Why I Use "Proper #" Instead of "# Sunday after Pentecost"

If you've picked up a Tunica bulletin lately, you may have noticed the season listed as "Ordinary Time · Proper 9A" rather than "Seventh Sunday after Pentecost." That's not an accident, and it's not me being difficult. It's a small act of precision that I think matters more than it looks like it does.

THREE NAMES, THREE JOBS

The Revised Common Lectionary itself is not tidy about this. Its own heading for this stretch of the year reads "Season after Pentecost (Ordinary Time)" — both names, side by side, treated as roughly equivalent. So I'm not correcting anybody who says "the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost." That phrase is legitimate and long-used.

But I'd argue the three common names for this season are actually doing three different jobs, and collapsing them into one phrase costs us something.

"Ordinary Time" names the season itself. "Proper 9A" identifies the specific readings the RCL appoints for that calendar Sunday, in Year A of the three-year cycle. "The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost" counts the Sunday's distance from a movable feast.

Only the first two are actually naming the season and its content. The third is telling you how far you've traveled since the last major feast day — which is useful information, but it isn't a name. It's an odometer reading.

WHAT "ORDINARY" ACTUALLY MEANS

Here's where a lot of people get tripped up. "Ordinary" in Ordinary Time doesn't mean plain, unremarkable, or filler. It comes from the Latin ordinalis — the word for numbers in a series, the root that gives us "ordinal" and "order." The Sundays of this season are simply numbered rather than named for a specific mystery of Christ the way Advent points to the Incarnation or Lent points to the cross.

So Ordinary Time isn't the liturgical waiting room. It's ordered time — the numbered weeks represent the ordered life of the Church, the long stretch in which we're not feasting and not fasting, just walking with Jesus through the bulk of his teaching and ministry. In fairness, not every liturgical scholar accepts this derivation without qualification — some have pushed back on how well-documented the ordinalis connection actually is in the earliest sources. But whatever its precise philological pedigree, the theological point stands on its own: this season doesn't need Pentecost to justify its existence. It has its own integrity.

WHY I DON'T COUNT BACKWARD FROM PENTECOST

Here's my actual objection, stated plainly: naming an entire season "after" the last feast we celebrated treats that season as an appendix — a long green afterthought trailing behind the fireworks of Pentecost. It defines the present entirely by its distance from the past.

I don't want to name half the church year that way. Pentecost concludes the Easter cycle. What follows doesn't need to be described only in relation to what came before it. It gets to stand on its own two feet, with its own name and its own reason for being.

That's why the bulletin says "Proper 9A." It tells you two true things at once: what season we're in (Ordinary Time), and which readings we're gathered around this week (Proper 9, Year A). It doesn't need a third piece of information — how many Sundays it's been since Pentecost — to be complete.

A SMALL THING, BUT NOT A SMALL THING

I know this sounds like liturgical trivia. Maybe it is. But I think the words we use to name our time shape how we experience that time. If you spend thirty-some weeks a year being told you're living in the afterglow of a feast that's already over, it's easy to drift through Ordinary Time waiting for the next big thing on the calendar. If instead you understand yourself to be in an ordered, purposeful season with its own appointed readings each week — that's a different posture. Less waiting room, more formation.

So: Proper 9A it is. Not because I'm quirky about numbers, but because I think Ordinary Time deserves to be named for what it is, not for how long it's been since Pentecost.