YR C Pentecost 2

Today the Second Sunday after Pentecost is our first Sunday in what is commonly called, in church parlance, ordinary time. Ordinary time is that time in the church year when we aren’t accounting down to Christmas or Holy Week and we aren’t counting away from Easter Day. Ordinary time is the regular steady week in and week out passage of time, which takes us through the summer and fall. It ‘s Ordinary. But its not mundane, it’s not boring, it just isn’t extraordinary. We all have extraordinary moments in our lives. The birth of a child, meeting the love of our life, seeing an incredible performance in the theater or at the symphony. For some of us it’s a spectacular vacation, an incredible bike ride or run---regardless of the specifics, our extraordinary times are, when we look over the whole of our lives fleeting, brief moments in time. Our life, the bulk of it, happens in ordinary time. Regular day in and day out life. But,as I said, ordinary isn’t mundane, it isn’t drudgery…for it is within the ordinary days of our lives when our faith, our relationship with the Holy and Undivided Trinity and our living out our faith in community can really take hold. It’s when we take the wonders of Christmas, the joy of Easter and the thrill of Pentecost and let it settle into our lives. It’s when the rubber of our faith meets the road of our life. And, if we’re serious about it, if we are attentive to living out our faith in all we do, extra-ordinary things will happen---amazing events will happen upon us as we pass through the ordinary times of our lives. Today, as we settle into Ordinary Time, we hear stories of ordinary people living through pain and loss, which, through the grace of God, turns into extraordinary grace. The dead are returned to life, the outcasts are given hope and the impossible becomes possible. Within the ordinary, we get the extraordinary. Today we begin a several week dip into the First Book of Kings, with special focus on the actions of Elijah and his response to King Ahab’s pagan practices. A horrendous drought has come over the land as Elijah encounters a widow and her son. Now it’s important for both the Hebrew scripture reading today and our Gospel, to know the significance of widows in ancient culture. A widow was the poster child for outcast. A widow, especially if she didn’t have a son to care for her, was generally left to beg on the street, competing with dogs for scraps. The most famous widow in Scripture is probably Naomi, whose daughter in law Ruth risks her own security and future to stand by her deceased husband’s mother. Widows don’t have an easy go of it. The widow in our reading from Kings is struggling with a famine and she is at the end of her rope, realizing that she and her son are going to die, when Elijah asks her to use her last little bit of meal and make him a cake. This ordinary woman listens to this crazy man and, inexplicably, gives him the last of her food. This act of extreme faith leads to a seeming unending jar of meal feeding her household for days on end. A happy ending until her son, who had survived this multi year drought and famine is taken ill and seems to die. A turn of events straight out of a TV melodrama, this shakes both the widow and Elijah to their core. In his own mourning and sorrow, Elijah prays and cries out to God and the young man is returned to life. In the ordinary life of a widow in ancient times, comes an extraordinary man who did extraordinary things in the name of God. This regular woman in the midst of a very painful yet very familiar event in the world of poor people—then and now-was attentive enough to say yes to crazy Elijah the Tishbite and by doing so, the grace of God broke through the ordinary and wrought something extraordinary. Ordinary time gives us an extraordinary opportunity to knit our faith into the fabric of our daily lives. These past six weeks at Good Shepherd have been full of activity and excitement and hubbub. After the glorious reception you all gave me on my first Sunday, the completion of the floor refinishing in Jewett Hall, the amazing renovations in the rectory, my moving into the rectory just last week and finally yesterdays’ beautiful and moving Celebration of New Ministry have provided a fair share of extraordinary days. Now it’s time to use all that energy to catapult us into sharing the Good News with one another and the world around us. Today we begin the settling in of our life together. We’ll get to know each other and our faith stories; we’ll break bread together at this altar and around fellowship tables in Jewett Hall and in our homes. We’ll attend the theater together, we’ll serve at Friends of the Night People, we’ll work in the food pantry, we’ll welcome the members of our community who come through our doors, using our space to meet, to heal and to dance. Today, we begin the ordinariness of our lives together. The ordinariness which, if we are attentive, will bring us extraordinary moments of grace, tucked in the midst of our daily lives. Our faith may get a shiny new coat of paint each Christmas and Easter but it’s during these regular days of the year that our faith gets its workout. So let’s get busy, let’s be attentive and let’s invite the grace and truth of God as shown to us through the varied and mysterious workings of the Holy Trinity to surprise and delight us throughout these, our ordinary, yet so very precious days. Amen.