Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

by Tish Harrison Warren

Ordinary love, anonymous and unnoticed as it is, is the substance of peace on earth, the currency of God’s grace in our daily life.

But in Christian worship we are reminded that peace is homegrown, beginning on the smallest scale, in the daily grind, in homes, churches, and neighborhoods. Daily habits of peace or habits of discord spill into our city, creating cultures of peace or cultures of discord.

And when we seek peace, we begin where we are.

Each time we make a small choice toward justice, or buy fair trade, or seek to share instead of hoard, or extend mercy to those around us and kindness to those with whom we disagree, or say “I forgive you,” we pass peace where we are in the ways that we can. And God can take these ordinary things and, like fish and bread, bless them and multiply them. He can make revolution stories out of smallness. He can change the world through shopkeepers who serve tea without sugar.

And yet I also need to remember that my small sphere, my ordinary day, matters to the mission—that the ordinary and unnoticed passing of the peace each day is part of what God is growing in and through me. It will bring a harvest, in good time.

But we must also learn to follow Jesus in this workaday world of raising kids, caring for our neighbors, budgeting, doing laundry, and living our days responsibly with stability, generosity, and faithfulness.

Because we are broken people in a broken world, seeking shalom always involves forgiveness and reconciliation.

Our forgiveness and reconciliation flow from Christ’s forgiveness of us. Out of gratitude over the enormous debt our king has forgiven, we forgive our debtors. Receiving God’s gift of reconciliation enables us to give and receive reconciliation with those around us.

It is never a peace that skims the surface or papers over the wrong that’s been done. It is not a peace that plays nicey-nice, denies hurt, or avoids conflict. It is never a

peace that is insincere or ignores injustice. It’s a peace that is honest and hard-won, that speaks truth and seeks justice, that costs something, and that takes time. It is a peace that offers reconciliation.

The Reformers taught that a farmer may worship God by being a good farmer and that a parent changing diapers could be as near to Jesus as the pope. This was a scandal.

This kingdom vision—our identity as those blessed and sent—must work itself out in the small routines of our daily work and vocation, as we go to meetings, check our email, make our children dinner, or mow the lawn.

In the daily rhythms for everyone everywhere, we live our lives in the marketplaces of this world: in homes and neighborhoods, in schools and on farms, in hospitals and businesses, and our vocations are bound up with the ordinary work that ordinary people do. We are not great shots across the bow of history; rather, by simple grace, we are hints of hope.9

I want to do the big work of the kingdom, but I have to learn to live it out in the small tasks before me—the missio Dei in the daily grind.

I want to learn how to spend time over my inbox, laundry, and tax forms, yet, mysteriously, always on my knees, offering up my work as a prayer to the God who blesses and sends.

When we practice the Sabbath, we not only look back to God’s rest after his work of creation but we look forward to the rest ahead, to the Sabbath to come when God will finish his work of re-creation. We recall together that we are waiting for the end of the story, for all things to be made new.

In the liturgical year there is never celebration without preparation. First we wait, we mourn, we ache, we repent. We aren’t ready to celebrate until we acknowledge, over time through ritual and worship, that we and this world are not yet right and whole.3 Before Easter, we have Lent. Before Christmas, we have Advent. We fast. Then we feast. We prepare. We practice waiting. In the sacred rhythm of our time, we embrace the tension of our reality. We live between D-day and V-day. The victory is secured, but the war continues a little longer.

We delude ourselves into believing that if we can just get everything done, if we can only tie up all the loose ends, if we can even once get ahead of the crush, we will prove our worth and establish ourselves in safety. Our problem with time is social, cultural, and economic, to be sure. But it is also a spiritual problem, one that runs right to the core of who we are as human beings. . . . Indeed, these distortions drive us into the arms of a false theology: we come to believe that we, not God, are the masters of time. We come to believe that our worth must be proved by the way we spend our hours and that our ultimate safety depends on our own good management.4

Time is a gift from God, a means of worship. I need the church to remind me of reality: time is not a commodity that I control, manage, or consume.

Time revolves around God—what he has done, what he is doing, and what he will do.

God is at work in us and through us as we wait. Our waiting is active and purposeful.

Even now as we wait, God is bringing the kingdom that will one day be fully known. We can be as patient as a fallow field because we know there are gifts promised by a Giver who can be trusted.

we “will always sit somewhat uneasy in the present, haunted by the brokenness of the ‘now.’ The future we hope for—a future when justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream—hangs over our present and gives us a vision of what to work for in the here and now as we continue to pray, ‘Your kingdom come.’”

We have a telos as we wait, an ultimate purpose and aim. Because we have a telos—a kingdom where peace will reign and where God is worshiped—we can never wrap our lives in little luxuries and petty comforts and so numb ourselves to God’s prophetic call for justice and wholeness in this world. Our hope for a future of shalom motivates us to press toward that reality, even in our ordinary days. Our work, our times in prayer and service, our small days lived graciously, missionally, and faithfully will bear fruit that we can’t yet see.

The future orientation of Christian time reminds us that we are people on the way. It allows us to live in the present as an alternative people, patiently waiting for what is to come, but never giving up on our telos. We are never quite comfortable. We seek justice, practice mercy, and herald the kingdom to come.

The liturgical calendar reminds us that we are people who live by a different story. And not just by a story, but in a story. God is redeeming all things, and our lives—even our days—are part of that redemption. We live in the truth that, however slowly or quickly we may be traveling, we are going somewhere. Or, more accurately, somewhere (and Someone) is drawing near to us.

Redemption is crashing into our little stretch of the universe, bit by bit, day by day, mile by coming mile. We have hope because our Lord has promised that he is preparing a place ...

Christian friendships are call-and-response friendships. We tell each other over and over, back and forth, the truth of who we are and who God is. Over dinner and on walks, dropping off soup when someone is sick, and in prayer over the phone, we speak the good news to each other. And we become good news to every other.

In the Eucharist we commune with Dorothy Day and Saint Augustine, the apostle Paul and Billy Graham, Flannery O’Connor and my own grandmother. One day we will all feast together, in the flesh, with Christ himself.

We profoundly need each other. We are immersed in the Christian life together. There is no merely private faith—everything we are and do as individuals affects the church community.

We do not know this Messiah solely through the red letters in the gospel texts. We know him in his fullness because we are joined to him in his Body, the church. In this joining, we do not lose our individuality or our individual stories of conversion and encounter with Christ.

We are drawn to those we find lovely and likable. Yet those Jesus spent his time among—and those most drawn to Jesus—were the odd, the disheveled, and the outcast.

God loves and delights in the people in the pews around me and dares me to find beauty in them. To love his people on earth is to see Christ in them, to live among them, to receive together Word and sacrament.

We work out our faith with these other broken men and women around us in the pews. It’s lackluster. It can be boring or taxing. It’s often messy. It’s sometimes painful. But these Christians around me become each other’s call and response. We remind each other of the good news.

Pleasure is our deep human response to an encounter with beauty and goodness. In these moments of pleasure—of delight, enjoyment, awe, and revelry—we respond to God impulsively with our very bodies: “Yes, we agree! Your creation is very good.”

In reality, the church has led the way in the art of enjoyment and pleasure. New Testament scholar Ben Witherington points out that it was the church, not Starbucks, that created coffee culture.4 Coffee was first invented by Ethiopian monks—the term cappuccino refers to the shade of brown used for the habits of the Capuchin monks of Italy. Coffee is born of extravagance, an extravagant God who formed an extravagant people, who formed a craft out of the pleasures of roasted beans and frothed milk.

When we enjoy God’s creation, we reflect God himself. God does not stoically pronounce creation “good,” like a disinterested manager checking off a quality checklist so he can clock out early. God delights in the perfect acoustics of ocean waves, swoons over the subtle intensity of dark chocolate, and glories in robins’ eggs and peacock calls.

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and

unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

At its best, church architecture accents the beauty of light and shadow, space and shape. This doesn’t mean that every sanctuary looks the same. I’ve worshiped in a school cafeteria, a thatched-roof hut, a stone cathedral with soaring ceilings, and a tiny country church, and in each place the worshipers thoughtfully sought to make their space beautiful, knowing that God is worthy to be worshiped in and through beauty.

This looks different from culture to culture. In a remote East African church, I lifted the chalice to my lips and was surprised that instead of wine, I tasted Coca-Cola. Wine was hard to come by where we were, and grape juice was nonexistent. Coke was the beverage of extravagance. A missionary told me that on Christmas morning children got two treats: meat and Coca-Cola. Coke was used in worship because these believers wanted to use the finest and the best. And indeed, that Sunday, it was an indulgent pleasure. Christ was among us, and even in the midst of poverty, worship was lavish.

The room where we worship is called a sanctuary, from the Latin sanctuarium, a derivative of sanctus, or “holy.” The word sanctuary refers to a holy place but, because churches were once places of legal asylum, the term has also come to mean a place of shelter, a haven, or a refuge.

In my daily life I find moments of sanctuary, moments when wonder scoots up next to me with a nudge. I remember how well I’m provided for. This quiet moment with my cup of tea is a moment of sanctuary in every sense—a haven of beauty...

Most of us love these moments in our day at a gut level. We intuitively know that goodness and beauty are connected to the divine, that “every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights” (Jas 1:17). We aren’t overly ascetic fundamentalists trying to stamp out delight or pleasure wherever it is found. We naturally greet these moments with gratitude. But more than that, we respond with adoration. We are not only grateful for pleasure; our hearts wonder what kind of Creator makes a world that overflows with such loveliness and beauty. As Lewis says, “One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.”

As busy, practical, hurried, and distracted people, we develop habits of inattention and miss these tiny theophanies in our day. But if we were fully alive and whole, no pleasure would be too ordinary or commonplace to stir up adoration.

But it takes strength to enjoy the world, and we must exercise a kind of muscle to revel and delight. If we neglect exercising that muscle—if we never savor a lazy afternoon, if we must always be cleaning out the fridge or volunteering at church or clocking in more hours—we’ll forget how to notice beauty and we’ll miss the unmistakable reality of goodness that pleasure trains us to see. We must take up the practice—the privilege and responsibility—of noticing, savoring, reveling, so that, to use Annie Dillard’s phrase, “creation need not play to an empty house.”13

the demand for more and more and ever more—can turn a healthy pleasure into an addiction. We become insatiable. Our ability to enjoy something is diminished to the extent that it becomes a false god. God alone can be both worshiped and enjoyed. All lesser things are meant to be enjoyed in their proper place, as they flow from the God who deserves all worship.

Enjoyment requires discernment. It can be a gift to wrap up in a blanket and lose myself in a TV show, but we can also “amuse ourselves to death.”18 My pleasure in wine or tea or exercise is good in itself but can become disordered. As we learn to practice enjoyment, we need to learn the craft of discernment—how to enjoy rightly, to “have” and “read” pleasure well.

These tiny moments of beauty in our days train us in the habits of adoration and discernment. And the pleasure and sensuousness of our gathered worship teach us to look for and receive these small moments in our days. Together, they train us in the art of noticing and of reveling in God’s goodness and artistry.

Being curators of beauty, pleasure, and delight is therefore an intrinsic part of our mission, a mission that recognizes the reality that truth is beautiful.