by Jim Vondracek
At Augustana (and throughout the church), liturgically we are in the time after Pentecost, sometimes called ordinary time. This part of our church calendar runs until we pick up the story of Jesus again in Advent in the autumn. Our Orthodox brethren follow a tradition that might unlock a new level of meaning for us during this time.
The western church, including Lutherans, celebrate All Saints Day on the first Sunday of November, but the eastern church celebrates it on the Sunday following the Festival of Pentecost. The reasoning behind it, as the Greek Archdiocese puts it, is that All Saints is the harvest of the coming of the Holy Spirit into the world, the “much fruit” brought forth by that seed which fell into the earth. Pentecost is the sowing. All Saints is what came up.
We tend to hear “the time after Pentecost” as the long green stretch when nothing much happens, the season we get through until Advent. The eastern church hears it as the season that is about the fulfillment of Pentecost: the Spirit at patient work in our lives, over decades, making saints out of ordinary people. If we want to extract meaning from that, perhaps it is that the green months are not our off-season, they are the Holy Spirit’s growing season, and the crop is us.
Augustana Lutheran Church of Hyde Park 