This short bit (a few seven weeks, this year) of Ordinary Time bridges the time between the season of Christmas and the beginning of Lent (February 26). It is the time -- as celebrated in New Orleans and Louisiana -- the season of Mardi Gras.

But this is not "down time" to rest (or party) between busy liturgical seasons. Besides continuing the celebration of the pashcal mystery at Sunday Eucharist, here at St Columba we celebrate our African American Celebrations series: beginning with honoring the Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr on January 19 and going through February 23. We welcome guest preachers (see "African American Celebration Series" under News/Events) at all our weekend liturgies to break open the theme of "Servant Leadership." 

We celebrate the gift of our blackness among ourselves, but also sharing that gift with the wider community and the world. "We have come this far by faith, leaning on the Lord," and giving thanks for his many blessings of healing and forgiving and consecrating. Because we have survived and have thrived we are called to lead, to share and to celebrate "Servant Leadership: Preserving the Legacy of Christ."

Come and see! Come and join us!

                                                        

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"We cannot talk about Ordinary Time without speaking of Sunday. The every seventh-day celebration of the Lord’s Day is the basic structure upon which the Church Year is built. The great liturgical seasons of Advent-Christmas and Lent-Easter are more expensive celebrations of particular aspects of the one paschal mystery which we celebrate every Lord’s Day. These special seasons focus our attention upon critical dimensions of one mystery, a mystery so overwhelming that we are compelled to separate out its various elements for particular attention.

"Ordinary Time is not very ordinary at all. Ordinary Time, the celebration of Sunday, is the identifying mark of the Christian community which comes together, remembering that on this first day of the week the Lord of Life was raised up and creation came at last to completion. Sunday as a day of play and worship is a sacrament of redeemed time. How we live Sunday proclaims to the world what we believe about redeemed time now and forever.

"What happens in our churches every Sunday is the fruit of our week. What happens as the fruit of the week past is the beginning of the week to come. Sunday, like all sacraments, is simultaneously a point of arrival and departure for Christians on the way to the fullness of the kin’dom. This is not ordinary at all. This is the fabric of Christian living."

—from Saint Andrew Bible Missal

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