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Evensong Sermon by the Venerable Howard Leigh - Precentor
Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time - 20 June 2010
Readings: Genesis 24:1-27; Mark 5:21-23

There is something in our psyche that makes us want to cling to special times and encounter new and exciting experiences….we live in an age when it is so easy to be bored by the routine! If we are constantly yearning for the extravagant and scintillating we are likely to miss the amazing little things that come our way everyday.

Frequently the readings from the Hebrew Scriptures at Evensong outside the major festivals seem pedestrian and fairly ordinary. Yet there is a purpose in this for rather than celebrating a particular event we are able to catch a glimpse of how God is at work in the routine and is able to surprise us at every turn if only we take time to be aware. There is something of this in the first reading tonight as Abraham and his servant are willing to encounter God as the day unfolds. Also on these ‘Green’ Sundays, we are encouraged to engage with the daily life of Jesus the Christ and through the Gospels identify with him in the day to day ministry and living that is his. It may not be particularly spectacular like his birth, baptism, dying and rising – or challenging like Pentecost and Trinity Sunday, but we learn to live with Jesus as he makes a difference to ordinary people in their ordinary lives.

At various times in the history of the Church we have labelled the times between the Church seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter as Sundays after a festival – Sundays after Epiphany, Trinity or Pentecost. Recently rather than keeping a previous festival in mind - we are encouraged to celebrate Ordinary Time, and the Sundays, which are always special, are in Ordinary Time.

Like most of us I am the first to be captured by the extraordinary…it makes life interesting to coast from one enjoyable event to another, to purchase yet another new gadget and to have fun learning how to use it until I discover someone else has something much more captivating so I discard the old and get the new – the iphone and the ipad!

Over the past few decades those of us with our roots in the British Isles have been encouraged to re-discover Celtic spirituality. This earthy spirituality grew out of the lives of ordinary people as they went about their ordinary lives and encountered God. They learnt to celebrate the presence of the divine in the joys and tragedies of everyday living. Rather than always yearning for the special, Celtic spirituality inspires us to deepen our awareness in each and every moment – the sacrament of the present moment. The church encourages us in the Ordinary Time between festivals and seasons to pause and stay with the present and to plumb the depths of who we are and where we are, and with whom we are walking.

The Spiritual writer Esther de Waal has this to say:

"Celtic spirituality was a practice in which ordinary people in their daily lives took the tasks that lay to hand but treated them pointing to a greater reality which lay beyond them.

…As we watch these people and listen to them, it is tempting to put the blame for our own lack of everyday piety on a society in which time has been conquered and technology determines the way we run our lives. But the loss ultimately lies within ourselves. Ironically, when travel and the media have blown all horizons wide open, our own inner horizons seem to have become narrower and our vision contracted. How can we find again the seeing eye and the feeling touch?
Essentially this is a spirituality which asks of us a return to greater awareness…What the Celtic understanding brings us is the chance to break down the barrier between the active and the contemplative life and instead to make the busy, boring, relentless daily life tasks the basis for continuous praying and for finding the presence of God…
Perhaps the first step is that we really should want to unearth God in our midst…Yet, if we can rediscover this vision, then we too may be able to transform what lies to hand, let the mundane become the edge of glory, and find the extraordinary in the ordinary."
The Benedictine Joan Chittester has written extensively advocating the importance for our health and well-being in embracing Ordinary Time. For her the routine parts of life, the dull parts of the day are the gifts of space. They're when thoughts of God take hold within us.
She reflects on her life as a religious novice when Ordinary time was the longest period of all. ‘It was the time when life went its long, dull way, predictable to the ultimate. Monday, the novices did the laundry; Tuesday, we did chapel, altar breads, and house-cleaning; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday we did it all again. More of the same. Same old, same old. Week after week, month after month, year after year. Every once in a while, of course, life was punctuated by a feast day with its special meals and polyphonic liturgies but, in the end, the normal, the daily predominated. As it does for all of us yet. The commute, the paperwork, the housework, the school run, eat up day after day with mind-numbing regularity. And yet, it is in "ordinary" time that the really important things happen: our children grow up, our marriages and relationships grow older, our sense of life changes, our vision expands, our soul ripens’.

Tonight on this Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time – the green growing time of the Christian year - I would like to finish with a few short extracts from Joan Chittester’s writings.

• What we learn while we're doing what seems to be basically routine that really counts: how to endure, how to produce, how to make life rich at its most mundane moments. "There are more truths in twenty-four hours," Raoul Vaneigem wrote, "than in all the philosophies."
• The nice thing about repetition is that it gives us an opportunity to take a second look at everything around us before we miss what it is meant to teach us.
• To be considered "ordinary" has become an insult of sorts. But it is only the ordinary that has the ring of hard-won truth to it. Anything else is likely to be scam and whipped cream.
• "Everything passes, everything perishes, everything palls," the French say. There is nothing, in other words, in which the pulse of the ordinary does not beat. Hoping to live life on the edge all the time is not just adolescent, it is futile.
• We want life to be exciting, when as a matter of fact, life is only life. We want the spiritual to be mystical rather than real.
• Annie Dillard wrote, "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." The tragedy is that we ignore so much of it in the interest of getting to the real stuff. Never confuse the ordinary with the simple, the static, or the boring. Living an ordinary life well can be a very complicated thing to do. It takes great talent to make a great life out of a routine one.
• We repeat our daily schedule. In the first place, it frees the mind for greater thoughts. In the second place, it sensitizes the soul to the sacred poetry of the present moment. When the day is really routine we get to think awhile about what we're doing and why we're doing it and how we're doing it. It is the well from which we draw our reasons to go on.
• The routine parts of life, the dull parts of the day are the gifts of space. Then, while the world goes on around us, the thoughts of God take hold within us.
• The function of routine is to give us time to recoup our energies for the next unpredictable challenge. Enjoy every minute of Ordinary time you have. Store it in your heart as energy and endurance. You will someday need the peace and calm and certainty you have garnered there.