[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Welcome to the Collective Table, where we celebrate the intersections of Jesus, justice and joy. This podcast is brought to you by Oceanside Sanctuary Church. Each week we bring our listeners a recording of our weekly Sunday teaching at Oceanside Sanctuary, which ties scripture into the larger conversations happening in our community, congregation, and even the podcast. So we're glad you're here and thanks for listening.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: Well, if we haven't met yet, my name is Claire, and as Janelle said, I'm the family minister here at Oceanside Sanctuary. I am usually the one covered in glue or I have like stickers stuck to my back on Sunday mornings, but I get to hang in here with you guys every once in a while with our adult teaching time and apologies ahead of time. There's no craft, even though you're with me in the adult teaching time, although you should have a cool little handout, which you are welcome to doodle on and take notes if you would like. And the doodle pads that we put in the pew backs are not just for kids. I also enjoy those as well. So if you're an adult doodling on them as well, no judgment at all.
So we're in the middle of a sermon series on spiritual practices, where we are exploring the myriad of ways that we might connect with God in our daily lives. So far, we've talked about prayer. We've even talked about fasting. Last week, Larry took us through something called the Ignatian Examen, and today's practice might not seem obvious at first, but bear with me, because we are talking about a calendar, something called the Christian calendar, or if you're really fancy, the liturgical calendar. Everybody's getting handouts. We'll have it on the screen as well if you didn't get a handout.
But it's also known as the liturgical calendar, our liturgical year, if you are feeling fancy and liturgical really just being a word that means public or communal worship.
And for those of you who did not grow up in the church, or maybe you grew up more evangelical like myself, you may not have even heard of something like this. Or if you did this order of seasons, church seasons, and high holidays, maybe they were posed to you as too rigid or ritualistic. You know, for me, I didn't really know that this even existed until I found my way into a mainline denomination in college.
And it was then that I found that the Christian calendar is more than just a schedule of holidays. It can be a sacred rhythm or a spiritual practice.
So as you can see, we have seasons like Advent or Lent, and we celebrate holidays Like Christmas or Easter. Those are a part of. Of this Christian calendar or Christian year. And if you're a real nerd like me, I know you all are out there. You might know certain days, like Epiphany, which we celebrate. Does anybody know what epiphany is? You can shout it out, Claire.
Yes. The twelfth day after Christmas. So we talk about the Wise Men. Or Pentecost. Who knows what Pentecost is? That might be a harder one.
50 days after Easter. And what do we celebrate on Pentecost?
The Holy Spirit, the birth of the church.
So we could just be really listing out a bunch of churchy holidays here. But what I want to pose to you today is that returning time and time again, year after year, to this narrative of who God is, the story of Jesus and the story of the people of God, who God's people are, that participating in this narrative can be a form of spiritual practice.
And what if it's not just following a calendar? What if it's a radical spiritual practice? What if it can help you find a rhythm of resistance, A way to remember how to be fully and beautifully and vulnerably human?
But before I get into the weeds and make my case to you today, I. I invite you to pray with me.
Holy and timeless God, you hold all of our days in your hands.
As the seasons change, as sacred rhythms guide us, teach us to move with grace through time.
Enjoy in sorrow, in our work and our resting, in gathering together and letting go.
Help us to see your presence in it all.
Center us now in your spirit that we would listen, learn, and maybe be made new.
In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
For everything there is a season, a time for every matter under heaven. The poet in Ecclesiastes says, a time to be born and a time to die.
A time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted.
A time to kill and a time to heal.
A time to break down and a time to build up. A time to weep and a time to laugh, A time to mourn and a time to dance.
A time to throw away stones and a time to gather stones together.
A time to embrace and a time, and this is a funny way of saying it, to refrain from embracing.
A time to seek and a time to lose.
A time to keep and a time to throw away.
A time to tear and a time to sew, A time to keep silent, A time to speak, A time to love and a time to hate. A time for war and a time for peace.
Or as one biblical translation puts it, there's an opportune time to do things, a right time for everything.
This scripture comes from Ecclesiastes 3, 1:8. And something that I keep coming back to in this text is not so much what it actually contains, because it's really, really beautiful. But each time I come back to it, I can't stop hyper fixating on what is missing from it. The Bible contains so many different genres of literature, and this particular book, Ecclesiastes, is wisdom literature. So it's very poetic, but it stands out from other books of the Bible, most notably because God is not really mentioned all that much.
In fact, especially at the beginning of this book, which we're reading from today, God doesn't really seem to be involved at all in the inner world of this poet.
And it's different from other pieces of wisdom literature in the Bible, like maybe Proverbs, because especially in this particular section, it's really just a whole bunch of observations, meditations on the world around you.
The Book of Proverbs, if you flip over and read it, it's more of an assertive tone. Wisdom literature in the sense of a parent giving a child advice.
So when you flip over to Ecclesiastes, it's strikingly less instructive than many of its sister texts.
And maybe some would say that it's indulgently so, because to have an entire book of the Bible dedicated to just going on and waxing eloquently about existential matters, some might call that indulgent. But I think it's a really important part of our Christian Scriptures because Ecclesiastes shows us how to wrestle with. With this inescapable cycle of the human experience and all of its joy and grief and unpredictability.
The scripture that we read this morning is somehow. It's a comforting assertion of order. You're handed these two things. A time to keep silent, a time to speak, a time for love, a time for hate. It's asserting kind of an order a over the world. But at the same time, it's just also an observation of how little control we actually have in life. There is a time for war, there is a time for peace. We can't escape that.
And it's kind of as if the writer gives us permission to throw our hands up. And I don't want this to scare you, but to throw our hands up in the air and just be a little bit agnostic about things.
Because Ecclesiastes doesn't give us easy answers. It doesn't hand us platitudes that make everything better.
It lets our experiences just be as they are.
It reminds us that faith is not certainty.
Sometimes faith just looks like living your life and returning to the rhythm of life anyways.
And maybe that's why I find myself, when we're talking about spiritual practices, why I find myself so drawn to these more repetitive practices in our faith.
Not because they offer control, sometimes they do. But because I think they honor the cycles of life that we find ourselves returning to over and over and over and over.
In the same way that our scripture in Ecclesiastes invites us to recognize the seasons of life and the limits of our knowing the rhythm of the Christian calendar. And our rituals do something similar.
They don't fix the chaos, but they hold us through it.
The first time I was introduced to a more repetitive spiritual practice, it kind of caught me off guard. Some of you already know that we are disciples of Christ's church, but this summer I'm going to be ordained in the United Methodist Church, which I'm so excited about.
But this is a tradition that I have been a part of for about a decade now. But one of the things that really drew me to it was actually their communion tradition or their communion ritual, which in the Methodist tradition, it's called the Great Thanksgiving. So it's a little bit more formal than what we do here at Oceanside Sanctuary, because basically, it's the word, these set words in our prayer books that the pastor says and the congregation says during communion. And there are so many different Christian iterations of this, but the Methodist one in particular is this communal prayer that retells the story of God's saving work in the world and invites us to join that story as we break bread and share in the cup. There's something about the rhythm of it, the repetition that every time we gather together at that table, we tell this story again. God's story, our story. And somehow I found myself inside of that story, too.
We spoke words that had been spoken by generations before us. We remember how God has always shown up for God's people, bringing liberation and love time and time again.
And somehow in that act of remembering, I found something grounding and sacred, something that has stayed with me.
As I said, while we at Oceanside Sanctuary, we do communion a little differently. We still do find ourselves week after week, reenacting remembering Jesus, last meal with his disciples. When we, too, celebrate communion. In this act, we're practicing a sacred rhythm of sorts. We come together as a community. Different people stand up here and read it and retell our collective story, remembering who God is, recounting what God has done in their lives, sharing what God is currently doing in their lives. And then we look forward, we look to where God is headed. And as a community, we take a stand and take communion together and hope that we will be a part of that.
The continuation of this rhythm, it still grounds me. It has comforted me and in some ways it challenges me, as I'm sure maybe it has challenged you as well.
In times when I didn't know where I was going, I knew that this ritual would be there and in it I would encounter God, even if I may have not been feeling God's presence in my life otherwise.
So we're talking about rhythms here. And sometimes rhythms can be a really powerful part or a really powerful part of healing, or just a way to hold yourself together in a hard time. It reminds me of when you find yourself listening to the same song or watching your same comfort TV shows over and over again. I think that's okay because there's something comforting about the familiar characters, the familiar storylines.
But as good as clinging to a rhythm can be for us, even in spiritual practices, it's not just anecdotally beneficial. There are numerous scientific studies that show that certain spiritual practices actually activate the brain regions linked to attention and compassion, emotional regulation, it can lower stress, it just promotes overall well being.
Over time, these practices can actually rewire our brains and enhance our resilience, our empathy, our sense of connection.
And like I said, as important as this can be, ritual for the sake of ritual is not enough.
And it itself cannot be our end. All, be all. As much as I love talking about the Christian calendar and these high holidays and different seasons and the importance of them forming you, I have a confession to make.
I didn't really observe Lent this year.
Who's clutching their pearls? Oh, no.
A more clever way to frame it would be. I've said this to some of you. I gave up Lent for Lent this year. Lent arrived during a time when I was just. I felt like I did not need to be reminded of my mortality. Lent kicks off with Ash Wednesday. And Ash Wednesday is the day that we put ashes on our foreheads and we say, you know, you come from dust and to dust you will return.
And I actually told Janelle and Jason after the service, I said, look, I'm so glad that we're a church that talks about this, but this year it is just not like I am fully aware of my mortality. Especially on today. I'm not really feeling like I need that reminder. I don't feel like I need to cover myself in ashes when it already feels like death is all around me. I need different practices to hold me in this season.
And I say all of that because thinking of a spiritual rhythm like the Christian calendar, or observing these seas as a set of obligations or boxes to check off, that completely misses the point. The liturgical year is not performance, but it's an opportunity for participation.
It's not asking us to escape our humanity, but to fully inhabit grounds us in our bodies and our lived emotional, very physical experiences. And it reminds us that our humanity is not a barrier to God, because that is the very place where God has chosen to meet us.
And while these rhythms can very well support our well being, they offer us actually something deeper than that. They offer us a way to orient our lives around this sacred story that shapes who we are and it can shape how we see the world.
It's a rhythm that retells the story of Jesus in a way that can draw us into our own stories. It's an invitation to align the sacred with the ordinary.
The birth and life, death and resurrection of Jesus mirror the cycles that I would say that we live through.
Our hopes, our losses, our questions, our longings.
The Christian calendar starts off with this longing, anticipation and hope of Advent to the vulnerable joy of Jesus, birth at Christmas, the clarity of epiphany, the wrestling of Lent, the heartbreak of Holy Week, the surprise of Easter, the inspiration of Pentecost.
And you see this half of it is this slow unfolding growth of just ordinary time. Nothing special in particular.
It's all there.
This rhythm doesn't pull us away from the world, but it's there because it helps us engage it more fully. It reminds us of who God is, of who we are, and how deeply those two things can actually be intertwined.
Much like the scripture that we read in Ecclesiastes, the Christian calendar reflects both an attempt to find some order in it all. And it's just an honest recognition of, of life's cyclical nature.
Ecclesiastes reminds us that there is a season for everything. A time to weep, to laugh, to mourn, even to dance.
It doesn't flatten life into tidy conclusions. It honors the full range of our human experience.
In the same way, the Christian calendar is a tool. It doesn't try to explain everything about God, but it offers us a sacred rhythm that can give shape to our days, can help us make meaning, and not by controlling or projecting onto God, but by entering into the story of God. With our whole selves.
So at its best, something like the Christian calendar, it gently orients our lives towards that story.
Not an abstraction, but through seasons and stories that echo our own.
Waiting, rejoicing, wondering, grieving, growing, hoping.
And I think I've talked a lot about the importance of this rhythm. I think what makes it all worthwhile and what makes it unique is the trajectory that it points us towards, and that's resurrection and the interest of living into Easter, which, if you didn't know, Easter is not just one day on our Christian calendar. Easter is an entire season right now. I said we're in the season of Easter. The Christian story, it doesn't just mirror the life cycles of birth and death. We have a whole season of resurrection that shows that this site, that God just breaks all of that open.
In Jesus resurrection, we glimpse this divine interruption to that endless loop that tells us that death is not the end. God doesn't just dwell within that cycle. When we say God dwells within our lives, I would go a step further and say that God transforms it.
That's what the practice of the Christian calendar invites us to do. Not a rote repetition of dates and rituals, but a rhythm that can open us up to transformation and change.
I'm going to go back to talking about comfort TV shows. Some of you know my husband and I love the show New Girl. Sometimes we talk to each other in New Girl quotes because when I tell you we watched it over and over, we love that show.
And even after countless viewings, we still will catch new jokes or we'll notice details that we've missed before. And it always surprises us. It's the same stories and little jokes and dialogue, but depending on where we are, what we're paying attention to, different things will jump out at us or make us laugh or if you've ever gotten to hear one of your favorite artists perform live, like one of your favorite songs, they'll shift the key or sing it a little differently or bring a new emotion to the lyrics. And suddenly you experience the music in a whole new way. Even today. Brett sung one of Joey's songs, and I had really only heard Joey sing it before, but Brett singing it, it sounded like a totally different song in the best way. Woo.
Yeah. Go Brett.
The resurrection story, it doesn't just repeat. It deepens its surprises. It can liberate us because we get to encounter it again and again and again because we keep returning to it as we change and evolve and we keep re encountering it from new and different places in our lives. And each time it opens something different in us.
I also think that the transformative power of ritual is that, ironically enough, it disrupts us. I talked about resurrection being that thing that cracks those cycles open. It won't let us just coast along or check out. We can't just go on autopilot following this because it insists that we stop and pay attention, even when we would rather just scroll, even when we're tired, even when we would rather avoid what's bubbling up in us. The story embedded in a sacred rhythm like this says, wake up. Remember who you are as a human.
And sometimes this goes without saying. That's really hard.
Sometimes the season invites you to mourn when you would rather move on.
Sometimes it calls you to rest, even when everything around you is screaming, keep grinding.
These sacred patterns don't always feel soft. Maybe they're not always peaceful. Sometimes they're confrontational.
But maybe that's where change or healing or transformation starts. Not just by being held, but by being shaken awake a bit.
So I've promised you a practical spiritual practice, and then I gave you this whole lecture on a calendar. So you might be wondering what is actually practicing the Christian calendar actually look like.
At the risk of oversimplifying things, I want to say that I really think it just begins with paying attention, looking around and asking yourself, what does this season? Whether it's the season that we're in as Christians and in the church, but a season that you might be in your life.
What kind of person does this moment need me to be?
The time that most of our world runs on is fast and efficient. It's always pushing forward. But sacred time invites us to return to rhythms, to rituals, to this story that we just keep living over and over and over, not because we're at risk of forgetting it, but because we keep changing.
To live by sacred time is to trust that something good can come from repetition, from slowness, from return.
It's to believe that our worth as humans is not in our speed or in our productivity, but in our love and in our presence and in our attention.
It's not there to erase our pain. It can be there to honor our pain and maybe force us to sit with our pain and reminds us again and again that death does not get the last word.
Even when maybe you have been waking up with anxiety clamped to your chest, even when your kid is struggling and you just don't know what to do or how to help, when you scroll and scroll and try to find distracted distraction and you still feel hollow when hope just feels like that is a little bit too much to ask for, or when hope just feels kind of stupid.
Returning to this reminds us that God is somehow still with us because life is still unfolding and we're not just going in circles. When we return to the same stories and practices year after year after year, it can form us. We're not simply passing time because we're learning how to inhabit time.
Like the poet in Ecclesiastes, the Christian year tells the truth about how time can feel repetitive.
Earlier in the book of Ecclesiastes, the poet says there is nothing new under the sun.
But it also dares to believe that transformation does not always come in these dramatic bursts like Christmas or Easter.
Those are teeny, tiny parts of the calendar. Actually, more often, transformation comes in this long, quiet work of ordinary time.
The faithful rhythm of showing up again and again and again, being formed and shaped over time like water flowing over a rock.
I also know that at the beginning of this, I posed to you that the Christian calendar can be a form of resistance or maybe a more radical spiritual practice. And I say that for several reasons. The first is that practicing the Christian calendar is not something that that can be done alone. It's inherently communal across time zones and traditions, across generations. People from all over the world are watching and waiting during the season of Advent.
People all over the world and for so long have been singing and saying, Christ is risen on Easter morning, or just building communities of justice and joy during that long stretch of ordinary time.
The idea of ordering our time around the life of Christ is also deeply rooted in tradition. There's a lot of argument about when exactly the Christian calendar really began and people started observing it. But some would say it's at least 1700 years old. People have been doing this for a really long time.
In practicing these seasons, you are a part of a larger narrative. Even when, and you all know this, there are a lot of philosophies or people or corporations out there that really don't have an interest in you being a part of something bigger than yourself.
I'm sure you've heard me say this before in some way, shape or form. But there are these dominant narratives among us that tout this idea of individualism, that you can do it on your own, that you don't need anybody but yourself to get by.
So by making it a spiritual practice to intentionally form your life around certain seasons and practices that stretch across time zones and generations and traditions, I think that can be a way to outright resist these individualistic Narratives, and not just individualism, that's a mouthful. But the temptation to numb out or check out emotionally when the pace of life just becomes unbearable.
This calendar doesn't allow us to stay in the same place or skim the surface. It moves gently through lament and celebration, through wilderness and feasting, and it asks us to feel it all when we are at risk of just being flattened into mere consumers. To buy, buy, buy, to scroll, scroll, scroll. To climb that ladder and achieve more, to be more productive, to not feel too much, to push through.
The Christian year says grieve, wait, be a human that is not weak, that is a form of rebellion.
The second reason I believe that the Christian calendar is a radical spiritual practice is because it invites us to resist what I would call the tyranny of hurry.
Our world loves this illusion of linear progress, always moving forward faster and newer and better. But like I said, the Christian calendar doesn't follow that logic because it circles, it spirals, it brings us back again and again and again to the same stories, not because we didn't learn them the first time, but because they shape us more deeply each time we return.
These seasons of the church, which begin with waiting and adventure, there's wandering in wilderness and Lent, the joy of Easter.
They give us permission to slow down and to mark our time not by deadlines or output, but by presence and meaning in a world that prizes immediacy. Sacred time teaches us the slow, sure work of transformation.
So I hope that you all feel invited, and not obligated, but invited to step into some kind of rhythm. Maybe it's the Christian calendar, but I would encourage you to start small, to pay attention.
Let the seasons shape you.
You don't have to get it perfect. That's the beauty of sacred time. That's the beauty of life. It comes back around Advent, times of waiting will come again. Easter times of joy and resurrection will come again.
And so much of life is ordinary.
Ordinary time will stretch long again.
And through it all, you are held in this story, and you are part of this story.
So I'd like to invite our worship team to make their way back to the front. And as they do that, I would ask you to pray with me.
Holy God, you are the pulse in every season, you quietly whisper to us on ordinary days.
You are a steady presence when everything feels uncertain.
Thank you for the sacred rhythms that hold us for the gift of time, not as a race, but as a rhythm we return to again and again.
And our stories and our rituals and our seasons remind us that we are not alone.
When life feels too fast, would you slow us down?
When we are weary, give us rest when we forget who we are, Remind us that our humanity is not something to overcome, but the very place that you chose to dwell.
May we leave here, rooted in your story, open to transformation, ready to pay attention to the time we're in and to the people around us, and to the quiet movement of your spirit among us.
It's in the name of Jesus who lives that we pray.
Amen.
[00:34:27] Speaker B: Thank you for joining us for this Sunday teaching, no matter when or where you're tuning in. To learn more about our community or to support the work we do, Visit
[email protected] We hope to see you again soon.
