Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

by Tish Harrison Warren

Tish dismantles that most stubborn of Christian heresies: the idea that there is any part of our lives that is secular, untouched by and disconnected from the real sacred work of worship and prayer.

There is our tendency to speak of the sanctuary as somehow of more importance to God than the workplace or the home, and those (like Tish) specially ordained to its work as somehow closer to God than those who work in the convenience store or the office complex.

The Word became flesh. The Word went fishing. The Word slept. The Word woke up with morning breath. The Word brushed his teeth—or at least he would have, if the Word had been a twenty-first-century American instead of a first-century Judean. This uniquely Christian belief is amazing, faintly horrifying, and life-changing.

We are baptized in plain water. We consume plain bread and wine. And it all is lifted up by plain people.

Yet all of this is far from ordinary. Our bodies, our pleasures, our fears, our fatigue, our friendships, our fights—these are in fact the stuff of our formation and transformation into the frail but infinitely dignified creatures we were meant to be and shall become. Our moments of exaltation and our stifled yawns—somehow they go together, part of the whole life that we are meant to offer to God day by day, as well as Sunday by Sunday, the life that God has taken into his own life. It is the life that Christ himself assumed, and thus rescued and redeemed.

The Lord is good. Every square inch of our lives, every second, is his.

Jesus hasn’t yet done much of anything that many would find impressive. He hasn’t yet healed anyone or resisted Satan in the wilderness. He hasn’t yet been crucified or resurrected. It would make more sense if the Father’s proud announcement came after something grand and glorious—the triumphant moment after feeding a multitude or the big reveal after Lazarus is raised. But after hearing about Jesus’ birth and a brief story about his boyhood, we find him again as a grown man at the banks of the Jordan. He’s one in a crowd, squinting in the sun, sand gritty between his toes. The one who is worthy of worship, glory, and fanfare spent decades in obscurity and ordinariness. As if the incarnation itself is not mind-bending enough, the incarnate God spent his days quietly, a man who went to work, got sleepy, and lived a pedestrian life among average people. Jesus emerges from water a commoner, wet and messy haired. And suddenly the Spirit of God shows up and the deep mystery of the universe reverberates through the air: this is the Son of God, the Son the Father loves, in whom he is pleased.

His every activity unfurls from his identity as the Beloved. He loved others, healed others, preached, taught, rebuked, and redeemed not in order to gain the Father’s approval, but out of his rooted certainty in the Father’s love.

Martin Luther charged each member of his community to regard baptism “as the daily garment which he is to wear all the time.”2

As Christians, we wake each morning as those who are baptized. We are united with Christ and the approval of the Father is spoken over us. We are marked from our first waking moment by an identity that is given to us by grace: an identity that is deeper and more real than any other identity we will don that day.

My wet fingers dipped in the baptismal font remind me that everything I do in the liturgy—all the confessing and singing, kneeling and peace passing, distraction, boredom, ecstasy, devotion—is a response to God’s work and God’s initiation. And before we begin the liturgies of our day—the cooking, sitting in traffic, emailing, accomplishing, working, resting—we begin beloved. My works and worship don’t earn a thing. Instead, they flow from God’s love, gift, and work on my behalf. I am not primarily defined by my abilities or marital status or how I vote or my successes or failures or fame or obscurity, but as one who is sealed in the Holy Spirit, hidden in Christ, and beloved by the Father. My naked self is one who is baptized.

Grace is a mystery and the joyful scandal of the universe.

When Jesus died for his people, he knew me by name in the particularity of this day. Christ didn’t redeem my life theoretically or abstractly—the life I dreamed of living or the life I think I ideally should be living. He knew I’d be in today as it is, in my home where it stands, in my relationships with their specific beauty and brokenness, in my particular sins and struggles.

What if days passed in ways that feel small and insignificant to us are weighty with meaning and part of the abundant life that God has for us?

If Christ spent time in obscurity, then there is infinite worth found in obscurity.

There is no task too small or too routine to reflect God’s glory and worth.

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

And on this particular day, Jesus knows me and declares me his own. On this day he is redeeming the world, advancing his kingdom, calling us to repent and grow, teaching his church to worship, drawing near to us, and making a people all his own.

If I am to spend my whole life being transformed by the good news of Jesus, I must learn how grand, sweeping truths—doctrine, theology, ecclesiology, Christology—rub against the texture of an average day. How I spend this ordinary day in Christ is how I will spend my Christian life.

In the creation story, God entered chaos and made order and beauty. In making my bed I reflected that creative act in the tiniest, most ordinary way. In my small chaos, I made small order.

But I sat expectantly. God made this day. He wrote it and named it and has a purpose in it. Today, he is the maker and giver of all good things. I’d lap up the silence like mother’s milk.

Flannery O’Connor once told a young friend to “push as hard as the age that pushes against you.”3 The church is to be a radically alternative people, marked by the love of the triune God in each area of life.

The thing that most annoyed me about bed making—the fact that it must be done over and over again—reflects the very rhythm of faith.

The crucible of our formation is in the monotony of our daily routines.

What Jonathan’s professor meant is that when we gaze at the richness of the gospel and the church and find them dull and uninteresting, it’s actually we who have been hollowed out. We have lost our capacity to see wonders where true wonders lie. We must be formed as people who are capable of appreciating goodness, truth, and beauty.

Our addiction to stimulation, input, and entertainment empties us out and makes us boring—unable to embrace the ordinary wonders of life in Christ.

Like liturgy, the work of cleaning draws much of its meaning and value from repetition, from the fact that it is never completed, but only set aside until the next day. Both liturgy and what is euphemistically termed “domestic” work also have an intense relation with the present moment, a kind of faith in the present that fosters hope and makes life seem possible in the day-to-day.

Daily life, dishes in the sink, children that ask the same questions and want the same stories again and again and again, the long doldrums of the afternoon—these things are filled with repetition. And much of the Christian life is returning over and over to the same work and the same habits of worship. We must contend with the same spiritual struggles again and again. The work of repentance and faith is daily and repetitive. Again and again, we repent and believe.

The kind of spiritual life and disciplines needed to sustain the Christian life are quiet, repetitive, and ordinary. I often want to skip the boring, daily stuff to get to the thrill of an edgy faith. But it’s in the dailiness of the Christian faith—the making the bed, the doing the dishes, the praying for our enemies, the reading the Bible, the quiet, the small—that God’s transformation takes root and grows.

Our bodies and souls are inseparable, and therefore what we do with our bodies and what we do with our souls are always entwined.

These teeth I’m brushing, this body I’m bathing, these nails I’m clipping were made by a loving Creator who does not reject the human body. Instead he declared us—holistically—“very good.” He himself took on flesh in order to redeem us in our bodies, and in so doing he redeemed embodiment itself.

If the church does not teach us what our bodies are for, our culture certainly will.

But when we use our bodies for their intended purpose—in gathered worship, raising our hands or singing or kneeling, or, in our average day, sleeping or savoring a meal or jumping or hiking or running or having sex with our spouse or kneeling in prayer or nursing a baby or digging a garden—it is glorious, as glorious as a great cathedral being used just as its architect had dreamt it would be.

He anoints the bathroom mirror with oil and prays that when people look into it, they would see themselves as beloved images of God. He prays that they would not relate to their bodies with the categories the world gives them, but instead according to the truth of who they are in Christ.

Because of the embodied work of Jesus, my body is destined for redemption and for eternal worship—for eternal skipping and jumping and twirling and hand raising and kneeling and dancing and singing and chewing and tasting.

When I brush my teeth I am pushing back, in the smallest of ways, the death and chaos that will inevitably overtake my body. I am dust polishing dust. And yet I am not only dust. When God formed people from the dust, he breathed into us—through our lips and teeth—his very breath. So I will fight against my body’s fallenness. I will care for it as best I can, knowing that my body is sacred and that caring for it (and for the other bodies around me) is a holy act. I’ll hold on to the truth that my body, in all its brokenness, is beloved, and that one day it will be, like the resurrected body of Christ, glorious. Brushing my teeth, therefore, is a nonverbal prayer, an act of worship that claims the hope to come. My minty breath—a little foretaste of glory.

These moments are an opportunity for formation, for sanctification.

Paul tells us to be content in all circumstances (Phil 4:11). For Paul that meant finding contentment amid shipwrecks, beatings, and persecution. But I need not wait around for a shipwreck to prove my contentment in all circumstances. The call to contentment is a call amidst the concrete circumstances I find myself in today. I need to find joy and reject despair in the moment I’m in, in the midst of small pressures and needling anxieties.

Otherwise, I’ll spend my life imagining and hoping (and preaching and teaching about how) to share in the sufferings of Christ in persecution, momentous suffering, and death, while I spend my actual days in grumbling, discontentment, and low-grade despair.

Over time, through the daily practices of confession and absolution, I learn to look for God in the cracks of my day, to notice what these moments of failure reveal about who I am—my false hopes and false gods. I learn to invite the true God into the reality of my lostness and brokenness, to agree with him about my sin and to hear again his words of blessing, acceptance, and love.

In my mind I have an ideal for my table—friends and family gathered around a homegrown, local, organic feast with candles and laughter and well-behaved children. A lot of beauty and a lot of butter.

Instead “he gave them an act to perform. Specifically, he gave them a meal to share. It is a meal that speaks more volumes than any theory.”

Christ is our bread and gives us bread. He is the gift and the giver. God gives us every meal we eat, and every meal we eat is ultimately partial and inadequate, pointing to him who is our true food, our eternal nourishment.

Word and sacrament sustain my life, and yet they often do not seem life changing. Quietly, even forgettably, they feed me.

How should we respond when we find the Word perplexing or dry or boring or unappealing? We keep eating. We receive nourishment. We keep listening and learning and taking our daily bread. We wait on God to give us what we need to sustain us one more day. We acknowledge that there is far more wonder in this life of worship than we yet have eyes to see or stomachs to digest. We receive what has been set before us today as a gift.

Habits shape our desires. I desired ramen noodles more than good, nourishing food because, over time, I had taught myself to crave certain things and not others. In the same way I am either formed by the practices of the church into a worshiper who can receive all of life as a gift, or I am formed, inevitably, as a mere consumer, even a consumer of spirituality. The contemporary church can, at times, market a kind of “ramen noodle” spirituality. Faith becomes a consumer product—it asks little of us, affirms our values, and promises to meet our needs, but in the end it’s just a quick fix that leaves us glutted and malnourished.

Christian worship, centered on Word and sacrament, reminds me that my core identity is not that of a consumer: I am a worshiper and an image-bearer, created to know, enjoy, and glorify God and to know and love those around me. These anonymous kidney beans say that what mainly matters about me is the fact that I need to buy things to stay alive. But God knows the harvester of these beans and cares about justice. And God has made us not merely to consume but to cultivate, steward, and bless.

But the economy of the Eucharist calls me to a life of self-emptying worship.

But the Scriptures and the sacraments reorient us to be people who feed on the bread of life together and are sent out as stewards of redemption. We recall and reenact Christ’s life poured out for us, and we are transformed into people who pour out our lives for others.

But I am increasingly aware that I cannot seek God’s peace and mission in the world without beginning right where I am, in my home, in my neighborhood, in my church, with the real people right around me.