The period in the Christian liturgical calendar between Epiphany and Ash Wednesday is called "Ordinary Time." That means we are not preparing for or celebrating any of the major holidays of the Church. It feels like an interregnum, or a break, between the more intense celebratory season of the Nativity, and the penitential focus of Lent in which we prepare for Holy Week and the Resurrection.

In other words, it perfectly suits the kind of doldrums we experience in these weeks in our secular lives. The decorations come down, the credit card bills arrive, we get our tax stuff together, and snow is no longer exciting or romantic. (Nobody dreams of a white Groundhog Day.) In our parlance, "ordinary" means boring, tedious, same-old-same-old, and tiresome. Nothing special is going on. It’s too nasty to go outdoors.

The gospel readings for this period usually have to do with the details of Jesus early ministry. He calls his first disciples. He is tempted by Satan in the wilderness. He begins preaching and healing in Galilee. Many of us preachers have dealt with these stories so many times that we don’t always know what else to say about them.

But one of the most powerful things we learn from Jesus is how God is present in the ordinary things and times of our existence. His parables and stories focus on ordinary experiences: lilies in the field, family relationships, the working life, sowing seeds, fishing, birds, children, and so forth. He teaches us that if we don’t perceive God’s Presence in the ordinary things, the things we encounter every day, the normal circumstances of our daily life, then we are unlikely to experience it when things get more interesting and spectacular.

The special things in our lives can be great distractions. They absorb and expend a lot of our energy. We think they are what life is all about. The stuff that gets on the news and makes it into history books; that’s where we tend to think the action is. That is what we think we need to record and remember.

Jesus suggests otherwise. Most of the events that he says "the Kingdom of God is like..." are very ordinary. It is as if he is saying that the Kingdom of God is nothing special. It doesn’t take superhuman strength or a supernatural shattering of the laws of space and time. It is neither in our peak experiences nor our depths of despair that we are most likely to experience God. Rather, it is in the ordinary events where God most readily appears.

Our Puritan forebears dispensed with most of the Christian year as lacking in Biblical warrant. Ditching most holidays and seasons, they retained mainly the weekly Lord’s Day, which represented the Resurrection. In other words, instead of the cycles of the liturgical calendar, they celebrated 52 Easters. While this was impossible to sustain over the generations, it did serve to sanctify time in a new way. It leveled the year by smoothing over the extraordinary, and at the same time lifting up the ordinary as the main locus of salvation.

I am not suggesting a return to Puritan practice. The liturgical calendar expresses the continuity between the cycles of the Earth and the cycles of God’s revelation showing how creation is itself gospel. But we do need to learn from them to focus on the daily, weekly, regular, and ordinary. For it is when nothing is going on that we need to cultivate most our awareness of what God is doing among, within, and around us. It is when nothing is going on that the most is really happening.

Even in the silent depths of January, the crocuses and daffodils are loading up. Ordinary time is anything but boring and tedious. It is the only time when we can hear what is normally drowned out by bigger events. This is important because in ordinary time we perceive the deep background of God’s grace that is always sustaining us.

Let’s listen for what God is doing in the quiet and routine of winter... not to equip ourselves for the "more important" times, commemorations, and celebrations... but just to know what is always there, always sustaining us, and always drawing us home.