Show Notes
In this episode of Peaceable and Kind, Derek Vreeland discusses the significance of the Christian calendar, particularly focusing on the season of Epiphany. He emphasizes the importance of observing the Christian calendar for spiritual formation and understanding the story of Jesus. Derek explains how the calendar creates culture, tells the story of Jesus, and provides a rhythm for Christian life. He highlights the revelation of Jesus as the King of all people during Epiphany and encourages listeners to embrace the rhythms of the Christian calendar to grow in love and kindness.
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Transcript
Narrator: Welcome to Peaceable and Kind, the podcast where we explore the transformation. Of living out Jesus’ call to peace and kindness in our everyday lives. Each week your host, Derek Vreeland, will delve into the stories, scriptures, and practical steps that help us embody these essential Christian virtues.
Derek Vreeland: Welcome back to another episode of Peaceable in Kind. I am your host, Derek Vreeland. And I have not had the opportunity to wish you a happy new year. So glad that you are tracking along with us here on Peaceable and Kind. And if you haven’t subscribed, go ahead and Click subscribe right now so you can receive other episodes like this one. And if you are looking to form new habits, If you’re looking to do something new in 2025, how about leave a rating or review that helps other people discover Christian content like this? Well, in the liturgical calendar, the Christian calendar, we are in the season of Epiphany. We celebrate the Epiphany on January 6th every year. It marks the end of the Christmas season. And it’s the in-between time, in between Christmas and Lent So today I want to talk a little bit about Epiphany and what’s happening with this very important day and celebration and season. on the Christian calendar, but maybe you are like me and you didn’t grow up with a calendar. Maybe if you’re like me, you didn’t grow up with the seasons of Advent or Lent, and you never heard of Epiphany. And that’s okay. There are a number of Christian traditions that are just simply unfamiliar with the Christian calendar, also called the church year or the liturgical calendar. And so I want to talk about Epiphany today, but maybe I should back up And talk a little bit about the value of the Christian calendar. Because for me personally, observing The Christian calendar with all of its seasons, with its holidays, its celebrations In a traditional sense, they will speak of feast days, but in observing this calendar, I have found it to be so vital in how I understand spiritual formation and how I experience it This is for us the great goal of our Christian experience Not just to learn more about Jesus, but to become more like Jesus. This is what I have devoted my entire life towards. I want to be more like Jesus. You know, even though people will often have negative opinions about the church. And as a side note, I’m working to change that. As a pastor and church leader, I want to change people’s perception about the church. But even though people popularly will have a negative opinion about the church, it’s rare to find people who have a negative opinion about Jesus. Jesus, two thousand years later, still has a popular reputation And I think that’s good. I say that in the church, this is the best thing we have. The best thing we have going for us in the church is Jesus. And so for all of the failures of church people, for all of the failures of church leadership And the church historically, we can look at all those failures and say they did not live up to the standard of Jesus. We are failing to look like Jesus. I have been a Christian now, I’ve been following Jesus my entire adult life. For 35 years I’ve been intentionally a Christian and I’m still intrigued by Jesus. I’m still fascinated by Jesus. He continues to surprise me, particularly when he shows up in surprising ways, as I’m reading the scriptures, even now I will come across something Jesus is saying And I’m intrigued. And so the best thing we have going for us is Jesus. And I want you to make this the goal of your life. is to become more like Jesus. So you think like Jesus, see the world like Jesus, treat people like Jesus, have the character of Jesus. That that’s what I want. We see that in a number of places in the scriptures. In Galatians 4, Paul says that he is laboring until Christ is formed in us. And so for me, observing the Christian calendar has been maybe the most significant practice and rhythm that I’ve adopted in the last fifteen years or so that has helped me grow to become more like Jesus. So before we jump into our discussion of Epiphany, I got a few thoughts about the Christian calendar. And I think this will help you, particularly if you didn’t grow up in traditions that observe the calendar. So a few thoughts. First, calendar creates culture. One of the things I’m trying to do as a pastor and a church leader is not just package up more information that I can deliver. Certainly I want to do that. That’s what I’m doing right now. So in my teaching or writing and with this podcast, I am trying to teach. I’m trying to share information, things that I’ve learned, things that I find interesting. But as a church leader, I want to create a culture because culture is what forms and shapes people. You are shaped by the culture you grew up in, whether you realize it or not. Culture is the air that we breathe. If we can imagine ourselves as fish in the sea, culture is the ocean around us. We swim in it and we don’t even realize that it’s there. So if you’re like me and you’re growing up in late 20th century, early 21st century America, you are shaped by American culture, by American values. And I believe that calendar creates a certain kind of culture. And in our life of discipleship in following Jesus, we’re not doing that as a solo project. We’re doing that together. And as we are worshiping together, following Jesus together, this is the life of the church, we are going to be formed and shaped by the culture around us. And so I think that the Christian calendar forms a certain kind of culture when we emphasize the seasons, when we lean into the seasons. The second thing I wanted to say about the calendar in general is that the Christian calendar tells the story of Jesus. Again, I’ve already told you the best thing we have going for us is Jesus. And why I love the calendar is it helps us to tell the story of Jesus. So the calendar begins with Advent, which is normally the end of November, beginning of December. Advent is marked by the four Sundays before the Christmas celebration. So Advent is about preparing. for Christmas. And then Christmas, December 25th, is not just one day, but a 12-day celebration. That leads us all the way up to January 6th. January 6th is the Epiphany. And we’re going to talk more about that, so I’ll pause my thoughts about Epiphany. We’ll get there in a moment And Epiphany is a day, and at least for some Christians, then Epiphany becomes that season in between Christmas and Lent. Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, and Lent is a 40-day season leading up to The death of Jesus, that’s Good Friday, then there’s Holy Saturday, and then Easter Sunday. So Lent is a season that prepares us for Easter Easter is such an important celebration for Christians. It marks the resurrection of Jesus, which is the linchpin of our faith. And Easter is so important that we need a season to prepare for it. So in entering into the sorrow suffering what we call the passions of Jesus that lead to his ultimate crucifixion and death, we have a whole season for that. It’s the season of Lent Then with Easter Sunday, we enter into a new season, the season of Easter, also called Easter Tide. And it is a seven-week celebration. So Lent is about six weeks. It’s a time for fasting. Easter is a time for feasting. So we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus for seven weeks, and Easter then lands us at Pentecost Sunday. Pentecost is where we mark the Spirit of Jesus, the Holy Spirit being poured out on the people of Jesus. So did you notice the trajectory? Advent prepares us for the birth of Jesus. Christmas celebrating the birth of Jesus. Epiphany about the revelation of Jesus. We’ll talk about that in just a second. Which leads us into Holy Week and the crucifixion, Good Friday, the death of Jesus, and then Easter, the resurrection of Jesus, up until the point of Pentecost. Where we see the Spirit of Jesus being poured out upon us. This for me, when I first latched on to the Christian calendar, this is what was so compelling for me. that we were able to tell the story of Jesus. Now this part of the calendar runs about six months on the secular calendar. From the end of November, beginning of December, all the way through the end of May, normally the beginning of June. So for June up into November, we call that ordinary time So the liturgical calendar only matches up with about six months, but every six months we are telling the story of Jesus, and that’s so important. Next thought is that you may not be familiar with the liturgical calendar, but you’re already celebrating two major holidays on that calendar, Christmas and Easter. And if you search your Bible, you’re not going to find those two words. Christmas and Easter are seasons given to us on the calendar. And because they are so important. We have seasons to prepare for them. Advent preparing us for Christmas, Lent preparing us for Easter. And while the liturgical seasons are not mentioned in the Bible, They are traditions given to us by the same people who gave us the Bible. This is why I never knew about the calendar growing up Because you won’t find the words Advent or Christmas or Lent or Epiphany, Eastertide, Easter. You don’t see these words in the Bible. Now, you have heard from me if you’ve listened to other podcast episodes and know that for me, the Bible is important. It is sacred. It is the inspired word of God. I read it every day. It is a valuable component in my own spiritual formation. The Bible is important, but if we are to grow up as Christians, we need more than the Bible. We need tradition And tradition has gotten a bad rap because certainly tradition can overwhelm our intentionality, our heart’s devotion. tradition can become merely ritual and a going through of the motions tradition and those who are traditional Christians can lose the vibrancy of their faith But what I’m going to argue is that we need both vibrancy and intentionality in our faith, and we need tradition Tradition is where we recognize that we as modern people don’t have it all figured out. There have been Christians for 2,000 years who have been walking with Jesus. And if we modern people can humble ourselves a bit and look pre-enlightenment to the historic Christian faith, We’re going to find traditions that are helpful in forming us in the ways of Jesus and forming us into the image of Jesus Jeroslav Pelikin was the 20th century church history professor at Yale. He was Lutheran and then towards the end of his life converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. But Pelican famously wrote, tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And certainly it is traditionalism that gives tradition a bad rap. But tradition is the living faith. of those who have followed Jesus before us, and we all have traditions. We all have little rituals and habits and routines that we do. Even non-traditional churches have their traditions. Some people want to use the Bible only. And because they have this inclination towards tradition or ritual, they look in the Bible and they see Jewish traditions in the Old Testament and they want to start practicing that. Now that impulse towards tradition and ritual, sacred practices is good, but non Jewish people don’t need to practice Jewish traditions. We have Christian traditions. And one of those is this Christian calendar. And what I’ve seen for me is that it Has created healthy spiritual rhythms for my day, for the months, and for the year So here we are in a new calendar year. It’s 2025. This is the time when people start talking about New Year’s resolutions. Maybe you made resolutions. Maybe you’ve broken those resolutions already. But I have found that in the Christian journey, rhythms and habits are more valuable than resolutions and goals. So maybe here in January, the beginning of a new calendar year on the secular calendar, you can Start practicing new rhythms. And I think the Christian calendar gives us a rhythm to center our faith on Jesus So here we are in the season of Epiphany. We just celebrated the Epiphany January 6th. And this is a time when we recall The revelation of Jesus to the non-Jewish Gentile world. Epiphany is a season for revelation Human reason is good, but will only get us so far. We need revelation from God to see things as they are. Reason has its place in the Christian faith. As I have done theology over the years, I like the grid. that has been given to us from the Wesleyan tradition. It’s called the Wesleyan quadrilateral. And there are four quadrants in which we think about who God is and how God works in the world. And the four are scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. Of course, it starts with scripture. This is our inspired text. This is the table at which we all come to to discuss who God is and what God is doing. Next is tradition. We’ve already talked about that today, the importance of listening to ancient Christians. Tradition is the summation of wisdom from the past. And then there is human reason. God has given us an intellect, has given us the means by which we can explore things and pose questions and wrestle with things Aquinas would speak of human beings as rational animals. What separates us from animals is that we not only have impulses and desires and appetites, but that we have the ability to reason. And it is then reason That allows us to access ourselves and self-awareness, and then also gives us the tools to open ourselves up to God awareness. So reason is good, but in the Western world, since the Enlightenment, and certainly for people living in the United States the values of the Enlightenment dominate our culture, and in the Enlightenment reason gets elevated to the top seat. What’s most important in how we live life is to think things out And Jesus certainly wants us to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, so there’s a place for human reason But I think we modern people have elevated our own ability to understand things way too high It’s how a secular culture dominates. When we say we don’t need God, we don’t need the quote-unquote fairy tales from the past. We are smart, enlightened, reasonable, intelligent human beings. We can figure out things on our own And certainly, human reason has led to the explosive growth of the sciences, medical science in particular. I appreciate that we have modern cardiology, for example. We figured out the human heart. We know lots of things that we can do to fix hearts, and that’s great. But human intellect and reason has also created atomic bombs. So reason can only get us so far And in the season of Epiphany, we remember that we also need to rely on God’s revelation. We need God to pull back the curtain and reveal things to us. So in the season of Epiphany, we receive the revelation that Jesus Was born in a Jewish family, but it’s not just the Jewish king. He’s the king of all people. He is the savior of the world Now, Jesus came as a fulfillment of the Jewish law and the Jewish prophets. He was the one they were talking about So as we read in the Old Testament, and I read from the Old Testament every day, I was in Genesis this morning. As we read from the Old Testament, We are reading in the law and the prophets, things that they are saying about the coming of God’s King, God’s Messiah. They’re talking about Jesus. They just don’t know that in the Old Testament So Epiphany is this revelation that Jesus is the Jewish king. The word they would use is Messiah. And that’s important to start there. To understand Jesus and all the New Testament writers, you have to understand them in their Jewish context Jesus came at a particular time in history to a particular people in a particular Jewish culture. But this revelation in Epiphany is that not only is Jesus the fulfillment of the Jewish law and prophets, not only is he the Jewish Messiah. But he is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the King and Savior of all people. And so this season is marked by the visit of the Magi You remember those wise men who traveled from the east? They saw the star in the sky, and they traveled to worship the newborn king. Now, the story of the wise men, that that gets wrapped up into the Christmas story. So at our church, we have a beautiful candlelight Christmas Eve service. Last year we did three candlelight communion Christmas Eve services and we do a live nativity. with live actors and live animals. So we have a real donkey. His name’s Django, by the way. He comes to us from a family in Oklahoma. He’s been the same donkey we’ve used for years, but but Django the Donkey will will enter into our sanctuary. Mary riding upon the donkey, Joseph holding a lantern. uh by her side. Uh then we have shepherds that will enter in our sanctuary and they will be bringing with them at least two sheep. And then we have wise men who enter our sanctuary riding on camels. Real camels And it’s funny, I always say that our Christmas Eve service is about preparing to celebrate for the birth of Jesus, and we’re there for Jesus, but I know a lot of people are there just to see live camels in our church. And I love the live nativity. I think it’s beautiful. And what we typically do as Christians is we wrap the story of the wise men. coming to bring their gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh. We wrap that up into the Christmas story, but it really belongs to Epiphany. Because here are these pagan, non-Jewish Persians who travel from a far away Gentile land to come worship Jesus. Why is that Why do they acknowledge Jesus’ birth as the birth of a king? Because the Jewish Messiah is king of all nations. So we have that story, the visit of the magi, the wise men, the three kings. That’s emphasized in Epiphany, and so is the baptism of Jesus. The first Sunday after the Epiphany on the liturgical calendar is the baptism of our Lord Sunday. It’s the day that we remember Jesus’ baptism. Now, the baptism of Jesus was not for Jesus himself, because John the Baptist was baptizing people in the Jordan, the Jordan River The same river the ancient people of God cross through into the promised land. John the Baptist is baptizing people in the Jordan River as a baptism of repentance. And Jesus is baptized by John. But he’s not baptized because Jesus needed to repent. Rather, this was an act of revelation. Jesus had to cross through the Jordan River because Jesus was fulfilling not only the law and the prophets, but the entire story of Israel. So there was a new crossing of the Jordan River, a revelation that God was doing a new thing, that God was establishing a new covenant So that moving forward through faith in Jesus, the people of God would not only be Jewish people, but non-Jewish people. Both Jews and Gentiles would be worshipping the Messiah. So Jesus comes to be baptized by John And as Jesus is plunged into the water, when he comes up out of the water, there is a dove that descends and rests on the shoulder of Jesus, and then there is a voice from heaven. The voice of God the Father. And one of the reasons that I love this story in the Gospels is it is a clear picture of God the Trinity. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You hear the voice of the Father. You see the Son being baptized. You also see the Spirit in the form of a dove descending and resting on the shoulder of Jesus. But the revelation that takes place At the baptism of Jesus is what God the Father has to say. God the Father says, This is my beloved Son. In him I am well pleased. Listen to him. I love that before the Son, Jesus, begins his public ministry God the Father is already proud of him. God the Father is like one of those parents at a youth soccer game or youth baseball game and God the Father is watching his son kick the winning goal or hit a home run. And like those parents Who line the field at Usports, God leaps out of his seat and shouts with joy about how much he loves his son And in this baptism, not only is God revealing something new, a new covenant is coming, just like the Hebrew prophets said. But that Jesus is God’s Son, and we are to listen to him, we are to follow him, whether you are Jewish or not Jewish And then in the rest of the New Testament, particularly in the letters of Paul, the biblical writers are trying to work out what it looks like in the light of this new revelation. that the people of God in this new covenant, a new covenant established by Jesus Himself, Jesus is the sacrificial lamb, his blood is the blood of a new covenant, what does it look like for the people of God to no longer simply be Jewish, but to be Jews and Gentiles loving together, living together in community. Following the Messiah, following the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world Epiphany is a reminder of our need for revelation to enter into the light of God’s revelation that is in Jesus Because in Jesus, we see what God is like, and we also see the kind of people we can become: people of love and kindness. So as you enter into a new calendar year, let me encourage you to pick up the rhythms of the Christian calendar. Enter into this season of Epiphany. Prepare yourself for Lent which is coming. Because as we do that, and as we do this together, I believe we will become more like Jesus We will grow as people of love and kindness. Well, that’s all I have for today. Thanks for joining me for this episode. Go in peace and be kind.
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.