"All guests who present themselves
are to be welcomed as Christ."

Sundays after Pentecost

The Easter Season runs for fifty days from Easter Day to the Day of Pentecost.  The next two Sundays are devoted to rare ‘theme’ festivals: the Most Holy Trinity, then Corpus Christi.  Next Sunday, Pentecost 4, begins the long green time of year, a time quite unlike the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter.  In the old prayer book these Sundays were known as “Sundays after Trinity”, but they are better called “Sundays after Pentecost” because Trinity Sunday is itself the first Sunday after Pentecost.  For a while, we experimented with “Ordinary Sundays”, from the Latin where “ordinary” time means “counted” time.  But this really didn’t work in English, where “ordinary” is understand as the opposite of special, and every Sunday is special because it is the weekly festival of the Resurrection.  Some sort of ecumenical consensus seems to have developed around “Sundays after Pentecost”, so we can expect this designation to prevail for the foreseeable future.