Following Pentecost, the liturgical calendar moves us into Ordinary Time: an ordered sequence of weeks between the major feast days of the Christian year which allow Christian communities to reflect on the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit, to embody the mission of Jesus, and to grow in our discipleship.

JUNE: Becoming

Genesis 12:1-9, Psalm 33:1-12, Romans 4:13-25,
Matthew 9:9-13,18-26

Ordinary Time explores our Spirit-led call into God’s future.

Genesis frames this as a summons into holy unsettlement in which Abram leaves behind land, kinship structures, and inherited security for an as-yet-unseen promise from God. Paul insists that this promise is not a prize for the deserving, but a grace that creates a people sustained by God’s faithful presence.

Thus, Jesus’ embodies God’s desire for mercy over sacrifice in 1) his table fellowship with tax collectors and “sinners” and 2) healings that cross boundaries of status, gendered vulnerability, and ritual expectation.

A liberation lens points to God’s promises as public, and to blessing as the disruptive vocation of challenging systems that determine who is “clean”, credible, or welcome at the table. Discipleship requires movement from certainty, status, and gatekeeping to practices of mercy in Yahweh’s strange economy of grace where Jesus’ touch undoes deathly social scripts and restores dignity to bodies long written off.

PrayerPoem

Holy One of thresholds and long roads,
you call Abram by name and the dust rises.
Loosen what we clutch:
land, label, the small safety of staying put.
Give us the courage to travel light,
so we can become blessing and not barrier.
Teach us your strange economy,
where promise is not wages for the worthy
but bread handed across the table to the weary.
When we start counting who belongs,
undo our arithmetic with grace.
Jesus, friend of the looked-away-from,
you sit with tax collectors and the too-much,
you touch what we were taught to avoid.
Heal in us the fear of contamination,
the superstition that says holiness is distance.
Spirit of Pentecost afterglow, re-form our community;
make room, make mercy, make music.
And where bodies and stories have been written off,
write your future on us again.
Amen.

Downloadable handout

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