Marking Time
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

As I write the leaves are descending upon my yard. It is that time of year when we can stop worrying about getting our grass cut, and start worrying about the leaves. There's something about the smell of fall that wakes me up, that excites me. When I begin to pick up that smell, the memory of a host of other smells comes back to me. I smell the bologna sandwich in my lunchbox from when I was a boy. I smell apple cider, I smell the fire that waited for me every Sunday afternoon after I played football with my friends. They are all good smells, at least to me, and all of them spawned by the leaves, which is, from one perspective, the smell of death and decay. True it is the source of future fecundity, but it is also the end of fecundity.

Smells are like that. While I am a rabid anti-relativist, even I recognize that there are matters of taste, or matters of smell. Some love the smell of napalm in the morning, some love the smell of money. I love not only the smell of fall, but the smell of incense. Recently that love of mine helped to put me in some hot water on the floor of the Westminster Presbytery of the PCA. I had let slip that I believed that incense could have a place in worship. That seemed to bother a few folks, I guess because they think such smells like Rome. And we can't have that.

There's irony here. The Westminster Confession once confessed that Rome, and her pontiff were the anti-Christ. Next to no one believe that any more, but I'm pretty close. I affirm with vigor that they are an anti-Christ, while others in the PCA argue that Rome is home to our brothers and sisters in Christ. This is where we've come to. You can hug Rome, but you'd better not smell like them.

I raise all this not to construct a defense of incense. This is not the smell good issue of the year. We're talking about holy days. I raise this to defend something else that smells like Rome, the church calendar. We don't go hog wild on it at all. I don't know whose feast day it is today. But neither do we go through the year without making ourselves remember the great events in the life of Christ. There was a reason for the calendar, just as there was a reason for many things that Rome did. The church calendar, like preaching exegetically through books of the Bible, helps us make sure that we don't leave anything out. Here is what we remember, every year.

First, like most churches, we celebrate the advent of the coming of Christ. We know that Jesus was not born in December. But because the church remembers this then, so do we. We take the time to consider our need for the coming of the Savior, as we consider our own sins, and those of the world around us. It is good to sing O Come O Come Emmanuel, and to remember that until the kingdom is consummated, we are still held hostage, and need to be ransomed.

Second, we celebrate the birth of Christ. So sue us. We're excited about the incarnation, and all that it means. We delight that God took on flesh and dwelt among us. We remember all that His humiliation for us entailed, and we give thanks.

Third, we remember His entrance into Jerusalem atop a donkey on Palm Sunday. We consider that we too have welcomed Christ as our King, while remembering what is just around the corner. Like those palm waving Jews, we rejoice in Christ when it is safe, when He comes to do our bidding. But like them, on Good Friday, we turn our backs on the obscenity of the cross.

Fourth, we remember His resurrection. As with Christmas, we celebrate honestly, not burying the resurrection under a pile of colored eggs. While we celebrate the resurrection every Lord's Day, indeed we celebrate all these things, still, we confess to remembering in a special way on this day.

Fifth, we celebrate His ascension. Here is perhaps the greatest argument for keeping, at least a little, the church calendar. Do we fail to celebrate the Kingship of our king because we don't believe He is king, or do we not believe that He is king because we have failed to celebrate His coronation? We need to be reminded, especially as our own culture daily denies that Christ is King. We choose to celebrate this great event on that Sunday which falls most closely to the 4^{th of July. We are reminded, while too many of our brothers are pledging allegiance to the flag, that we are loyal to our King, and are citizens of His kingdom. We remember that we are free because of Him, not because of Washington.}

Finally, we also celebrate God's continuing works in history. We celebrate the Reformation, not by backsliding into any Romish superstition of the calendar, but by remembering each year, at a particular time of the year, what God did in a particular time. We celebrate also the anniversary of the founding of our church. We do this not with a picnic, but by remembering how we began. I preach each year from the same text, Joshua 24: 15. Every week we renew covenant. And every year we renew the covenant that we will weekly renew covenant.

All of our lives are liturgical. Such started not in Rome, but in Eden. We move through each week beginning in rest, the rest that Christ won for us in His birth, life, death, resurrection and ascension, to making manifest the kingdom in which we rest, and return the next week to remind ourselves of that rest. The same is true of our years. The habits with which we inhabit time become in time the habits of our hearts. We are not slaves of the calendar, nor of tradition. We are slaves of Jesus Christ, and so mark our lives through the marks in His life.