There's ordinary and there's ordinary.

Check the graphic above.  We have just made our way clock-wise through the Great Fifty Days of Easter with our Pentecost celebration.  What we have on the calendar until November 25 are Sundays AFTER Pentecost or Ordinary Time.  It's that nearly half of the calendar on the left.  There are a few feast days like Transfiguration on August 6 and All Saints' Day on November 1st to perk us up but for the most part we will be following what is largely an in course reading of the Gospel according to Mark. There are no other seasons to organize our attention to scripture and the faithful living we expect to follow this attention.  That is the order.  That is why we call it ordinary time.  

Ordinary, not because of the missing embellishments of seasonal observances like Christmas and Easter.  But because a very ordered chapter by chapter reading of the gospel is our practice.  We are relying on the most basic appreciation of scripture.  We are going where the story takes us.

It reminds of those several attempts I made and only once succeeded in reading the Bible -- minus the Apocrypha -- straight through.  Genesis was big but it kept moving.  Exodus started to get bogged down around Chapter 25 with all the instructional material.  Leviticus killed me.  Numbers tried to get my attention, "bless his heart."  Deuteronomy was a repeat offender.   Done. 

The next time I even made it all the way through the genealogies of First Chronicles.  It was down hill from there!  Job was a grind, as were the Psalms even with their familiar moments.  Proverbs was fragmented and preachy.  So too was Ecclesiastes. Song of Solomon so distracted me with its romantic nonsense that I forgot what I was trying to do.  Done. 

The prophets got better each time I tried.  Ezekiel and Daniel were equally fanciful.  Lots more prophets.  I remember the time I turned the page and started Matthew immediately after Malachi.  Hooray!

I think that was on about my third or fourth try.  I did it and read all the way through the Bible.  It was the summer after my senior year in high school.  I was motivated as much by competition with Dan Hatfield, my roommate on staff at Ridgecrest Baptist Assembly.  He won.  He got the girl, too.  

This time our ordinary reading is not so distracted or competitive.  We'll even take a break and read from John's gospel for the Sundays in August.  The break will be a good thing because Mark does bring his own pressure or urgency to these serial accounts.  We will be presented with vignettes that have very little of the staging or flourish used by the other synoptics.  No frills. 

Mark just keeps moving.  His orders are like the orders of a insurgent moving.  So this year's ordinary time will have some of that flavor as well.  It will keep us moving.  Which is a much better take on "ordinary."  

Moving. Being moved. Following. Being part of a movement.  Ordered by the urgency, a holy calling.  There's ordinary and then there's ordinary.