day no. 17,200: mark your calendars

Genesis 8:22

While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

This Sunday, November 30th will mark the first Sunday of Advent according to our liturgical calendar. It is also the time of year where all the calendar-mongers make most of their money. You can’t go anywhere without tripping over a calendar. It seems every bank, school, credit union, and local business has one of theirs they want you to have and every store has a special section set aside or an end cap stocked with calendars they want you to buy. It makes sense. Next year is right around the corner and it is much harder to sell a calendar in June. So, calendars this time of year are nothing if not ubiquitous. 

But that is actually true year round. We may see more of them this time of year, but they are always there in the background. Calendars are inescapable. It is not a question of whether you will keep a calendar, but which calendar you will keep, and more importantly who’s calendar it is.  Everyone’s year is dictated by some kind of calendar, but all calendars are NOT created equal. There are school calendars that run from August to May and often include two semesters. There are sports calendars, which depending on the sport, have pre-season, regular season, playoffs, and post-season rhythms. There are fiscal calendars that typically end in July and include four quarters. Whatever you are into, there is a rhythm to how it works and even for those who are content to march along with the traditional civic calendars, there are all kinds of options for what theme you’d like your calendar to come in. So, you may be content to march to the beat of the same drum as everyone else, but you at least want to do it with pictures of kittens as you do it. 

But we are Christians and we should not march to the beat of the world’s drums. We must march in the footsteps of Christ and to the tune of Here Comes the Bride. History is merely the time it takes the church to walk down the aisle. 

Our calendars will honor something and someone. So let us make every effort to tell our time to honor Christ. That is what we have in mind by setting aside this time of year as Advent. We are approaching the beginning of another liturgical year. It begins with the birth of Christ, the Word made flesh and continues until the birth of the church on Pentecost. In between we mark Epiphany, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, Easter, and Ascension. Trinity Sunday follows Pentecost as the crown on the head of the liturgical year. Ordinary time are the months that follow until Advent again prepares us for another tour of duty in the trenches of doctrine and delight. The good fight is an annual engagement and we must make our time submit to the Son of God.