Ordinary Time

I have been thinking about a church on fire.

Sunday is Pentecost Sunday, fifty days after Easter, and the day Christians commemorate receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit. Many churches will read from Act 2 and talk about a mighty rushing wind and tongues of fire. I wish that was the fire I was thinking of.

Instead, I am thinking of the Mother African Union church in Wilmington, Delaware. The church was destroyed by a fire early Sunday Morning. The building is in shambles. The picture reminds me of Nehemiah’s description of Jerusalem before he endeavored to rebuild the city. “The gates are burned with fire.” This church, which probably quartered refugees from antebellum south, is no longer safe to even host parishioners on a Sunday morning. While I am glad the fire is no longer burning, I am sad that the “lighthouse” of Mother African Union church no longer stands.

In many ways, church on Sunday will also be an end, of sorts. Pentecost signifies the end of the Easter season. Fifty days after Easter, we all go back to our regularly scheduled programs. Catholic churches will remove their Paschal candle and in liturgical terms, Christians of many different denominations, will go back to Ordinary time.

Nothing about this season feels ordinary to me. The world is on fire and not in a good way. I mean, it’s not hellfire and brimstone, but to some of us it kind of feels that way. Things that we took for granted, things that we thought were normal, are no longer.

The events of Acts 2 were anything but ordinary. There were people from different nations speaking a variety of languages. That’s diversity. Peter read from the scripture that said God would pour out God’s own spirit on people, regardless of their age or gender. (I read the text to be inclusive of any other ways we have decided to classify ourselves and one another.) That’s equity. And the book uses the word “all” over a dozen times. That’s inclusion. That’s how God sees the world. That is not at all how so many of us see it.

We can only see what’s in front of us, and what we can see and hear is disturbing. We see violent shootings at houses of worship and schools. We see rampant political corruption. We hear of wars and rumors of war. We see people who don’t look like us, who don’t worship like us, who don’t vote the way we do. We see a historic church burned to the ground. We are leery of the person whose culture is slightly different from our own. We barely consider the man who dresses differently than we do, or the woman who prays in another language, as our neighbors, even if they live next door. We all live in little enclaves of exclusivity and homogeneity. That’s normal for us, ordinary even.

Thank goodness God’s thoughts are higher than ours.

God steps into ordinary time and changes the order of things. God uses ordinary people to deliver extraordinary results. Mary was just a regular girl who prayed, “Let it be to me as you have said.” Peter was a hard-headed, knife-wielding fisherman who cussed on occasion, and he was chosen to lead God’s church. The God who created the universe from nothing is not intimidated by the ordinary. In fact, it’s just what God needs to do the next great work.

May our return to Ordinary time reveal extraordinary light in each of us. Let everyday people like me, make a difference in our world. May the fire on our altars never burn out.