Ordinary Time: Spiritual Growth in the Everyday Rhythms of Life (Amy Peeler)

00:00:01
Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm doctor James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm doctor James Spencer and I'm joined today by doctor Amy Peeler. She is the Kenneth T. Wesner Chair of Biblical Studies at Wheaton College and she's written a book called Ordinary Time that we're going to be discussing and so Amy, welcome to the program. Thanks for being here.

00:00:47
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me. I'm really looking forward to our conversation.

00:00:51
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely, So talk a little bit about how you got involved in this particular project and maybe give people a little bit of your background. I mean, the the Westerner chair of you know, Biblical studies gives people probably some idea, but what are your interests, how did you come to this title?

00:01:09
Speaker 2: Absolutely sure, So maybe ye, I'll start with myself and then move to the book. So I was. I started college interested in psychology, but then pretty and about the middle of college, I discovered biblical studies. I had grown up in the faith, and then I realized you can study the Bible like a school project. It was kind of amazing. I loved school, I loved God. You can put these things together. So I had excellent mentors at my college. I went to Oklahama Baptist University, and they really ignited the fire for me to be a professor. And so about the age of twenty, I thought, that's what I want to do. So I pursued that path, and in God's goodness, that's what I get to do. I am here at Wheaton. I've been here this my fourteenth school year. I teach all the way from undergraduates sometimes I have freshmen all the way to doctoral students, so I have a wide range and they're amazing people who come here to Wheaton. I love teaching God's word and so that's the focus of what I do for the majority of the time. I also serve at my church and I love being grounded in a local Christian community. So I'm kind of Bible all the time, which is amazing and so fun. Off Really many days I'm like, this is my job. I get paid for this. This is often so lots to be thankful for. So this project, then, honestly is a little different. I've never done anything like this. So my colleague here at Wheaton, a dear friend, is Isa McCully. He's the editor of this series. It's the Fullness of Time series, and there is a little book on each section of the church year, and so maybe some of our listeners would be familiar with that, maybe some not. I grew up Southern Baptist. I was very well rooted in scripture, but we didn't think very much about the different seasons of the year. That's not really part of that tradition. I'm now part of the Anglican Communion in the Episcopal Church, and so that is absolutely we strutured everything according to Church here. So just briefly, then Esau had envisioned this series where scholars and pastors and priests, everybody is within the Anglican Communion writes both history and exit Jesus and reflection and devotion about the seasons of the church here, and my understanding is they had everything set Easter and Lent and Pentecost and Epiphany, and then there's this big part of the year that is ordinary, and initially they didn't imagine they'd have a volume on that because that's like the normal. But then later in the imagination of the series, ESA thought, you know, we need something on that time of the church here, and very graciously he approached me, and I was really excited to take it on. So yeah, it was really his invitation and then my decision to say, I can think about this huge time of the church here and write a beautiful little book about it. And by beautiful, I mean like they have done an amazing job of the formatting of these books. They're small and they have beautiful color. So I've never had the opportunity to write something so little and so pretty. Most of my books, you know, I think the content is good, but they're not much to look at. So it was really fun.

00:04:19
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, for those who don't who aren't familiar with sort of the church count I grew up Lutheran, so we had the church calendars, so I understand the cadence of it. The idea of ordinary time is just basically, maybe I'm getting this wrong, so you can correct me, but it's basically the time of year where there is no official church holiday kind of thing going on, right, It's just we have a blank space here. That's the ordinary time.

00:04:45
Speaker 2: No, that's precisely right. And if we learn from early Christians, of course they are celebrating Jesus's resurrection and they want time to prepare for that, and they celebrate his birth and they want time to prepare for that. So really you have Easter season and Lent, Christmas and Advent and then Epiphany and Pentecost, and then ordinary time is the stuff that's left over. It's neither feast nor fast, it's our normal life. So you've got it exactly right.

00:05:14
Speaker 1: How much time actually is that? Do you have a good sense of that?

00:05:17
Speaker 2: So there are two different sections of ordinary time. We actually just entered one, and so after you have Advent in the twelve days of Christmas, then you have a brief season of Epiphany where we remember the wise men coming to visit Jesus and the light going out to the world, and then we enter into ordinary time. So we're in it right now, and depending on where Easter falls. It's really just a handful of weeks. So at the end of Epiphany until ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, we're an ordinary time. That's a small section. The much larger section, which can be up to twenty nine weeks, occurs right after Pentecost all the way to Christ the King, the beginning of Advent, so that stretches over the summer months and into the fall. It's the widest longest period of the church.

00:06:04
Speaker 1: Here and talk a little bit about how ordinary time normally fits or is treated. So is there a is there any sense where this space is viewed as the bridge between the you know, the season that came before it and the season came after it, or is it sort of really okay, we're done with this season now, we're going to move to this season, but we're not going to use this ordinary time to sort of build that bridge.

00:06:31
Speaker 2: Oh, what a fascinating question. In the research that I've done, I haven't seen bridge language and I wonder simply because it's so long, that'd be a really long year long bridge. Yeah, exactly. And so the ways that it's been spoken about in church history and different traditions is that we do kind of have a bookend with Pentecost, and then it's a long time before we have the new year of the Christian calendar, which is Advent. So this period of time is thought about as normal life, as a time for growth, as a time for reflecting on the life of Jesus, as reflecting on God's work with the people of Israel. So I've never really heard bridge language. I just think that's simply link would prevent that. But it is the time of like when we are living out our growth as Pentecost people, as Easter people, as resurrection people, but we do so for a long time, patterning ourselves off of the life of Jesus and of the saints.

00:07:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's associated with color usually, right, Yeah, So maybe talk a little bit about the color and how that ties in symbolically with what ordinary time is.

00:07:43
Speaker 2: Excellent, excellent. Yeah. I love the liturgical tradition, and I recognize I'm a convert, so I'm very zealous about it, but I love that it has a visual aspect. So, and when you go into the different seasons, one thing you might recognizes the color changes. Advent is often blue, and Lent is often purple, and so you have a change for ordinary time. It's green, and that is very mundane. As early Christians and kind of throughout time they're thinking, well, what colors do we use well? In that period of time, especially in the northern hemisphere, you have lots of plants, lots of grass. You can make a lot of green dye for the banners and the vestments and the stoles and things that are decorating the church. And I think it works symbolically as that period of time we're seeing, you know, the harvest rising, you know, the plants green that leaves a green outside we are. That makes us think as humans about growing things and how our own spiritual life can grow in this time.

00:08:53
Speaker 1: And so the green is both I like the word you use mundane in the sense that we've entered into something that's not particularly special in a way that we're applying some sort of big symbolic logic to it, like an advent or a lent, and so it becomes a little bit more earthy and just every day.

00:09:12
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:09:12
Speaker 1: But then the green also denotes this idea that even though you're in a mundane space, you shouldn't be exactly you should be actively moving forward that's.

00:09:22
Speaker 2: So well said. This is not a season of the year that's like a timeout, right, Like we do these big things, and you know, sometimes churches even can get into the mindset of kind of thinking that way. I've heard conversations of like, oh, we don't have much programming in the summer. We kind of take it off, and you know, I recognize that people travel and it's a little bit maybe of more relaxed, but I think that's a wrong thing. We shouldn't just say, you know, we only do things with God when they're big, like when we're fasting or when we're feasting. Oh, that's the beauty of the incarnation that God is with us in the every day, and I think ordinary time really helps us remember that truth because most of our lives are pretty normal, Like we don't have a party every day, We're not crying every day. A lot of days are I do what I do. I interact with the people I love, and that's my life. So we've got to think about how God is active in that and respond to God actively.

00:10:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, you kind of went from you went from a more open tradition without these seasons and then over into a you know, Anglican Church, where these are really very much a part of the warp and woof of life. I did the opposite thing. Oh, and so I've kind of seen both, like, yeah, but one thing I noticed, and as I was reading Ordinary Time, I'm kind of thinking through it's this space you're talking about, that apathy that can develop. We're going to take the summer off. That kind of idea. It almost feels like that carries into some of the I would call them, you know, non liturgical calendar traditions. That's really a mouthful, right, but because you don't have any sort of punctuated moments other than maybe Christmas in Easter, Yeah, that's a whole lot of time. I mean, the same problem you run into with the twenty nine years growth. Now you have that for almost fifty weeks, you know, or something like that. Within the overall church calendar. Did you notice anything as you moved? I mean, I'm sure you have an appreciation for the calendars in the different seasons, but did you notice as you reflect back on your time sort of in the Baptist tradition, do you notice any of that?

00:11:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a wonderful question, you know, in my transition from that more free church to a liturgical church. I spent time with Presbyterians and Wesleyans. I'm really quite a mutt and have learned, you know, have just been blessed by so many traditions. And what I something I was exposed to in those periods of time was the were the writings of Augustine, and the writings kind of translated through James Smith from Calvin who talks about like, if our lives aren't attenuated and focused on God, we're going to run by kind of our culture's calendar. And our culture's calendar is very repetitive. It's almost if we look at it from a materialistic standpoint, it's very consumerist. What does the market want us to buy next? And we can kind of be captured by that. One thing I appreciated is that in the liturgical calendar there is a recognition that time is God's right. Time is not just what I have to make of it, or it's not what the market tells me I need to be purchasing. There's this rhythm that is both repetitive, right. It is a cycle, and yet we practice that cycle because we know we're headed somewhere. We are practicing for the coming Kingdom, and I found that very helpful. If I can give you just a short example, Christmas, I was the kind of kid maybe all kids are like this. I loved it the best thing ever, Like I would start listening to Christmas music September. First I was getting ready, and then man, that day after Christmas, I was just crushed. It was all over. Something I appreciated with the liturgical tradition is that Advent helps you get ready, but you're not quite there yet, and then you have these twelve days of Christmas, not just all focused in one place. I guess writ large, I would say the liturgical calendar has helped me to be more patient, actually, because I don't have to kind of capture all of the goodness right now. It's spread out over time. And I know now that I've been in this tradition probably for about ten fifteen years, I also know that, hey, I can enjoy this season, but it's okay if I don't get to do everything I want in the season, because it will come again. It will come again, and I'm able to rest more in the rhythms that early Christians have recognized.

00:13:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. I mean, it just strikes me. You know, the Lutheran Church had that cadence and it was helpful, and I can remember the changing of the colors and different things like that, and so I can still walk into my old Lutheran church and kind of understand where we're at. But I also think that you know, when we're we sort of have this no time right there isn't a cadence is just onto the next sermon series or onto the next you know, event that we're going to have as a church, and it can be a little bit. I think that's part of the challenge of we find with getting too programmatic, is that we almost need these events to punctuate something within our cadence. Yes, you know, because we're trying to get we're trying to move people somewhere, and so what do you do, Well, you have an event. Let's have an event. And it's like, well, if we had a calendar, we wouldn't need an event necessarily, like we'd have this stuff. So yeah, I was just sort of fascinated. I wanted to kind of hear your thought on that aspect of it, because you wrote on the time in between this time that is fairly unstructured and a lot of your insights, I felt like really conveyed that sense of when there is no structure, when there isn't a calendar, we are tempted to do different things. It's not like it has to be that, but we're certainly not guided and directed in the same way we are at lent or advent or what have you.

00:15:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's so well. Humans Humans like a rhythm, and we'll create it if we don't have it. But I would to say as well, I'm thinking my younger brother, I am really close. He's remained in the free Church tradition and doesn't like the structure of the liturgic culturch. It's not for everyone, that's fine, and we have wondered, my husband and I, if our children that we've raised them here, they might make the same transition you do, that they need something fresh. So I don't like to claim that how we do it is the only or the best way, but I have found it meaningful, and I do think that is something very natural about wanting a structure given to us.

00:16:04
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I don't think it has to go all the way back. I can do agree. I wouldn't advocate necessarily. Hey, everybody should go back to this, but I do think that the problem of cadence is a real one.

00:16:15
Speaker 2: Yes, that's well said.

00:16:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's talk a little bit about you know, you in the inordinary time. It's such an interesting approach within the liturgical challendar because it's a blank space. So what did you find as far as historically and you know, from sort of the traditions of the church that help guide people through ordinary time? Are there those resources or are we thinking more just sort of generically, Hey, spiritual growth?

00:16:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, what a great, what a great question. There was some structure, and they came primarily through the readings. Christian worship has the beauty of lots of different things, these colors and song and smells and prayers, but we're rooted in listening to what God says to us. And that's true across all traditions, and so early on there was a movement that we're thinking about this growth in particular way. So we think about the grace of God, we think about our response, we think about what God empowers us to do, not just for our own lives, but as we face outward. I learned from some those who study the early Church, and they said there was kind of a pretty tight fourfold rhythm of how we move through growth. In more recent developments, those have become a little bit they're not as clear cut, I guess, I would say, but those remembrances are still present in the readings gratitude, right, that's coming right after Pentecost. God was kind enough to reach down and change us. And so you have a period of reflection and then you move into I need to continue to think about I fall short, and I need to think about the community outside of the church. So those are still preserved, but not quite as clean. The other thing that this season offers us, and I ended up choosing several chapters to reflect on this in the book, is that I believe it gives us a chance to reflect on the kind of things that we do all the time. So we have Trinity Sunday. Right. In some sense, you would say, well, we don't need a Sunday because we talk about the Trinity all of the time, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And yet isn't it the case that the things that we do all of the time, we actually need to focus on them because they become so rogue they're just part of what we do. We reflect on the Lord's Supper, and I recognize, you know, different trictionans to have different ways and different rhythms of doing that, but that's a regular part of Christian worship. And so we have a day within ordinary time to say, let's stop and think about what it means to have this meal. So I love that that we both have this kind of dynamism of growth that leads us to that last Sunday where we proclaim Christ as King. But we also have opportunity to reflect on the normal practices that we do all of the time.

00:19:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you really do a nice job I think of highlighting the challenge of ordinary practice, like where do we find God in doing the dishes? I don't think that's one of your examples.

00:19:20
Speaker 2: But well I drew that from my friend Tis Harrison Warren and her Liturgary of the Ordinary. I think there's been an explosion more recently in asking this kind of question, like where's that not just on the mountaintop, but in the normal stuff I do. She's awesome about that.

00:19:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, it's sort of a difficult question to go with. But I think what I appreciated about what your book brought out, at least for me, when I was reading it was that idea of the necessity of reflecting on these things, Like there's a way for us to just sort of go through life and be like, well, that day went somewhere. I don't know where it's gone. Now we've gotten so fat paced and so much information coming at is that a lot of times we're driven to task as opposed to being able to step away for reflection. And even when we're not tasking, we tend to be sort of tempted to just top on Netflix and stream a whole show at one time. And you know, like we've lost this sort of aged and that sort of breakup of commercials even gave us at least a little bit of time to take a break from a story, right, we just don't have that baked in anymore. And so as I was reading through your book, that just came to my mind because I think it maybe you'd agree with this, but in order to find those things in ordinary life and understand their significance, you have to also have time to think about them. It can't just be I'm going to keep doing them.

00:20:48
Speaker 2: Wow, that's incredibly well said. It almost feels like, and I know people are doing this work that we need to think more about humans and rhythms in light of our technological world. Right, Jamie Smith wrote his book, he talked a lot about the culture of the mall. Well, who goes to a mall much anymore? Not right? It is a constant stream of consumerism of entertainment. And I don't mean to be like super negative. I always feel like I'm an old person, like, oh, that technology is there, but we do, as Christians, need to be very thoughtful about it, and if we're always caught up in it, then we can't stop and think. And so worshiping with fellow Christians according to a rhythm where we're all thinking in the same ways reminds us that we're connected to other people and gives us a little time out to consider who we are and what we do. You've said that, really, well, that's important to do.

00:21:42
Speaker 1: That gets back to something I wanted to ask. So we have this ordinary time, which within the Protestant tradition, right, ordinary time where we have more open space and we can kind of do what we want. Yeah, isn't necessarily a good thing, and you can certainly see how it can go off the rails. But then also you have this sort of these lit of liturgical times that I'm wondering if you can just comment on as you're going through these, you know, the church calendar, going through Advent, you're going through Lent. Some of my experience recently has been that people just don't think about it. You go through motions and so you have problems on both sides. It's like you become so familiar, yes, yes, that you lose the significance of it and it almost feels like it collapses into that ordinary time that you're talking about. You know that this idea that if we're not really reflecting and deeply understanding it will lose it. So can you just kind of talk a little bit about any insights you had maybe on ordinary time and relation to the calendar, and how the formative effects of both of those maybe are maybe need to be bolstered a bit.

00:22:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a beautiful question. So, having just kind of come out of Advent and Christmas, that's fresh on my mind right. So Advent, I think is a really fascinating and I see more and more Christian communities wanting to do some kind of practice of Advent. But if you are liturgical, if you've grown up there. You know, the colors change, you know the readings, it doesn't. And so I think there is a responsibility for Christians, a responsibility, especially for those who are shaping worship, say okay, yes, this is a season of preparation, but let's give a focus. So, for instance, we ended up focusing on all the Isaiah passages this advent and the theme of returning to God and then lo and behold discovering that God has already come to us. And that gave like there was a boundary of hey, we're in a season of preparation, but we also needed a focus. And this is where liturgical traditions I think can learn from free church traditions because everything is open. You all have to be really creative in telling your people here's our focus, here's what we're doing. Our messaging is consistent, and there's a danger on kind of my now my chosen tradition be like, well, we've got the church calendar, we've got the lectionary. We don't need to be we don't to think that much. We still need to within those boundaries guide ourselves and our people to say, what are we doing in this season? And we need kind of a fresh focus to awaken us. And it also says katechisis right any of our traditions. If people are only coming to worship, that's better than not. But there's not an opportunity then in a community to reflect on what we're doing. So we need those small groups in Sunday School there. I sound like a Baptist, right, like we need to just keep getting together. But I think that's the rhythm for all of us. So I don't know if that helps. But but then maybe what that does for ordinary time is that it does say, Okay, this is a time of growth. We're a time of listening to the life of Jesus. But that's why I started the book, and I started my research recognizing that, you know, this is described as a season with no feasts or but that's not quite right. There are these little glimmers of celebrations that happen throughout and I think that says something about God recognizing us as humans. It would be really hard to go through twenty nine weeks of drudgery, right, Humans kind of need a party, and so we do have these moments where we're celebrating the trying nature of God, the body of Christ. Different saints, different brothers and sisters in the faith that we think about so and of course every Sunday is meant to be a celebration. Every Sunday we are feasting with our Lord, and so we need we need those things sprinkled through as well. In ordinary time is not just this kind of wilderness.

00:25:44
Speaker 1: Yeah. No, I think it's really helpful to hear you talk through that, because what I hear you saying is there can be progress within the liturgical tradition. Yes, right, because you're consistently focusing in on something very particular. You're helping people grasp what you're doing a greater depth or from a different angle. You know, it's not like, you know, if we think about it to college, it's not like you're taking you know, Bible one oh one sixteen times over right, right, You're seeing a progression within that. And even though the calendar comes up in the same at the same time, which gives it to some structure, there can be some interesting wrinkles within that to sort of guide and deepen people's understanding and then also understanding that the ordinary time isn't just empty, that there's a there is an ongoing influence within that calendar, even just from the Bible readings themselves that are intended to prompt our reflection and give us, you know, this time to really reflect and think and be formed differently. Right.

00:26:50
Speaker 2: And you know, even as you say that my personality type is I like doing things all of the time. Yeah, and so it's really been good for me to and I kind of talk about this in the beginning of the book. It was funny when I was asked to do this because I always felt like ordinary time was just boring.

00:27:07
Speaker 1: Yes, long, I love that.

00:27:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's not that much going on. But it's actually been really good for me both to realize it's not boring and that was a discovery that I've really been changed. I'm like so excited we're going to wear green this week, Like I just cannot wait that we get a few weeks of green, but also that to realize that there are it's actually good for a person like me to have seasons where there's not ninety important exciting things going on. If that summer season, that ordinary season feels a little slow, sometimes I need to listen to that as well. So, yes, is there growth happening. It's not passive, but it might not be as fireworks as the other times. And that's actually good. Right at the beginning of the book, I reflect like, if we had something crazy, amazing or crazy terrible happened every single day, there would be no time to think about it. And so that's the other thing that ordinary time offers us is to both reflect back on the first part of the calendar year. Where did God show up to us in Christmas? What did we change or want to change about ourselves in Lent? And then how are we going to get ready for this next year. If we didn't have that quote off time, we wouldn't be able to contemplate the amazing things that God had done and we'll do in the future.

00:28:25
Speaker 1: The other thing I've so yeah, I mean I thought it was amazing. I would have felt the same way. It's like we're not doing anything. This seems like this seems like my worst nightmare, like we should be doing something right. And so what strikes me and just what you said is maybe two things. Number One, maybe we do need to just change the way we talk about that ordinary time, even within the Free Church tradition, like taking the summer off probably isn't the best way to message that yeah, right, everybody, you know, Jesus goes on vacation exactly, Like, that's not really what we want to convey. But then number two, one of the things I was and I wanted to ask you about this is in that ordinary time because the church is taking a bit of a step back, you know, as a as an institution. Let's say, the institution of the church is taking a step back, and they're not going to manage now what happens in ordinary time as strongly as they might av Lent, Pentecost all these other ones. Is there a sense in which you see in the literature a difference between the formation that happens within a congregation underneath an authority and the agency of individual Christians taking on the responsibility for their own spiritual growth in ordinary time. I mean that may be importing very today's cultural norms back on, right, but I just wondered if you found anything within the tradition to sort of even suggest that.

00:29:59
Speaker 2: If I'm sure, and this sounds like a really important question, I want to make sure I'm capturing it. That ordinary time because the church institution is not as kind of hands on, offers a little more opportunity for individuals to explore their growth. Is that what you're wondering.

00:30:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's that sense of Okay, if I'm outside of the I don't want to say program, but I'm outside the church is no longer sort of driving this for me, it's taking its hands off the wheel a bit and saying, here, you drive for a bit. I was wondering if you saw any of that within the tradition or whether that's something I'm just reading in, you know, from a that is fascinating.

00:30:37
Speaker 2: I've never thought to ask the question in that way, so I'd have to go back to some research. But here's what strikes me is that in the intense seasons, maybe particularly lent, as we prepare for the major thing, there is a lot of admonition for people to be either taking up new things or letting go of things in their individual lives. So there's a lot of you need to be driving the wheel at this time, but almost really every day or you know, multiple times a week, you can come and gather communally. And this is overseen by the church. So if there is a chains that just shift an emphasis that, I think maybe the difference and this could be modern you know, I recognize that Christians of the past and monasteries or you know, celibate preas it would be different. But another thing that I think in a modern context, ordinary time offers is a little bit of a breather for church leadership. And maybe then there is a demonstration there that hey, just like Jesus did throughout his ministry, we need time to retreat and kind of fill our own souls. Right, that's become the time where clergy can say, hey, I'm taking off this week. You take off this week, because nobody can take off during lint or Easter or Christmas or atod. And so in kind of an exemplar kind of way, it says to the laity, oh, hey, you know, Jesus took time. Our leaders are humans. They need to take time to fill their souls. It's good for me to imagine too, in this extended period of time, not how am I doing the kind of intense practices of lent, but how do I kind of rest into the growth that's happening. And this is where I think the nature motif is really helpful. And of course that's throughout scripture. Jesus is parable sure, right, yes, it's active, and we want to be responsive to God. But growth is first and foremost and primarily what God, through the power of the Spirit, is doing in us. Now, my kind of so teiology, my sense of how humans interact with God, is that we can resist that. But if we take ordinary time to kind of relax into what God is doing, God wants to grow us, and so it becomes not passive but more a time that you could think receptively about what does it look like rest in God.

00:32:54
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's really helpful. Yeah, I like that, thinking receptively about what God is doing, stepping back and watching him work.

00:33:02
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, and these parables right like oh the harvest sprung up and I didn't even do anything and it happened overnight. I mean that could be dangerous of like, oh, you never have to do anything in your Christian life. No, that's not what, of course anyone would say. But I don't know. Maybe my background or my personality. I'm tend to be like I can if I work really hard, if I really try, then God will show up. And sometimes the call is cease striving right, rest for a little bit, know that I'm in control. And of course we have that with the regular rhythm of sabbath, right, Like that's why we take the day off, to know we accomplish everything. What if we thought of ordinary time almost as this extended sabbath of the church, here where we rest in what God is doing.

00:33:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a really interesting concept. I mean, I think we're so unattuned to the need for rest. Yeah, in a lot of ways in today's world. I mean you're even seeing it in scientific research on sleep and the need for good sleep, Like there's a reason that stuffs coming out, and it's because people don't sleep well. And so you know, there's these new sort of emphasies placed on the body needs rest. There needs to be a rhythm here, you know. And this is actually really important. I do a lot in the fitness industry, and so it's really important for your fitness and those kind of things. And so I think it sort of rings true to me that we would have this moment in the midst of the church calendar where we don't necessarily stop working for twenty nine weeks, but we're not putting ourselves through all the paces. Like there's something to the idea that we've done the heavy lifting and now this is a time for us to sort of take a step back and reflect and rest and let the work we've already done, the pieces that we've been participating with God in catch up a little bit and let our bodies catch up to that work.

00:34:56
Speaker 2: Wow, somehow I love that. That's Yeah, such a wonderful conversation. I think those ideas were kind of nascent, but you've articulated them really clearly. Well.

00:35:06
Speaker 1: I think the I feel like the book it kind of brings them out. I hadn't ever thought about ordinary time until the book, and so I was looking. I picked it up, and I was kind of expecting the Liturgy of the Ordinary. That's what I was expecting, right, And then I was like, Oh, that's not what this is at all. And so it sort of opened up a whole set of different thoughts because I never really thought about the whole in the church calendar. I need to call it that. But you get what I'm.

00:35:36
Speaker 2: Saying exactly exactly.

00:35:40
Speaker 1: Let me ask you one other because I feel like it's almost obligatory for me to do this as an Old Testament guy. But your Image of God chapter talk about how the image of God plays into ordinary time a little bit. I was fascinated by your take in there.

00:35:54
Speaker 2: So that decision, just to back up for one second, is that as a Bible scholar, right, not no one would be surprised that I'm like. The first kind of question I ask is, well, how can I focus on the texts? Right? That's where I feel comfortable, I know what to do. But then, shockingly, and it came about because I was at a Christian camp several summers ago and was asked to speak to the camp and I was like, well, what are the lectionary passage? Right? Lectionary? For those us? In the liturgical tradition, we're kind of given a handful of scriptures each week as guidance of what we could select. And I noticed that in this ordinary time there was a focus on Abraham and Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael and their families. And ended up preaching through those texts and just felt like I discovered and learned largely from my Old Testament colleagues reading from them, but just in God's word, this is amazing. And then it struck me, this is an ordinary family, even though God does something crazy with them, they have struggles, They're ordinary, So what would it look like to exegy to talk about their story? In this book. And so that Image of God chapter is the story in Genesis eighteen where these angelic visitors come to see Abraham and says, I mean it's a thorny, difficult passage, like is the manifestation of God or the triune God? And so I in that chapter reflecting on how do we see God? And then when we see God, how do we see ourselves? Right? Because image of God and Christian tradition is both humans are created in the image of God, and chiefly it is Jesus, the son of God, who reveals God to us and reveals true and ideal humanity. And so I saw glimmers of that really powerful implications for that in this interchange between these visitors in Abraham and Sarah. And then that catapulted me into the hard stories of when Hagar ni Ishmael are sent out and then when Abraham is willing to sacrifice Isaac, so that I mean, that's always true. I spend so much time thinking about the incarnation. Who is Jesus, how does he reveal God and humanity? And it was fun for me to reflect on that. And I think that's one of those examples in ordinary time we say always our foundation of like human ethics is that we all bear the image of God. That's awesome. Let's press in a little bit, and these readings in ordinary time allow us the space again to pause and reflect on what that might mean.

00:38:24
Speaker 1: Well, I was both impressed and surprised that you would pick Genesis eighteen. So I'm like, there's so much complexity there, just like you said, like there's a million things you could go off on. But what I kind of loved about it in the chapter as I thought about it, I'm like, there wasn't anything going on. You know, if you go to Genesis fourteen, you know, Abraham's fighting a battle. If you go to Genesis fifteen, there's this grand vision. If you go to Genesis, you know, like there's always something going on. Yeah, but not in Genesis eighteen. In Genesis eighteen, these angels just come up and visit the tent, like Abram is just hanging out with Sarah and like, hey, let's fix some some food. And then they don't really do anything nor they just have a discussion. Yes, And so I'm like, it's a beautiful picture of this ordinary time that I think you're trying to illustrate. Even in the story. There's it's not a big event. It's it's a conversation, right.

00:39:25
Speaker 2: Right, It's a meal and a conversation. Well, that happens three times a day, right, and that's when God shows up to say I'm about to do something miraculous.

00:39:37
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, so that's a that chapter I thought was really well done. I love the I love the Genesis eighteen piece. And then I think the last thing I kind of wanted to ask you about was, or maybe the last thing we have time for is the Trinity chapter. So you mentioned earlier, you know, we have Grinity Sunday, right, We're constantly talking about the Trinity, right, and you have a chapter called Triune. I'll admit I've always been it's like, I believe in the Trinity, but I'm always uncomfortable with it because it's so inscrutable, like you just don't know what's going on there, and so I'm sort of fascinating to read the chapter. But if you could just give a little bit of a sense of what you're thinking about in that chapter, how that impacts ordinary time, I think that would really help help listeners.

00:40:33
Speaker 2: Absolutely. So, yeah, that was the opportunity again kind of an overwhelmed to be like, in this little book, could I write a chapter on the Trinity where people have still for a million fire?

00:40:44
Speaker 1: Right?

00:40:45
Speaker 2: But I approach it liturgically, Right, I take a look at the prayers that we say each week, that's really the focus some of the passages the celebration. My question there was we say Fathers in Holy Spirit a lot in really all Christian traditions, especially in my liturgical tradition. And that's some of my previous work is like, I've always been energized what do we mean by this language that God has given us? And so here I attend to and I want to be careful here, right, there's so much danger with talking of the Trinity. But in the liturgy there is an allowance for us to pause and say, who is our Father? What are the aspects the revelations of God's fatherhood? And we have that in a prayer. Who is Jesus? Who is the Holy Spirit? And if someone is able to attend regularly throughout ordinary time, they're going to hear the proclamations of the revelations of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, And of course they all work beautifully together, and that they are one God. But there are ways in which scripture and church tradition gives us an opportunity to think about God as creator, God as the father who sends the sun, and the Son is the one who reconciles the world, the Spirit as the one who speaks through the prophets. There is a unity in what they do, but there are also particularities of expression, and in some ways I think I began that chapter with that him Saint Patrick's breastplate, which is like this long, beautiful hymn of all the things about the Trian God. And we have to recognize that when we say this language and prayer and worship, we are speaking back what God has given to us. We are speaking truth. But we do it in worship, recognizing that there is always this sense of we can't wrap our minds or our hands around it. Right. I love my theologian friends say that if we could understand God and kind of wrap it up neatly with the Beau, well, that wouldn't be God, because God, then we would be over God. God wouldn't be sovereign over us. So readers may find the chapter a bit dissatisfying, and that I don't know that I give any like cute quips of here's how to think about the Trinity, but more I'm saying, as you experience worship, how might you attend to the revelations of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

00:43:12
Speaker 1: Yeah? I found it. I found that emphasis actually helpful. I thought the Saint Patrick's poem was great. And one thing that I so the State of Theology report came out or they're familiar with that, but Liganeer did. And so one of the one of the challenges in the report was that people tended to evangelical Christians tended to affirm the Trinity, but then when they were asked specific questions about the Spirit, they called them a force. Yes, yeah, I did that right, Yeah, And I just I was like, man, this chapter really conveys the idea that, no, the Spirit is not a force, right, he gives power. Maybe, but he gives the power, and so the Spirit is this person. And I thought all the theological arguments, those are important, and they're interesting and helpful, but I think framing it liturgically is actually more helpful. Like we're obviously missing something somewhere where we're not really worshiping either in the power of the Spirit or we're not worshiping the trying God in a way, you know, like where are we sort of messed up in the way we're talking about this that people can walk away and feel like, you know, the Holy Spirit is basically like star wars.

00:44:28
Speaker 2: You know, yes, it's understandable. Of course spirit, the Spirit hasn't been incarnate. But whateeople appreciate about our liturgy is that we say the Nicene Creed each week, that long affirmation of what Christians have always believed. And there's also a practice of changing your body posture. So when we speak of the sun, we tend to bow in reference to the sun. That is an act of remembering the incarnation that Christ came down took on flesh. It's kind of a Philippians too move And then when you start speak of the Spirit, you stand up again. And I have often in my Christian life imagined like as I bow before Christ, almost as he would like place his hand on our heads, of like how he blesses the children. But then the spirit who empowers the prophets as one who lifts our head also a person who is filling and empowering us. So that bodily kind of posture of you know, being blessed, bowing down and then being lifted up, because that the Spirit is the one who allows us to go and do this insane thing that we could not do on our own, proclaim the kingdom, and sometimes personally right as we if we struggle a bit, then we find no, we found our meaning and our purpose and our call. It's the Spirit who allows us to do that. So I've thought very personally of Jesus blessing me, the Spirit lifting my head, and that has helped me understand the Spirit not as a force, but as a personal being who is at work within and through us.

00:46:05
Speaker 1: Very good. Well, we're running up against time, so I'll let you just one last question to help people understand how they should approach this ordinary time. You know, what did you learn as you after you wrote the book that you would leave people with and say, look, this is the value of ordinary time as you see it.

00:46:25
Speaker 2: Yes, I really for me, the shift in researching and writing this book has been as I anticipate this time of year, and especially the long period of time what we're in right now is so short that the long period of time, instead of being frustrated or like this is going to be boring. I really have grown excited about what is God going to do as just as you said, and we kind of let the work that we've done of the year marinate. I'm on the lookout for growth and that both makes me excited but also teaches me patience. Right, if you're trying to grow something, it always takes longer than you want. But that doesn't mean that God is not active. And so my admonition would be, you know, if you've never thought about this time of the church here, or if you've thought about it kind of negatively as I did, prepare yourself through prayer to say to God, I'm anticipating that you want to do great things. You want to grow me. We know that God wants us to grow into the fullness of the Statue of Christ. And so God, I'm on the lookout for how You're going to do that in this season, both through my response to you, you know, taking on some habits like thinking about your ways in the world, but also maybe some time of rest in you that you do this work because I'm not strong enough to do it, but you will ensure that it happens.

00:47:48
Speaker 1: It proves it.

00:47:49
Speaker 2: You know, I've always approached advent with huge anticipation. I love it. Right, it's we're getting ready. Can I have that same posture for Ordinary Time? That's what I'm pressing into.

00:48:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that. Well, Amy, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for writing the book. I thought it was great. And listeners, this is an IVP title, so we get a twenty percent discount if you order off the link in the show notes and put in the discount code, So please take a look at it. You can get this at the IVP Press website. Ordinary Time by Well. It's Ordinary Time, the Season of Growth by Amy Peeler and part of the overarching series which was give me the series Fullness of Time series, The Fullness of Time series. Yeah, so i'd encourage you. I haven't read the other ones in the series yet, but I'm planning to. So it kind of took me back to my roots a bit.

00:48:45
Speaker 2: And I will say they are really lovely little books. I've never written a book with so few footnotes. That's not to say it's not research, but it's just something you could sit down with a cup of coffee and read.

00:48:58
Speaker 1: It's a very easy read. Yeah not in not no, Wow, I couldn't you know, I didn't really need to read this. It was so easy. But it isn't you know, the normal academic book with you know, the footnotes or you know, eighteen pages of endnotes somewhere. It's not that. It's it's a great book. And again, really appreciate you writing it, really appreciate you being on the show. Thanks for being.

00:49:19
Speaker 2: Here, Thanks for such a wonderful conversation. I've had new really realizations of season and talking to you, so thank you.

00:49:27
Speaker 1: Oh hey, no problem, all right, everybody, Well, thanks for sticking with us, Thanks for being here on the show, and we will catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.