Desiring the Kingdom (): Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Cultural Liturgies Book 1)

by James K. A. Smith

On the other hand, many of the secular liturgies of marketing play off of our deep knowledge of our faults and failures, but transform them into phenomena that yield shame but not guilt. In response, they promise not forgiveness or pardon, but opportunities to correct the problem via various goods and services. In this sense, they seem to require confession but make no promise of pardon or peace. In contrast to both, the rite of confession and assurance in Christian worship counters such secular liturgies by immersing us in a weekly practice that reminds us of a fundamental fracture that we find in ourselves and our world—and of the consequences of our choices. It forces us to be honest with God and ourselves about our complicity in injustice as well as to face up to the ways that we’ve failed to be good husbands or wives, daughters or sons, sisters or brothers, neighbors or ministers—and perhaps more importantly, how we as a people, the ekklēsia, have failed to be the foretaste of the kingdom to which we’re called to be living witness. Yet the practice does not leave us in despair, but rather gives us hope, assuring us of forgiveness and reminding us that the curse is being rolled back. A reordering of creation has already broken into creation in the person of Jesus Christ, and we are gathering as a people in order to practice for the arrival of the kingdom in its fullness—and thus in order to be trained to be a kingdom-kind-of-people in the meantime, as witnesses to that...