TEACHING

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SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2022
10:30 AM (kids + communion + baptism)
Chronos χρόνος and Kairos καιρός
​God's Time The Gift of a New Calendar with Shel Boese
Mark 1:14-15, 1 Corinthians 6:1-2, 1 Chronicles 12:32
How do you mark time in your life? While we are called to stay awake in the present to experience God’s presence, we’re also called to remember in unique ways. Remembering, helps you understand where you are right now. The calendar you keep is more than keeping track of a day, it tells you what is important. Christians are invited to get our worth not in what we produce or consume, but in finding that we are beloved by a God who entered time and is moving us onward.

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Always Being Formed
BIG IDEA: There are practices that can shape us deeply—how we mark time is a major one. We can let the world around us shape us, disciple us, brainwash us when we don’t stop, wake up, and then reflect. 

• The Bible and the Work of the church is to lean into another vision—what imagination is, another vision of what is, and can be.
• “I have come to the rather simplistic notion that imagination is the capacity to image a world beyond what is obviously given. That’s the work of poets and novelists and artists—and that’s what biblical writers mostly do. I think that’s why people show up at church. They want to know whether there is any other world available than the one that we can see, which we can hardly bear. I have subsumed a lot of those ideas under the rubric of “imagination” for my own work.”
  -Walter Brueggemann 

What is the Church Year?

“It is simply a practice of historic Christianity that continuously stirs reflection, anticipation and action in the hearts of God’s people for the whole, big story of the gospel. More and more Christians are rediscovering this historic practice, and growing in the truth and knowledge of Christ.”
-Daniel Montgomery
Chronos χρόνος and Kairos καιρός

• Fasts and Feasts

“There never was a time when it was easy and obvious. When the church is in the midst of this totalizing military consumerism, it’s in a scary place to articulate an alternative, but that’s what’s been entrusted to us in the Bible and in the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
-Walter Brueggemann 

• Jewish roots
• Sundays
• Introducing the Revised Common Lectionary
  • A lectionary is a collection of readings or selections from the Scriptures, arranged and intended for proclamation during the worship of the people of God. Lectionaries were known and used in the fourth century, where major churches arranged the Scripture readings according to a schedule which follows the calendar of the church’s year. This practice of assigning particular readings to each Sunday and festival has continued through the history of the Christian Church.
  • Sunday Readings
  • Daily readings

 

• Resources Electronic calendar links:
  • https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/calendar.php
    • This Revised Common Lectionary website provides iCalendar files of Weekly and Daily readings for your personal calendar. iCalendar is a standard file format that all major calendaring applications support.

• https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/slides/Advent_A_Daily_Prayers_Week_1.pdf

Major Practices - worship, small group [home church, conventicles, classes]

• Baptism and Communion
  • Review: Believers’ baptism (credobaptism)
    • New Testament clear paradigm - repent, believe, obey Jesus then Baptism.
    • Baptism as part of the context of discipleship
    • No explicit evidence of infant baptism until second century, and no regular/dominant use of it until much later (fourth+ century), but many explicit references to believers being baptized - people old enough to decide:
    • Children or Adult: “while someone need not necessarily be an adult (“adult baptism” is a bit of a misnomer) before being baptized, they do need to be old enough to be able to understand, and confess, their dependency on and devotion to our Lord.”

LANDING THE PLANE

• Staying Awake to the Time: Kairos/Chronos
• Know you are being formed, like it or not.
• Embracing the Church Year and lectionary

FINAL WORD - A Gift For Your Household

“I am so glad to see the emergence of this calendar because we Christians are in an emergency about time. It is clear that dominant culture in North America no longer knows what time it is, because every season has now been homogenized into an uninterrupted ‘shopping season’ and when we do not know what time it is we are unlikely to remember ‘former times’ and surely have no ground to hope for ‘new things’. This new calendar refers all our seasons back to the Lord of all time and may, in quite concrete ways, provide a form of resistance against the timelessness of consumerism back into the timefulness of our faith.”
-Walter Brueggemann

For Discussion and Reflection

1. If an event starts at a stated time, eg. 8 PM, are you generally there before 8, after 8, or exactly at 8? Why? What’s your sense of “on time”? What do your friends or family think about “on time”?
2. How has your view of time changed over the last few years? Why?
3. We have incorporated more of the church year over the years at Pilgrim. What do you like about it? What questions does this way of marking time raise for you?
4. How many calendars do you have in your life (ways you mark time)? How important are they? Why?
5. Getting into consistent scripture reading can be a challenge for new and old followers of Jesus. What challenges do you have in reading the Bible in some way regularly (beyond what we read on Sunday morning)?
6. What resources would you recommend to your group or church regarding the Bible? (from reading it regularly, to understanding?)​
7. ​Put a list together of Podcasts, books, apps, etc. you’ve found helpful to get into the Bible. Share this list with pastor Shel [email protected]