One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. – Romans. 14:5
Of the Worship of Saints they teach that the memory of saints may be set before us, that we may follow their faith and good works, according to our calling – Augsburg Confession Article 21
Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. – Colossians. 2:16-17
Christians have been arguing about calendars since Apostolic times. And those arguments never really stopped. Hence the two opening quotes. And when you argue about calendars you are arguing about piety, practice and remembrance. You are arguing about what people think is important. Many such arguments can simply be settled “you respect yours, I respect mine.” You can hear that argument in the Apostle Paul. But calendar arguments, because it is hard to keep your own calendar, often become group defining. “We are going to remember this date.”
The very first of those definitional dates would be over the Sabbath. The Apostles, being Jews, kept the Sabbath, on Saturday. They then met together on “the Lord’s Day” or Sunday, the day of resurrection. For example Paul is searching for the local Jewish gathering “on the Sabbath day” (Acts 16:13), but at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 there is no mention of telling the gentiles to keep the Sabbath. And by the time of John’s visions in Revelation, they come to him as “I was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day (Revelation 1:10).” You can hear those arguments in that third quote at the start. Paul telling his gentile audiences that Sabbaths are a shadow of the substance of Christ. Meeting on Sunday is good and proper.
I’m talking about Calendars for two reasons. The first is that this Sunday gets a special name – St. Michael and All Angels. The church calendar that we follow has a general structure – the large seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter and Pentecost. For half the year we follow the life of Christ, and for the other half we emphasize the life in the Spirit. We gather on the “the Lord’s Day”. We are the people of the resurrection. We remember that substance of Christ weekly. Within that general calendar there the “feasts and festivals.” The actual dates never change. All Saints is always November 1st. But some of them, like All Saints, we move their observance to the nearest Sunday. We have deemed their witness and memory too important to skip, yet we do not feel compelled to gather on the odd Tuesday Nov 1st. Most of those festivals we observe occasionally, which means when their day falls on a Sunday naturally, so due to leap years every 6-14 years. St. Michael and all Angels is one of those days. It is always September 29th. When September 29th is a Sunday, we remember the angels. There are also some feasts that honestly, we just don’t remember. When I served St. Mark’s in West Henrietta, I tried to observe April 25th, the feast day of St. Mark. At Mt. Zion there is no such special connection.
And that gets into the second reason I’m talking about calendars. I tend to think that our everyday lives and most of what takes place in them is designed to flatten everything. The World does this in two ways. If anyone saw the original Pixar Incredibles movie, it has one of the most subversive lines I can remember. “And when everyone is super, no one is.” There is something about our age that reacts against “the memory of the saints being set before us.” Our world wants equality or even equity. The acknowledgement that someone – a saint – lived it better is subversive. So it levels all days, and days it can’t level it elevates everything to obscure the remembrance of the saint. But I just don’t think that is either reality or the needs of true humanity.
We need things to strive for. Every Olympic athlete ponders how can I break the world record. The memory of the saints is so that we may follow their faith and good works. We need feast days like we need fast days, and ordinary time (another name for the season of Pentecost). Because life is not flat. We need days to remember St. Michael and the angels, because we need to ponder that creation includes “things visible and invisible”. And that those invisible things do impact our existence. When the world wants to flatten everything, the Christian needs to hear the distant triumph song. There are things the world wants us to forget that we need to remember.