Misconceptions. . .

While I am not a fan of the Roman Catholic practice of naming the Sundays after Epiphany and Pentecost Ordinary Time, they have certainly gained a bad rap for this by the misconceptions that accompany this nomenclature.  Ordinary has come to mean simple, common, usual, and, inevitably, unimportant.  It seems we are captive to one view of that term and in our poverty of language have forgotten other nuanced meanings of it.  When the word “ordinary” is applied to Sundays in the Church Year, it does not refer to its typical meaning illustrated above but refers to another root of the words that has come to mean simple, common, usual, unremarkable, plain, or unimportant.  It hearkens back to the the English term “ordinal” -- a word that refers to the position of one thing in a series of things.  It is when we call something the first or second among a whole series of things.  It can refer to importance but it can also refer simply to time.  One comes before another and one comes after another.  The term Ordinary Time refers to those Sundays which are distinguished only or primarily by their sequence following one or another major Sundays.  These Sundays have a common color -- green.  It is the color of these ordinal Sundays even though the feast day which they follow has another color (white for Epiphany and red for Pentecost).  Even when we called them after Trinity, we observed the color green instead of the Trinity color of white.  After Trinity or Pentecost is a small change, indeed, for a practice which is the same.

Of course, someone will insist but what about the Sundays of a Season -- the First Sunday of Advent or in Lent or of Easter?  They also follow an ordinal pattern in their naming.  Yes, they do.  But they are Sundays in or of a season and not the ordinal Sundays after an event: The First Sunday after Epiphany or after Pentecost.  So there is no slight meant toward Sundays in Ordinary Time nor is this meant in any way to indicate that they are, well, ordinary.  Indeed, any Sunday is never ordinary and every Sunday, as the day of our Lord's resurrection or a sort of mini-Easter, is special in that regard.  Can any one of us regard our time in the presence of our merciful God to receive His gifts of Word and Sacrament distributed to us quite apart from our merit or worthy regard such a day as ordinary?  No, I did not think so.

There is another aspect to this that perhaps is also worth our attention.  While we regard such time spent together around the Word and Table of the Lord as special, there is also the sense to that gathering that it is ordinary, that is, the common way that God comes to us, through means.  It was common when I was growing up to have the Sacrament only four times a year and there was great counsel from the solemn voices of that day that to have it more often would somehow tarnish its special character and render it common.  Odd how that never applied to hearing God's Word read and preached or praying the Our Father!!  Our Lord never intended for His Supper to become something special in the sense of something reserved for special occasions.  No, indeed, for He commends His testament to the Church with the common to do this often in His remembrance -- as the very means of His remembrance.  So the Sunday of the Church Year may be referred as an ordinal Sunday of a season (after Epiphany or Pentecost) but it is observed in the ordinary way -- gathering together to hear His Word and receive His body and blood and to respond with prayer and praise.  

The weeks of the Sundays outside the Festival half of the Church Year are ordinal and yet they are observed in the same way we observe the Festival Sundays, including feast days.  While there may be attendant changes to the liturgy for some days (such as the omission of the hymn of praise in Advent or Lent), we gather in the same way for the same gifts.  These are never common in one sense and yet it is out common duty and delight in another sense to be there in the Lord's House, on the Lord's Day, around the Lord's Word and the Lord's Table as the people who have been washed by the Lord's water.  Thanks be to God!