“To observe the feasts and fasts of the Church set forth in the Anglican formularies”

I’ll give you a bit of a riddle to start things off this morning. What is it? It’s the one thing we never have enough of, but can’t stand when we have too much. Some think they have lots of it; for other it’s running out. Some have too much of it on their hands, others are loosing it. Some people try to make it, others do it. It drags on for some, while if flies for others. There are people who save it, and others who kill it. What is it? It’s Time.

“Time is of the essence,” we like to say. Or as Benjamin Franklin once said, “Time is the stuff life is made up off.” But sometimes we look at time the same way the historian Arnold Toynbee once famously remarked about history: that it’s “just one damn thing after another.”

How we use our time, and how time itself can be used in the service of the Gospel, is the subject of the eighth duty of the laity as outlined for us in the canons of the Anglican Church in North America. It concerns our use of the Church Calendar. That as those who self-consciously identify themselves as faithful Anglican Christians, who have received a spiritual heritage from the earliest ages of the Church in the sacred seasons and festivals of the Christian year we ought therefore, and we’re expected, “To observe the feasts and fasts of the Church set forth in the Anglican formularies.”

You see, the principle behind the Church year is that even time itself is to be redeemed and brought under the Lordship of Christ, so that our time is not just one damn thing after another, but can be used in the process of making our lives more and more Christ-centered, and more and more Christ-like. As St. Paul writes in Ephesians: “See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil” (Eph. 5:15, 16).

I think we get that part about the days being evil, especially in this day and age. But I’m not sure we always know what it means to redeem the time. It literally means to buy it back. But to buy it back from what? Well, from the same things all parts of our lives need to be bought back or redeemed from: from self-centeredness and worldliness; from our tendency to forget God or to relegate Him to a very small portion of our lives; from our use God’s good gifts, even our time, as if they’re just things to be consumed, rather than things that are to be the stuff our fellowship with Him. That’s what all parts of our lives need to be bought back from, including our time –bought back and returned to the Lord.

And so to help Christians redeem and submit their time to Christ, the Church has organized the year around the major events in the life of Christ, again seeking to help keep life Christ-centered.

The Church year could be described as a way of transforming the passage of time so that the foremost events in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ become the foremost events in our own lives.

Our Lord’s Nativity, Circumcision, Epiphany, Transfiguration, Passion, Death, Resurrection and Ascension, become the matrix for sort of squashing all our frantic moments and dizzying cycles of busyness into a Christ-like form. It’s an attempt to allow the rhythms of Christ’s life – the ups and downs, the joys and sorrows, the triumphs and tragedies of His life – rather than the go-go-go, me-me-me, shop-till-you drop sort of life of this world, to set the agenda for how we worship God and serve Him in time.

This is why the Church year is a series of feasts and fasts. It’s not all about tinsel and lights, and turkey and ham, and wine and champagne. It’s about observing times of quiet anticipation before festal celebrations. It’s about going through the darkness so we can see the light more clearly when it comes. It’s about keeping seasons of penitential self-reflections so we can enter more fully with joy into the seasons of Christ’s triumph over sin and death. It’s about walking alongside of Christ through His sufferings and sorrows so we can be raised with Him in His exaltation and glory.

This basic Christ-shaped structure of the Church year is also punctuated at various points by other holy days, days which honor those who have been God’s “choice vessels of his grace and the lights of the world in their several generations,” the saints closest to our Lord in his earthly ministry: saints such as the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Apostles, the Evangelists, and the Martyrs. And this way we have constantly set before us that great cloud of witnesses that spur us on by their example to “run with endurance the race that is set before us” (Heb. 12:1).

But observing the Church year, keeping the feast and fasts of our sacred calendar, takes commitment. And it’s not easy, because so much of our time is already organized by our various other calendars – by our social calendars and cultural calendar, by our work schedules and our school schedules, and by the million other special dates and times that All of these things have a tremendous power to form us and make us who we are. And so unless we make a concerted effort, all of these dates and times and schedules and calendars often crowd out the sacred seasons and day, and we lose the opportunity the Church calendar gives us to be reformed and remade in the image of Christ.

So observing the Church year takes commitment. But so do any of the spiritual disciplines. So does daily prayer and meditation in the Scriptures. So does keeping of the weekly liturgy, with all its repetitiveness. But you see, just as the weekly repetition of the liturgy is way of forming us and shaping us by its very repetitiveness – by being confronted again with our sins, by hearing again Christ’s comfortable words of forgiveness, by being brought back to fellowship with Him around his holy table – so the Church year reinforces on a seasonal basis what the liturgy does on a weekly basis. So as time has a three-fold pattern – daily, weekly, and seasonal – the Church tries to help redeem all of our time by give us the sacred calendar.

So our church has a list in the beginning part of the Prayerbook called the table of feasts and fasts which are “to be observed in this church throughout the year,” not as another law we have to keep, but as one more means we given the opportunity to use to continually bring out lives back to the center in Christ, away from self, away from this fallen world. Does the Church expect us Yes. That’s what the 8^th duty of the laity in canon is telling us. Not because this is the Law of God; not because we have a Scriptural injunction to keep the Church year, but because we have chosen the Anglican Way of being Christians. And the Anglican Way has always seen the usefulness of setting apart days and season, feasts and fasts, for the redeeming of our time, that even time itself can be used in the service of the Gospel to transform us by the life of Christ to more and more reflect His life in ours.

The Psalmist writes in the Psalm 31: “My times are in you hands.” Are they? Do you submit your times to the Lord? Do you submit all of your time to the Lord, or just a small portion? The Church calls us to keep the feasts and fasts of the Church year so that our time takes on a Christ-like shape. And that become one more tool in our spiritual tool bag for living a Christ-like life. We can use as many as we can get!

The days are evil. So let us redeem our time. +