The Liturgical Calendar and Hymns
Pastor Mathew Magera – 2/18/16 – Sermon 145
St. Thomas Lutheran Church, Trufant, MI
To God be the Glory!
Grace and peace to you from God our Father, from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
According to the dictionary a calendar is a system of reckoning time. Some calendars follow the moon. Some calendars follow the sun. Some calendars follow both. Some are based on the seasons. Some are a set number of days each year, others vary. The liturgical calendar, however, is not centered on time as much as it is the life of Jesus and the life of the church. It even varies its length based on both the Gregorian calendar as well as the lunar cycle. You can easily confirm this by realizing that Christmas is always on December 25th while Easter is on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. This means the earliest date possible for Easter is March 22nd and the latest date is April 25th.
One thing about many calendars is that there is a distinct beginning as well as an ending. There is always some kind of January 1st and a December 31st. The thing about calendars having a beginning and an ending is that it allows the year to start over again. It leaves the past behind and focuses ahead. A fiscal calendar begins a new budget, a new way of looking forward for the life of an organization or business. Our Gregorian calendar looks forward on January 1st causing people to make new year’s resolutions. People think that by starting the calendar over again they can put a new outlook on life and start over. People come up with, let’s call them unique, ideas for which to start off the new year. I want to share with you a couple of my favorites. 5). I will do less laundry and wear more deodorant. 4). I will not bore my boss with the same excuses for missing work. I will think of new ones. 3). I will start buying lottery tickets at a luckier store. 2). I will stick to my resolution for more than a week. 1). I will learn what the word “resolution” actually means
Our Gregorian calendar starts on January 1st so that we don’t have to look back. We want to forget about what happened and think about being better and so we find ways to give us incentive to do it, but as was just implied, we often fail even within the first week. The liturgical calendar does have a distinct beginning also but unlike our Gregorian calendar, with the liturgical calendar the past is always there. In fact, we need it and I’ll explain that in a bit. You see when we think of January through December we might often think of a linear calendar. Whereas if we are to think about the seasons, we think of them as a circle. One affects the other and there is no stopping point. I mean, where is the beginning of the seasons? The same goes for our liturgical calendar. We can mark a point on it and say this is the beginning but at no point can we be without the past because the calendar itself is always in motion and we who are living within it are also in motion. So, the past and the future are always with us at the exact same time. And looking back on that calendar is the reason we are able to look forward. It preaches its own sermon, if you want to think of it that way.
The reason we have a liturgical calendar in the first place is because of the festivals celebrated in the Jewish faith. Our Old Testament reading this morning from Exodus is the first Passover and the real first introduction we have to a religious calendar that has molded itself into what we know it as today. Moses instructs the people to celebrate the Passover each year. And it begins. Our second reading from Acts highlights the day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles, the birthday of the Christian church itself. Our Gospel reading is none other than the Last Supper where Jesus and his disciples find themselves around the calendar celebrations of Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. So, our liturgical calendar comes from all of these and more. They are put together in a circular fashion and out comes the calendar as we know it. In fact, the calendar itself is listed in the LBW on page 9 if you want to look at it.
I'm going to spend time talking more about the calendar itself during our text study after worship this morning because there is just too much to talk about now but the calendar itself is set up in a way to mirror worship and our Christian life. The calendar itself opens in Advent where we find ourselves waiting and hoping for the coming Savior. Upon celebrating the nativity of our Lord, we continue in the celebration of Christmas, or Christ Mass, celebrating Christ being born to us and celebrating the mass around it, simply meaning worship with Holy Communion.
After Christmas we have our Savior in our midst and now he is going to reveal his true self to us during the season of Epiphany and through signs and wonders will show us he may not be the savior we envisioned. That ultimately ends with Transfiguration Sunday which was two weeks ago when we see a visual change of who Jesus is and we are sent down into Lent to reflect on our faith and to follow him closely to the cross. Lent is a somber time because many of us don't want to venture to the cross with Christ but we eventually find ourselves there watching him crucified and killed. But then we realize all was necessary because on Easter morning when the women went to the tomb they found the stone rolled away and the body was gone. Christ had risen. We spend the next few weeks in celebration of the resurrection of the Easter season before we get to the day of Pentecost after Jesus had ascended into Heaven. Now the Holy Spirit is coming down and the Christian church is being founded. Then those many Sundays after Pentecost represent the life and ministry of the church as it reflects the life and ministry of Jesus. Over half of the liturgical year are those Sundays after Pentecost because it represents our life as a church going out and sharing the good news of the resurrection, feeding the hungry, healing the sick. But, all leads us back to Advent when we realize this is hard work and we just can't do it alone and we often fail to listen to Jesus’ instructions. Where can we get someone to help us do the ministry of a Christian? Who will help us? Who will save us? And boom, back into Advent. The cycle just keeps on going.
As you can see, the liturgical calendar is more than just a calendar. It teaches something to us and it preaches a message to us. The message of that calendar is that grace always wins. Let's think about it. Through its cycle we’re either thinking about the birth of Christ, the resurrection of Christ, or the ministry of Christ and can apply that to the joys and struggles we face each day. Grace wins here. Grace wins there. All year long, grace wins.
This means that no matter what we are going through at any point in our year, the grace of God still wins every time. If we struggle to find the right gift for someone at Christmas time, we remember that Christ was the greatest gift given to anyone in the world and that no gift we can give will be as important or as valuable as him. If we struggle with the winter blues like we might be doing so now during the season of Lent, we are reminded of the new life and the warmth that comes in the spring time and the new life we receive in the resurrection of Christ.
Still, oftentimes the church calendar, to many of us, is just the colors in the sanctuary. Sometimes we don’t feel what the season is all about. This is where hymns, in particular, come into play. If we don’t already have enough good news with the progression of our calendar, hymns provide assistance. One of the reasons we sing in worship is to find the words that we might not otherwise be able to express. We sing to find the words the God whispers to us as well. So we sing in worship because it has been done since the Old Testament. We also sing because it gives us a different way to express our worship other than speaking and listening. For me, good hymns have three purposes in worship.
Written for people who can't sing
Speaking of singable melodies, I think you'll like this one. A good Lutheran hymn is written for people who can't sing. It's true. There is a different between a song and a hymn. A hymn is meant for everyone to sing. A hymn understands there are people from a variety of backgrounds in one place. A good hymn is written in such a way that no matter how bad you think your singing skills are, if sung with the entire congregation, it won't sound bad. As such, a good hymn will have a reliable rhythm, won't go too high, won't go too low. A good hymn will have a meter to it that is recognizable and easy to count. Now, there are many different meters and some hymns sound unsingable if we haven't sung them before, but good hymns, once taught, should be singable by everyone.
While the melody is written for people who can’t sing, the words also make the hymn its own very special vocabulary in a distinct setting. A professor at Duke once talked about hymns and said "you won't hear any of this kind of music on MTV. This is a different kind of music. You have to get up, get dressed, and come down here at an inconvenient hour of the day to hear music like this. To be a Christian is to find yourself moving to a different rhythm, a different beat." Bottom line is that hymns require us to move to a different beat.
Identify with our sinful state
A hymn should not glorify us or anything we do. If a hymn talks anything about us it should refer to our sinfulness, our weakness, our need for a savior or need to help others. A hymn that glorifies who we are and says how great we are or how faithful we are puts the focus on us where rather the focus should be on Jesus. The reason it will point us to Jesus is because Jesus reminds us that, just like with our calendar, grace wins. When we are led to Jesus, we should be able to see that grace does triumph over everything else.
Express the theology of the church
As a Lutheran congregation, the music we sing, just like the worship we give, should reflect our theology. Our worship should reflect what we call Law and Gospel, which is the understanding that God has given us His Law to keep us from sinning but to such high standards that our sinful nature prevents us from meeting them. When our need for a Savior arises, Jesus comes to us and lifts us up to those standards out of pure love. Good Lutheran hymns will reflect this ideology. Good Lutheran hymns will talk about salvation by grace through faith, they'll talk about justification. They will put our Lutheran beliefs into a singable melody. This means that hymns also support our church calendar. And, if you even look in your hymnals, the first section of hymns from number 22 to 173 are all in the order of the liturgical calendar, Advent, Christmas, etc. Each hymn for each season is meant to help bring out the themes and theology concerning the season. If we aren't able to feel Advent the correct way, the hymns give us words to consider the Biblical events surrounding the season as well as the concepts, such as hope for Advent, that are prominent in the season. After that, the rest of the hymns help to bring out any number of themes we may focus on in worship.
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So, this liturgical calendar that we have and the hymns that we sing are in place to point us to Christ, as the entire worship service should do. But, they do it in different ways. The liturgical calendar can be compared to the seasons we experience outside, spring, summer, fall and winter. It can also be observed by the colors of the paraments up front here. Understanding the colors of the seasons help us to articulate a particular feeling about the worship service and prepare us for the character that worship will take on its own. The hymns are meant to reflect our different liturgical seasons and pull everything together.
During Lent, as we are now, our color is purple, the weather outside is unpredictable and we are waiting for the coming spring and the new life it brings. Our worship service centers around personal reflection on faith and the re-birth our lives take during this time. Our hymns represent the praise we give to God, the confession of our wrong-doings and our hope that ultimately rests in Jesus himself. It all goes together and it tells us, even on the darkest of days, on the black of Ash Wednesday, on the emptiness of Good Friday, even at the sadness at a funeral, there will always be, if even a little bit, a reminder that grace wins.
We have Jesus to thank for grace, we have Jesus who walked willingly into Jerusalem, who willingly healed the sick, who willingly took up the cross and died for us for those days when we just don’t want to get up. For those days when we’re not sure what is going to happen. For those days where everything seems to go wrong. Even from his tomb comes the whisper on Easter morning that wakes us up and it says, "grace wins."
With that, the calendar continues and it is still alive, the journey from death to life that is found within the seasons of the church and that continues to be found within our hearts, that undying message that wakes us up and brings us here each week. And we can look forward and backward in this calendar and we can always be pointed to Christ no matter which way we look. It’s the good news. It’s our savior. Grace wins. To God be the glory, now and always. Amen.