Welcome to the Church Year

An Introduction to the Seasons of the Episcopal Church

Vicki K. Black

• Publisher: Morehouse Publishing
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780819219664
• eBook ISBN: 9780819225757
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

From birthday cakes and anniversary dinners to summer vacations at the beach, each family has its own ways of marking the days and seasons of its life. For the Christian family—especially Episcopalians—it's no different. With an array of colors and an assortment of rich traditions, Episcopalians move through the Church year, marking the days and seasons that tell the story of Christ in our lives—in history and today.

This book—written for newcomers to the Episcopal Church as well as lifelong members—takes readers by the hand and leads them through the Church year, from the first Sunday of Advent through the last Sunday of Pentecost, answering questions like "Why do we use purple in Lent?" and "What does Maundy Thursday mean?" In an easy-to-read conversational style, Welcome to the Church Y ear introduces readers to the traditions of the Church seasons and explains why we do what we do. But it does more than offer interesting trivia about church vestments and pageantry. Its insights can help readers participate in the liturgies of the Church year in a deeper, more meaningful way.

1

Welcome to the Church Year

When our son Benjamin was about four years old, he was given a Spirograph set at a birthday party. I was delighted to know they still made Spirographs after all these years. I still remember the hours I spent as a child, pen clutched tightly in hand, tracing the swirls and ellipses and spirals made with the various sets of plastic wheels turning around and around inside other wheels. Now Benjamin, too, is watching the amazing patterns that emerge as he circles the wheels over and over on the paper. The key is the number of repetitions: the more times he goes round the wheel, the more intricate and three-dimensional the picture he creates.

The same is true of the church year. Every year we cycle through the seasons from Advent through the Season after Pentecost, and with every repetition their meaning becomes more textured—richer, deeper, more subtle and complex. Sometimes a particular season will stand out for us in a given year and its message will take on fresh significance, while we will speed through another almost without noticing its passing. The repetition is the key to their gift of grace in our lives. Like the Spirograph’s layers of single ellipses combining to form intricate spirals, the cycle of the repeating and overlapping cycles of the feasts and fasts of the church year create patterns of meaning in our lives, giving shape and direction to the events that mark our days.

Repeating the cycle of the seasons makes us aware of the passing of time. Most of us have had this experience with family holidays, or occasions such as high school or college reunions. As we decorate the Christmas tree or open gifts, we notice how our children have grown; as we gather around the Thanksgiving table, we are aware that our aging parents or grandparents—and we ourselves—have changed during the previous year.

We are also reminded of who we are, as we gather with family and friends and mark traditions that are part of our identity within the larger community. If the year has had difficult moments, we are perhaps a bit wiser and more sober than the year before, and also more aware of our dependence on God’s merciful grace. If the year has been filled with joyful occasions and gifts of new life, we may find gratitude welling up as we sing familiar songs or tell a family story. For Christians, keeping the church year likewise becomes a means of grace in our lives: the repetition of the cycle of feasts and fasts teaches us who we are as followers of Christ and beloved children of God.

What Is the Church Year?

While I was writing this book, whenever I told someone it was about the church year, the most common response would be a polite look of confusion and the embarrassed question, “Now, umm, what exactly is the church year?” The church year goes by any number of names—the Christian calendar, the liturgical year, the church’s feasts and fasts, the seasons of the church—but it is essentially the cycle of days and seasons that mark occasions of special devotion in the Christian faith. The Book of Common Prayer officially calls this cycle of feasts and fasts “The Calendar of the Church Year.” You can find a brief description and a list of the days in that section of the prayer book.¹

Every culture, every religious tradition has its cycle of seasons, holy days (or holidays), and occasions of special commemoration. We know the earth’s seasons of winter, spring, summer, and fall. In the United States, for example, people celebrate national holidays such as Independence Day and Memorial Day. The calendar of the Christian year marks the occasions that have to do with the life of Jesus: his conception, birth, baptism, teaching, ministry, suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension. Someone has said that the church year “is the life of Christ lived out again in liturgical time—in the time and in the memory of his Church.”² Other days in the church year focus on the church community, such as the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost or the communion of believers throughout all time at All Saints’ Day.

There are significant variations in the liturgical calendars of different traditions within the wider church, especially the Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran, though the broad outline of seasons is quite similar because all the calendars share common roots in the early church. The Orthodox dates for Christmas and Easter differ from those in the western churches, for example, because we have long followed different calendars. In this book, however, we will be focusing on the liturgical year as practiced in the Episcopal Church.

Time in the Church Year

Fundamental to the Christian year is the concept of time. Time can be measured in any number of ways: we order our days by using a common standard for minutes, hours, days, months, and years. Historians speak of time in terms of eras, geologists in terms of epochs or ages. We speak of meeting someone at noon or four P.M., and we also speak more generally of “a time” in our lives when we were students or newlyweds or first-time parents or recently retired. In the church year we likewise have two different approaches to time, and as we move through the seasons, we tend to blend them in our worship, prayer, and reflection.

The most straightforward approach to time in the church year is the historical approach, which the liturgical professor Marianne Micks once called a “tourist’s view of time.”³ It became more prevalent during the fourth century, as churches in the Holy Land developed liturgies to mark the days of Holy Week and Easter at the various sites at which Jesus suffered, died, and rose again. Pilgrims began to travel to Jerusalem to participate in these liturgies, and they brought them back to other countries as they returned. We have the diary of one such pilgrim, Egeria, who visited Jerusalem in the year 385. She describes in great detail how the Jerusalem church marked the days of Lent, Holy Week, and Easter with a series of liturgies that recalled the historical events at the end of Jesus’ ministry.

In the historical approach to the church year we, too, like the pilgrims in Jerusalem, follow the life of Jesus step by step, from his conception and birth through his baptism and years of ministry and teaching to his suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension. As Micks puts it, “The historical approach offers a chance to relive in microcosm every twelve months what Jesus himself experienced in his thirty-some years. By walking in his footsteps one imitates his rhythms.”⁴

The second approach to time in the church year is one that actually predates the historical perspective, and might be described with words like mystical, theological, or eschatological (meaning the end of all time, or outside time as we know it). It is a way to understand and participate in the eternal and mysterious meaning of the holy days of the calendar, beyond all time and human history. In Micks’s words, what she calls the “mystery” approach

offers Christians a chance instead to experience the full mystery of God’s plan for mankind, not only in each Eucharist but also in each full cycle of Christian holidays. The stress in this interpretation is on times and seasons wherein Christian worshipers encounter the power of the Holy Spirit to make present that which has already happened and which is yet to come.⁵

The liturgical scholar Massey Shepherd echoes this theme when he writes, “The Christian year is a mystery through which every moment and all times and seasons of this life are transcended and fulfilled in that reality which is beyond time.”⁶

As you move through the seasons of the church year in the Episcopal Church today, you will probably see both of these approaches to time in the services you attend. At Christmas, for example, you will hear the story of Mary and Joseph traveling to Bethlehem and of Jesus’ birth there. At the Christmas pageant you may see the visits of shepherds and wise men and angels. At the same time, you will also hear words like “Incarnation” and “Logos” and “Word-made-flesh”—theological words the church uses to talk, however dimly, about its ongoing experience of Jesus, fully God and fully man, who lived among us and who lives among us still. In historical time, Christmas happened over two thousand years ago in Bethlehem; in theological time, Christmas happens now, in the mystery of God choosing to dwell within humankind, a mystery that transcends all time.

The Two Cycles of the Church Year

There are two main patterns for the seasons in the church year: the Lent-Easter-Pentecost cycle and the Advent-Christmas- Epiphany cycle. In the weeks not included in these seasons, we do not have real “seasons” but “Sundays After”: the Sundays after the Epiphany and the Sundays after Pentecost. During these weeks the Sunday celebration of the resurrection is the primary focus.

The dates for Lent, Holy Week, and Easter move around each year according to the date of Easter, which is determined each year by the date of the first full moon after March 21. Easter thus is set by the lunar calendar. This is the calendar that the Jews used at the time of Jesus to determine the date of Passover, and the one Christians continued to use in the days of the early church. The cycle for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, on the other hand, is set by the fixed date of December 25: the first Sunday of Advent is always four Sundays before Christmas Day. This cycle is set by the solar calendar used in the Roman Empire; it is the one we are most familiar with today.

Within each season of the liturgical year are feast and fast days marking events in Jesus’ life, in particular saints’ lives, or for special occasions. Some celebrations are called “Principal Feasts” because they take precedence over any other holy day when there is overlap: these are Easter Day, Ascension Day, the Day of Pentecost, Trinity Sunday, All Saints’ Day, Christmas Day, and the Epiphany. Other holy days are identified as “major” or “minor,” based on the closeness of their association with Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and their basis in Scripture. You will sometimes hear the major feasts called “red-letter days,” from the old custom of printing church calendars in two colors: red for major feasts and black for lesser feasts. Today, people still refer to important days in their lives as “red-letter days.”

A major feast, for example, is the Annunciation—March 25, the day we mark the appearance of the angel to Mary announcing the coming birth of Jesus. The minor (or lesser) feast days include commemorations of the saints throughout the ages, such as Julian of Norwich on May 8 or the Martyrs of Uganda on June 3. When major or minor feasts happen to fall on a Sunday, however, the Sunday celebration of the Eucharist always takes precedence. When March 17 falls on a Sunday, for example, we always celebrate the liturgy for a Sunday in Lent rather than the feast day for St. Patrick.

When you attend a service in an Episcopal church, you can usually determine which season or feast day is being celebrated that day by checking the service leaflet or bulletin. It will indicate which Sunday within the season that particular day marks (such as “The Sixth Sunday of Easter”) or the name of the feast being celebrated (such as “All Saints’ Day”). You can also gather clues by the color of the vestments and altar hangings (white for Easter, green for the Season after Pentecost, and so on), by the theme of the gospel lesson that is read that day, and by the hymns that are chosen.

The Development of the Liturgical Calendar

The Christian year has its origins in the liturgical observances of Judaism, particularly as they were practiced around the time of Jesus. The basic unit of time for Jews then was the seven-day week, with a regular pattern of daily prayer and the keeping of the Sabbath. Jews gathered daily at the Temple in Jerusalem for ritual sacrifices and prayer, and weekly for Sabbath services in their synagogues to hear the Scriptures read and interpreted. Christians continued that pattern of daily and weekly prayer. From the beginning, they structured their week around Sunday, which they called “the Lord’s Day,” set apart as the day not only of Jesus’ resurrection but also the day of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. In the Jewish calendar, Sunday was known as the first day of the week, or sometimes the Eighth Day, symbolizing the fulfillment of time, the New Age. It was the day of creation, the day of light, and Christians adopted this day, rather than Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, as their primary occasion of celebration.

Very early in the church’s history, Christians began gathering every Sunday to celebrate the Eucharist, a ritual meal of bread and wine in which the presence of the risen Christ was revealed to them in the breaking of the bread and sharing of the cup. The Sunday Eucharist was thus the earliest feast of the church. Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth, written around the middle of the first century, tells us that Christians were gathering to keep the Lord’s Supper soon after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension (1 Corinthians 11:23–26). Early church documents testify that attendance at this weekly gathering of disciples was seen as vital: “To abstain from this meal is to separate oneself from the Lord: the Sunday meal is that which we take in common with the Lord and with the brethren.”⁷ This practice of sharing in the Sunday Eucharist with other Christians was what identified someone as a Christian.

Sunday was thus the principal celebration of the early church, marking, week after week, the resurrection of the Lord. Soon, however, Christians began to celebrate other important events in the life of Jesus, and the church calendar of feasts and seasons emerged. The Christian educator Joseph P. Russell has called the church year “the first curriculum of the church,” a way of teaching the faith to those who were preparing for baptism and who were being formed in the Christian tradition. He notes:

The familiar pattern of Advent/Christmas/Epiphany and Lent/ Holy Week/Easter evolved out of the need of the early church to guide candidates for baptism through the essential narratives and teachings that would form their understanding of God in Christ over the rest of their lives.⁸

The liturgical historian Marion J. Hatchett concurs: “The greatest influence on the development of the Christian year . . . was the liturgy of Christian initiation.”⁹ Baptism was the water rite that initiated someone into the church as a new Christian, or “little Christ,” and the traditions and practices surrounding baptism were the kernel around which all other aspects of the church year developed. From the rites associated with Easter, baptisms developed the Great Fifty Days of Easter and the season we call Lent. Over time the fasting, study, prayers, and liturgies that early Christians used to prepare for and celebrate Easter became part of the fixed cycle of the Christian year.

For example, fasting on certain weekdays and on special holy days had long been a part of Jewish faith and life, and members of the first Christian communities continued the practice. In addition, Christians would join those preparing for baptism (called catechumens) in days of prayer and fasting during the weeks prior to their baptism at the Easter Vigil, and most intensively on the Friday and Saturday before Easter Sunday. Eventually these days of fasting, penitence, and preparation were combined and solidified into the Lenten season of forty days that we know today.

In a similar way, the calendar of saints’ days evolved during the eras of persecution, in response to the growing need in the early church to commemorate the death of a Christian who died in witness to the faith. These martyrs were remembered both to honor their memory and to strengthen other Christians, who might be faced with persecution themselves. At first, these commemorations were probably for local witnesses to the faith, but as the church grew, the practice of remembering and celebrating the saints and martyrs became more widespread, especially during the Middle Ages. The Reformation of the sixteenth century sought to remove some of the focus from the lives of the saints and place it instead on the celebration of the Sunday Eucharist. Anglicans still commemorate saints’ days, though they never replace the Sunday celebration of Jesus’ resurrection. Biographies of the saints commemorated in the Episcopal Church can be found in a book called Lesser Feasts and Fasts, which is updated every three years as new saints are added at our General Convention. It also provides Scripture readings and prayers that can be used to mark their feast days.

The Lectionary

When the early Christians gathered for worship, prayer, and the reading of Scripture, they probably based their choice of readings on the Hebrew Scriptures used in the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8