How does a speaker persuade us to listen? Usually by promising us something new. But imagine a speaker who starts by saying “You already know this.” That’s how the Second Epistle of Peter begins. The apostle Peter tells his readers, “I shall keep reminding you of all this, although you know it and are well-grounded in the truth you possess” (2 Peter 1:12 REB). And again: “I have been recalling to you what you already know” (2 Peter 3:1 REB). This simple idea is at the heart of the church calendar: we need to recall what we already know.
Remembrance was central to the life of ancient Israel. In the Old Testament, Israel is faithful when Israel remembers; and when Israel forgets, Israel is unfaithful. Memory of what God has done for his people in the past is both the foundation of present faith and the matrix of future hope. There were annual feasts like Passover and annual fasts like the Day of Atonement, and the Old Testament even describes the observance of these kinds of days and seasons as a reason for the divine creation of the sun and moon (Genesis 1:14; Psalm 104:19). Beyond the biblical feasts and fasts, this impulse to mark events in annual patterns is just deeply human. In yearly cycles we remember birthdays, wedding anniversaries, and national holidays.
In a similar way, the church year prompts us to call to mind annually the central events and truths of the Christian faith. This is not simply remembering as opposed to forgetting, but it is also a public celebration, proclaiming the great deeds of the Lord (compare 1 Corinthians 11:26). John Davenant, the Bishop of Salisbury (1621–1641), describes it this way: “It was piously and prudently provided by the ancient fathers that those great benefits of the incarnation, the passion, the resurrection, and ascension of the Son of God, and the descent of the Holy Spirit, should be celebrated annually in the church.”1 We remember these days “by stated anniversaries,” Davenant continues, “‘lest,’ as Augustine says, ‘in the rolling wheel of time an ungrateful forgetfulness creep upon us.’” (Davenant, An Exposition, 485, quoting The City of God, book 10. Compare Richard Paquier, Dynamics of Worship: Foundations and uses of liturgy, translated by Donald Macleod (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967)
Each feast and fast is like a time capsule buried for us by the church. As we open each one, we are reminded that God has done great things for us (Psalm 126:2).
The Two Halves of the Church Year
The church year has two halves. The first is about the incarnation and the great events by which God has accomplished our salvation. The second half is about how we live as Christians. This shift from salvation to sanctification occurs in many of the epistles. The apostle Paul will typically start with doctrine about our salvation in Christ, and then say “Therefore” and launch into the implications for how we live (for example, Romans 12:1).
The incarnation half of the year begins with Advent and runs through Christmas, Epiphany, the ’Gesimas, Lent, Easter, Ascension, and Whitsunday (also called Pentecost). It is roughly from the start of December through May or early June. One common misunderstanding is that in these seasons we’re engaged in a mythic, cyclical repetition of the life of Christ. In other words, in some sense Jesus is born anew every Christmas or resurrected again every Easter. (One of us was once told not to say alleluias in Lent because Jesus wasn’t risen from the dead yet!) But Christianity confesses that our Lord has already come to save us—dying, rising again, and ascending—and that he is now reigning until he comes again to judge the world. The first half of the church year isn’t a way to repeat these events. It’s a way the church commemorates them and teaches their significance.
The other half of the year is a season called “Trinity” or “Trinitytide” because it begins with Trinity Sunday. It is roughly from May or early June through November. We could say that the first half of the year is about the life of Christ, and the second half is about our life in Christ. George Herbert (1593-1633), rector of a rural English parish and author of religious poems that are read to this day, described these two halves of the church year as God’s “two rare cabinets full of treasure, / The Trinity, and Incarnation.”(George Herbert, “Ungratefulness,” in The Complete English Works, edited and introduced by Ann Pasternak Slater (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995). But these treasures are not locked up or out of reach. Addressing God, Herbert writes:
Thou hast unlockt them both,
And made them jewels to betroth
The work of thy creation
Unto thyself in everlasting pleasure.
These treasures remind us that Jesus Christ has made us, the church, his bride. The annual round of feasts and fasts are our engagement ring.
One of the earliest commentators on the Book of Common Prayer was Anthony Sparrow. He published his commentary anonymously in 1655, when Oliver Cromwell was Lord Protector and it was illegal to use the prayer book in church. In fact, Sparrow himself had been forced out of his church several years earlier for using the prayer book in services. Sparrow, who would later become a bishop, wrote that in the first half of the church year we celebrate “the high festivals” and “mysteries of our redemption by Christ on earth.” These feasts take us “through a great part of the creed,” culminating in Whitsunday. That movement tracks the Apostles’ Creed, where the last section begins with “I believe in the Holy Ghost.” But in the second half of the year, the church has given us readings that “tend to our edifying, and being the living temples of the Holy Ghost our Comforter, with his gifts and graces, that having oil in our lamps, we may be in better readiness to meet the Bridegroom at his second advent or coming to judgment” (compare Matthew 25:1-13).(Anthony Sparrow, A Rationale upon the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England (London: printed for Blanche Pawlet, at the Sign of the Bible in Chancery-Lane, near Fleet-Street, [1684] 1839)
Thus the Trinity season carries us from Pentecost to Advent, which prepares us for another yearly cycle. Truly, as the apostle Peter said, we need to recall what we already know (2 Peter 1:12).
Contributors: Samuel L. Bray and Drew Nathaniel Keane.
Adapted from How to Use the Book of Common Prayer by Samuel L. Bray and Drew Nathaniel Keane. ©2024 by Samuel L. Bray and Drew Nathaniel Keane. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
Photo Credit Unsplash.com
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