The liturgical season of Ordinary Time gets its name of this season from the Latin Ordo – ordered, ordinal. It just means that these are numbered Sundays: first, second, third, etc.
I think this word “ordinary” puts a bad rap on it; it makes it sound like there’s nothing special about counting time between Christmas and Easter and Easter and Christmas.
A lot of times when we talk about our lives, when we look back over them, we talk about the big events – the birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, births and deaths. All those are really important and we do need to celebrate them.
But if you think about what makes us who we are – that is to be found in the daily events of our lives: the day in and day out. The ordinary. “Quotidian” is another word for it. That’s where we become who we are. I love the quote by Annie Dillard “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
So Christmas and Easter are big celebrations for us and we need to pay attention to them. But who we are as Christians and who we are called to be – that gets fleshed out during the Sundays of Ordinary Time.
As we go through these Sundays from this 11th Sunday to the 33rd Sunday – which will take us to the end of this liturgical year in November… we’re always going to ask the question: What do the scriptures of this Sunday have to teach us about how to live day in and day out as Christians?
Each Sunday we’re going to do a semi-continuous reading through the gospel of Matthew. We pick up here today in chapter 9 and we’ll go through chapter 25 of this gospel. The Old Testament reading will be chosen each week to complement the gospel reading. So we’ll always try to look for that connection. And then we get a semi-continuous reading through another New Testament book. We’ll pick up today in Romans and we’ll be in that book till mid-September. Then we’ll have a few weeks in the book of Philippians and then towards the ends of October we’ll pick up 1 Thessalonians.