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September 21 - October 19, 2017
They hold out a sort of redemption in and through the goods and services the market provides.
Its quasi redemption lives off of two ephemeral elements: the thrill of the unsustainable experience or event and the sheen of the novel and new.
By our immersion in this liturgy of consumption, we are being trained to both overvalue and undervalue things:
The mall’s liturgy fosters habits and practices that are unjust, so it does everything it can to prevent us from asking such questions. Don’t ask, don’t tell; just consume.
The list of such “secular” liturgies is very contextual and will vary not only from country to country but from generation to generation. This is why pastors need to be ethnographers, helping their congregations name and “exegete” their local liturgies.
To recognize this is to appreciate something about the mechanics of temptation: not all sins are decisions.
In other words, our sins aren’t just discrete, wrong actions and bad decisions; they reflect vices.
Once you’ve cultivated the sort of apocalyptic angle on cultural practices that we discussed above and have begun to read your daily rhythms through a liturgical lens, you’re then in a place to undertake a kind of liturgical audit of your life.
You could think of this as a macro version of the Daily Examen, a spiritual practice inherited from St. Ignatius of Loyola.
You begin to realize that what you want has probably been inscribed in the habits you’ve learned at this temple. You start to sense that this is a place where you’ve learned (what) to love.
And you start getting worried.
Waking up to the formative power of secular liturgies might open us up to appreciate the importance of Christian liturgies that we have resisted or perhaps even denounced.
Liturgies, then, are calibration technologies. They train our loves by aiming them toward a certain telos.
our loves need to be reordered (recalibrated) by counterliturgies—embodied, communal practices that are “loaded” with the gospel and indexed to God and his kingdom.
“Everybody’s got a hungry heart.”
Indeed, in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus extols such hunger as “blessed.” “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled” (Matt. 5:6).
Of course, that we get hungry—that we need to eat—is a structural feature of human biology. But the “direction” our hunger takes—what we hunger for—is, in important ways, learned.
The same is true for our deepest existential hungers, our loves: we might not realize the ways we’re being covertly trained to hunger and thirst for idols that can never satisfy.
I discovered a significant gap between my thought and my action.
More specifically, it clarified the gap between my intellectual convictions and my preintellectual desires, my knowledge and my habits.
And while their arguments could be intellectual catalysts for me—epiphanies of insight into how my hunger-habits had been deformed—unlearning those habits would require counterformative practices, different rhythms and routines that would retrain my hunger.
The way that my hungers have been reformed might be a kind of allegory for our spiritual reformation, I think.
First, in an important sense, I pledged myself to be part of a covenantal community—even
Second—perhaps somewhat ironically—in order to reform my wants I would commit myself to practices that I didn’t want to do.
Instead, the point of such conscious reflection is precisely to channel you into practices that will, in turn, generate new eating habits.
If love is both habit and hunger, then our tastes and cravings for what’s ultimate will be changed in the same way.
But reflection should propel us into new practices that will reform our hungers by inscribing new habits.
The church is that household where the Spirit feeds us what we need and where, by his grace,
If we think of sanctification as learning to “put on” or “clothe” ourselves with Christ (Rom. 13:14; Col. 3:14), this is intimately bound up with becoming incorporated into his body, the corpus Christi.
Discipleship is a kind of immigration, from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of God’s beloved Son (Col. 1:13).
Christian worship is our enculturation as citizens of heaven, subjects of kingdom come (Phil. 3:20).
too often we look for the Spirit in the extraordinary when God has promised to be present in the ordinary.
We keep looking for God in the new, as if grace were always bound up with “the next best thing,” but Jesus encouraged us to look for God in a simple, regular meal.
While we might be expecting some remarkable, unmistakably divine mode of interaction, God shows up at our flooding house with a canoe, a boat, a helicopter.
the best gift God could give you is Spirit-infused practices that will reform and retrain your loves.
the most potent, charged, transformative site of the Spirit’s work is found in the most unlikely of places—the church!
Yes, Christian formation is a life-encompassing, Monday through Saturday, week in and week out project; but it radiates from, and is nourished by, the worship life of the congregation gathered around Word and Table.
Liturgy is the way we learn to “put on” Christ (Col.
So if we are going to properly understand how and why worship is the heart of discipleship, we need to stretch, expand, and, frankly, correct our understanding of worship.
In short, we might react to “liturgy” as if the very notion is bound up with salvation by works, salvation by ritual observance.
While worship is entirely embodied, it is not only material; and though worship is wholly natural, it is never only natural. Christian worship is nothing less than an invitation to participate in the life of the Triune God. In short, the centrality of embodiment should not be understood as a naturalizing of worship that would deny the dynamic presence of the Spirit.
create “a powerful environment of God-centeredness.”8 Worship is not for me—it’s not primarily meant to be an experience that “meets my felt needs,” nor should we reduce it to merely a pedagogy of desire (which would be just a more sophisticated pro me construal of worship); rather, worship is about and for God.
As Nicholas Wolterstorff has pointed out, the medieval Western liturgy against which the Reformers reacted was beset by its own kind of “naturalization” insofar as it “was a liturgy in which, to an extraordinary degree, the action of God was lost from view.
As such, the Reformers saw the liturgy as God’s action and our faithful reception of that action.
So worship is a site of God’s action, not just God’s presence. The emphasis—in accordance with Calvin’s theology of grace—is on the primacy of God’s gracious initiation.
Wolterstorff observes that, for Kuyper, “various parts of the liturgy, and the liturgy as a whole, are to be seen as ‘an interaction between God and the congregation.’
Have we not fallen prey once again to the static medieval paradigm that is focused on “presence”?
I simply invite us to recognize that the very form of our songs, in their grammatical structure, can implicitly say—and hence teach us—something about who we think is active in worship.
When we tacitly assume that we are the primary actors in worship, then we also assume that worship is basically an expressive endeavor.
If worship is expression of our devotion to God, then the last thing we want to be is a hypocrite: our expression needs to be honest,
