c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) It all looks so orderly.

A new church year starts next Sunday (Dec. 2). We end Year C in the liturgical calendar and start back with Year A. This time next year, we’ll start Year B, and the cycle continues.

With a new church year starting on Advent, Gospel readings in the lectionary will change from Luke to Matthew. Four Sundays of Advent lead predictably into familiar Christmas rituals, and on through a 12-month cycle that purports to see time as circular.

Actual time, meanwhile, is linear. Housing prices have dropped 20 percent in some areas since Advent 2006. Millions of homeowners are paying the price for foolish and greedy lending behavior. Unemployment is rising, retailers anticipate a difficult holiday season and, except among politicians in denial, the word “recession” now is followed by the last remaining question, “How deep?”

That’s just the economy. War news also is linear, with some deja vu from the Vietnam War quagmire, but mostly the constant surprises of warring parties whose religious calendars might be circular but whose behavior is dictated by linear strategies and fluctuating confidence.

No less linear are the changing fortunes of presidential candidates, their poll-driven messages and a determination to escape awkward precedent. So also the hard realities facing this year’s high school seniors: record numbers applying to college, tuition bills rising at twice the rate of inflation and, surprise, no style points for having mastered text-messaging.

This linear tale could go on and on. In fact, at the level where we live, it does. Family issues are different this year, not a reprise of some prior cycle. Our sense of personal well-being might be up, it might be down, but it is unlikely to be a repeat of last Advent, or of Advent 2004, the last time the church lectionary rotated from Year C back to Year A.

Bringing out Advent’s purple vestments might seem a comforting routine to church insiders. But what does it say to the man whose wife died in the final months of Year C? Is the pain suddenly gone with a fresh church calendar?

We might enjoy stepping primly through four Sundays dedicated to four pieces of the Messianic story, but if you are a homeowner whose job is gone and whose house can’t be sold, can a clever homiletic maneuver make the annual devotion to, say, Mary into an answer to anxiety?

In doing what we enjoy doing and asking our constituents to go along with it, we offer a strange view of God. Instead of presenting God as the steadfast guide through 40 rugged and thoroughly linear years in the wilderness, we present God as having a 12-month attention span and a determination to recycle former days.

It’s almost as if, to God, nothing is ever new _ not even our pain or joy.

At the heart of our conceit of circularity is a God who orders time by predetermined habit, not a God who stops to hear a blind beggar.

At the risk of offending centuries of liturgical tradition, I think we are missing the point. Church insiders find solace and direction in the circular routines of church year and liturgical rituals. What do we need to be doing this year? Well, what we did last year, of course.

In my opinion, we don’t serve well when we impose a circular, orderly, nicely ritualistic view of God’s time onto linear lives. They are lives that are proceeding, not by the reappearance of the label “Advent,” but by the actual trajectory of life from “2007” into “2008.”

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)

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KRE DS END EHRICH