Marking Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year

Session 5 Shoes That Fit Our Feet Retrieving the Great Tradition in Our Tradition

The Risen, Ascended, and Glorified Christ Is the Center of the Church Year Observances

The resurrection of the crucified Christ is the point on which the weekly and annual cycles of the Christian calendar turn. In fact, it supplies the clue to the whole history of salvation and indeed the cosmos. Every Sunday and every Easter day is a commemoration and celebration of the resurrection of Jesus and an anticipation of the day when the same Lord will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and finally establish God’s universal kingdom.

~ Doug E. Sailers. “The Origins of the Church Year.” Robert Webber., ed. The Services of the Church Year . Nashville: Star Song Pub. Group, p. 92.

Lord, Give Us Shoes That Fit Our Feet Shoes was the worstest trouble. We weared rough russets when it got cold, and it seem powerful strange they’d never git them to fit . . . We prays for the end of tribulation and the end of beatings and for shoes that fit our feet. [Mary Reynolds, ex-slave].

~ Dwight Hopkins. Shoes That Fit Our Feet: Sources for a Constructive Black Theology . Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993, p. viii.

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I. The Power of the Distinctively Christian Tradition

With Christ, the final kingdom began its irruption into this world, and all our created time has become, as the Orthodox theologian Olivier Clement puts it, ‘porous’ to God. Every Sunday, in particular, is a declaration of the eschatological qualification brought to time and history by the resurrection of the crucified Christ from the dead [italics mine]. Over time, though so qualified, is not abolished. The Savior himself ‘needed’ we can infer after the event the years of his earthly life, from the moment of his conception to the day of his ascension, for the multifaceted work of redemption. Moreover, the mystery of God’s design for the world apparently includes the cen turies that have since passed. And still the Parousia has not taken place. What is worked out in time and history will belong, we conclude, to the final kingdom of God, however marvelous the transformation it will undergo in the general resurrection which Christ’s presaged. If the Creator’s saving purpose accommodates

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