Let Us Keep The Feast: Living the Church Year at Home (Pentecost & Ordinary Time)

By Jessica Snell, Kristen Stewart and Ann E. Dominguez

Pentecost and Ordinary Time are the last of the seasons in the Church Year—and often among the most misunderstood and neglected. As with some of the other seasons, Christians may find that their practices are inconsistent or in need of improvement. In the Pentecost and Ordinary Time edition of Let Us Keep the Feast, you’ll find help for enriching your observance and celebration of these seasons: traditions new and old, suggested readings, recipes, and prayers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781937063726

Book preview

Let Us Keep The

FEAST

celebrating the Church Year at home

(Pentecost & Ordinary Time)

Let Us Keep The Feast: celebrating the Church Year at home

Pentecost & Ordinary Time

Published by:

Doulos Resources, PO Box 69485, Oro Valley, AZ 85737; PHONE: [phone] WEBSITE: www.doulosresources.org.

c Copyright 2014 by Jessica Snell. Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License. To view a copy of this license, (a) visit www.creativecommons.org; or, (b) send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 2nd Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Please address all questions about rights and reproduction to Doulos Resources:

PHONE: [phone]; E-MAIL: [e-mail].

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Published 2014

Printed in the United States of America by Ingram/Lightning Source

ISBNs:

978-1-937063-73-3 (print)

978-1-937063-72-6 (digital)

Cover design by Julie Hollyday, 2013.

This book is printed using paper that is produced according to Sustainable Forestry Initiative® (SFI®) Certified Sourcing.

Table of Contents

Introduction

V

Pentecost

1

Ordinary Time

19

Bibliography

45

Our Writers

46

Introduction

by Jessica Snell

If you want a cup of tea, you boil water in a kettle. The kettle’s a wonderful device, and thank God someone invented it. Which of us, wanting a cup of tea, would go to the trouble of inventing a new kind of kettle from scratch?

When it comes to devotional practices, many of us in the Protestant tradition have been discovering that someone already invented the kettle. Our thirst for the presence of God has led us to rediscover the goodness of many old traditions, traditions that may have been passed over or forgotten for a time while our predecessors in the faith fought necessary battles over doctrine and dogma.

But church history belongs to all of us, and more than that, all of church history belongs to all of us: all 2000 years of it, and not just the last 500. During that history, Christians developed seasonal devotional practices that helped remind God’s people of God’s mercies.

These practices include some that might be familiar; giving something up for Lent is one of the practices most of us have heard of. Others of us first learn about the church year through the practice of lighting a candle for each of the four Sundays in Advent. Either of these practices is enough to pique the curiosity of an alert believer and to prompt the question: is there more where this came from?

The answer is yes. There is, in fact, enough to fill a whole book. Like this one.

Scripture and Tradition

The church year isn’t commanded by Scripture, but it is suffused with Scripture. The church year is traditional, but those traditions exist because they have been found, over and over again through the centuries, to aid believers in their walks with Christ.

That ritual and rhythm are wise tools for fixing our ever-wandering attention on the goodness of God is clear even as far back as the covenants of the Old Testament. Celebrations like Passover regularly brought the mercies of God to the forefront of His people’s minds; the Israelites were commanded to remind themselves of the mighty acts of the Lord, of how He’d saved them, of how He loved them. They were prompted to worship and thanksgiving, to repentance and to joy. We humans forget the Lord’s kindnesses so easily, but a yearly cycle of festivals at least make it harder to forget for quite so long.

There is repetition to the practice of celebrating the church year, but the repetition doesn’t