place). The Winter Solstice is the day where there is the shortest time between the sun rising and the sun setting. To pagans this meant that the winter was over and spring was coming and they had a festival to celebrate it and worshipped the sun for winning over the darkness of winter.

Christians celebrated the birthday of the true Son of God who came as Light into the world to conquer the darkness of sin, death and evil once and for all. Now, beloved, we must choose:  Will we live out our years on earth merely orbiting the Sun 90 or so times in a meaningless astronomical cycle? Or will we count our days and “redeem the time” by letting our lives revolve around the Son and his saving acts each and every year?