Second, and more important, at this late date A.D. the church is hardly in the position of muscling the culture away from its calendars toward those of Christendom. Instead, we are in an urgently evangelistic and missional posture, continually negotiating a hearing, proclaiming the good news to a society no longer automatically interested in our pronouncements, under the terrible and exhilarating obligation of winning the right to be heard—for our faith, our convictions, our gospel, and our ways of marking time. In other words, our job is not to blow the whistle on the culture and put them in the penalty box until they learn how to count the Sundays to Lent. Our job, instead, is to walk that pathway ourselves, to move with Christ from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, and to announce with joy to all who will listen — even those who haven’t the foggiest notion of epiphany or transfiguration or baptism of the Lord, what good news and trustworthy promises are meant for them.