Life inside the beltway is, as all Washingtonians know, just a bit different from life anywhere else.  Not only are we influenced by the closeness of our lives to the thrones of power and policymaking--yet the very rhythms of our lives are governed by the calendar of federal holidays.  Summer begins not when schools get out, but when government workers get off for Memorial Day weekend. Then Labor Day sends the tourists home and brings the lawmakers back to the start of a new legislative year. 

Yet in a time not so long ago, and in a galaxy no further away than the horse country of central Virginia, America was a nation whose rhythms were not federal but agricultural. School lasted until planting and livestock-breeding season, when all hands were needed in farm families large and small.  Summer vacations coincided with the growing season, when there were crops to tend and yearlings to feed and raise for the livestock-sales each fall.  And then school waited a bit longer until the autumn harvest was well underway, and the strong backs of youth could be spared for the seemingly lighter work of learning. 

Even urban Episcopalians still follow a church calendar that packs all the major feasts - from Advent, through Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter and Pentecost - into the period of time each year that stretches from when one year's crops were taken into the barns until the time that the next year's crops were in the ground but not yet needing tending.

Our altar guild this time of year breathes a sigh of relief when someone looks up at the color-coded liturgical calendar in the Fisher Room and notices that it's time to embrace the coming of the green -the green of the stoles and chasubles we wear reflecting the abundance of spring and summer.

I like to think of this season-marked by our green vestments, as our liturgical "take a deep breath time."  For weeks and weeks, then months and months, this season of the Sundays after Pentecost stretches out in front of us like the comfortable green pastures that the poet imagined when writing the 23^rd Psalm.  In the Roman Catholic tradition this is referred to as ‘ordinary time'.  It's a season without major religious festivals or holidays, and it flows out towards the horizon of autumn in such an endless procession of weeks that as a child I remember wondering each summer: "will it ever end"? 

Ordinary time in the church year is the season of God's Spirit at work in the world.  It's the season for us to take time to appreciate God's constant presence in our midst - a God dreaming of being invited into the ordinary of our days.  This is just one of the reasons our parish retreat takes place in May-to ponder together, as spiritual community-what it means to inhale with our whole selves, the favor of God.

The long season after Pentecost is like an extended Sabbath-time, a time to step back from doing more, so that we can look back over this past year to examine our spiritual journeys with Jesus, both as individuals and as a community striving to give Jesus hands and feet in our world.  Let me make clear however, that Sabbath-time, as I experience it, isn't time off from being God's people. Sabbath time is what it looks like to be thankful -- so grateful for God's love for the world around us -- that we invite God to ever more deeply transform us into a community of radical inclusion.  Matthew's gospel extends us one of these radical invitations to us this morning.