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The Church Year

© John L. Hoh, Jr.

Soon many Lutherans will go to church on Sunday morning and see, printed in their church bulletin, the endless refrain of "The Endless Sundays after Pentecost (or Trinity)." To the uninitiated, this may seem boring, trite, or useless. Yet the Christian Church has for centuries observed a church year, complete with an order of scriptural readings throughout that year. Luther retained the continuity and order which the Church year provides and it has been passed down through Lutheran generations since. Lest we think of the church year as just another formality, a closer look reveals that this time-worn tradition of the Church not only has meaning, but a purpose and an organization that helps make clear to us the salvation won for us by Christ on the cross.

The church year is divided into two parts: the festival half and the non-festival half. The festival half focuses on Christ's life in this world and his atoning sacrifice for our sins. It displays the Father's fulfillment of his Old Testament prophecies and the New Testament work of the Spirit in bringing Christians to faith. The non-festival half looks at the Christian life in Christ. It focuses on the Holy Spirit's work of creating and strengthening faith in each believer's heart.

The festival half of the church year contains the three great festivals: Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. At Christmas we see the Father's fulfillment of the promise of a Savior. The evangelists quote the Old Testament authors to show that Jesus is the Messiah sent by the Father to redeem the world. Another way of looking at this is that God gave his Old Testament people an "itinerary" of his upcoming earthly life. Then, when he came, he followed that itinerary.

That itinerary would take Jesus to the next great festival, Easter. At Easter, we celebrate the fulfillment of the law by Jesus and the successful completion of his atonement for all of our sins. The early Church saw this festival as the greatest festival; new converts were usually baptized on Easter Sunday. Christmas itself wasn't celebrated until the third century. To the early Christian, only pagans celebrated someone's birthday. The true birthday to a Christian was the birth into eternal life; hence saint's days commemorate days when the saints died. This was made possible by the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

Pentecost is the third great festival. Here we honor the work of the Holy Spirit who works through the Word and Sacraments to create and strengthen faith in each and every Christian. Thus the three persons of the Trinity and their work are observed each year