After fifteen weeks of Lent and Easter, after the arc from SEE to BURN, after Pentecost and Trinity Sunday and Corpus Christi, we arrive at Ordinary Time. And I want to tell you what that means for Saint Francis Parish and Outreach this summer, because the word ordinary does not mean what most people think it means.
In the liturgical calendar, Ordinary Time is called ordinary not because it is routine or unremarkable but because the weeks are numbered. The Latin root is ordinalis: counted, ordered, in sequence. Ordinary Time is the counted time of the year, the long season of growth between the great feasts, the weeks when the Church is not celebrating a particular mystery of Christ’s life but is living out the implications of everything it has already celebrated.
The implications of everything we have celebrated since Ash Wednesday are significant. And this summer, we are going to spend eight weeks sitting with those implications in a very specific way.
Introducing the Series: The Kingdom Worth Everything
This Sunday we begin a new eight-week series called The Kingdom Worth Everything: Costly Discipleship in Ordinary Time. It runs from June 14 through August 2, and it is designed to do two things simultaneously: look outward at what the kingdom of God looks like in the world, and look inward at what it costs the disciple to be someone who builds it.
The series runs alongside our Thursday evening book study on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship. Bonhoeffer published that book in 1937, while directing an illegal seminary for the Confessing Church in Germany, the community of theologians and pastors who refused to let the Nazi regime take over the Protestant churches. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and executed at Flossenburg concentration camp on April 9, 1945, three weeks before the end of the war in Europe. He was thirty-nine years old.
He opened The Cost of Discipleship with a sentence that has stayed with me since the first time I read it: “Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of our church.” And the alternative he offered was not expensive grace, grace that you pay for, but costly grace: grace that forms you, changes you, demands something of you, and produces in you the kind of person who cannot simply look the other way when the world requires a witness.
The series has eight words, one for each Sunday. Taken together they describe the shape of costly discipleship for a community like ours in a moment like this.
CALLED (June 14, Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time)
SPEAK (June 21, Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time)
CROSS (June 28, Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time)
YOKE (July 5, Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time)
GROUND (July 12, Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time)
PATIENCE (July 19, Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time)
WORTH (July 26, Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time)
ENOUGH (August 2, Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time)
Each word opens a specific text from the Roman Catholic Lectionary for Year A. Each word also connects to a chapter or theme in Bonhoeffer’s argument. And each word carries a specific claim about what this community’s life together looks like in August, in the South, in 2026, when the cost of discipleship is not a historical abstraction.
This Sunday: CALLED
The first word of the series is CALLED, and it comes from one of the most important single verses in the Gospel of Matthew.
Jesus is looking at the crowds. Matthew tells us he had compassion on them, because they were distressed and were reclining, like sheep without a shepherd. The Greek behind those words is visceral. These are not people who are a little spiritually unfulfilled. They are people who have been worked over by life and left where they fell. And Jesus sees them with a compassion that the New Testament consistently describes as coming from the gut, from the deepest place in a person.
And then he says to his disciples: the harvest indeed is great, but the laborers are few.
I want to preach about the call that comes out of that seeing. Not the call that comes after you have made yourself worthy or sorted out your theology or resolved every doubt. The call that comes while you are still in the middle of all of it. Paul tells the Romans that God demonstrates his love in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. The call does not wait for us to be ready. It meets us in the field, distressed and reclining, and it sends us to find the others who are there too.
The kingdom worth everything begins with a seeing. Come and hear what that means for this community, in this city, in this summer.
Augusta Pride: We Need to Get There
I want to close this blog post with a direct appeal, because Augusta Pride is this month and we are running out of time.
We need $775 to have a Saint Francis Parish and Outreach booth at Augusta Pride 2026. The connection between that booth and the series we are beginning this Sunday is not accidental. The kingdom worth everything includes the queer people of Augusta who have been told by every religious institution in their lives that God does not want them. The costly discipleship Bonhoeffer writes about includes being physically present in the places that matter, with your name on a sign, saying what you believe out loud.
A booth at Pride is not a gesture. It is the series word CALLED made visible outside the sanctuary. We were called to see the distressed and the thrown-down and go to them. Augusta Pride is one of the places they will be.
If you believe in what this community is doing this summer, give what you can and share this need with people who care about this kind of ministry. Every dollar helps.
Venmo: @saintfrancisparish
PayPal: paypal.me/saintfrancisparish
Cash App: $saintfrancisparish
See you Sunday. The harvest is great, the laborers are few, and the kingdom is worth everything it costs.
Pax et Bonum,
Bishop Greer