Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

by Tish Harrison Warren

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.

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

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

He himself took on flesh in order to redeem us in our bodies, and in so doing he redeemed embodiment itself.

Christians are marked not only by patience, but also by longing.

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.

Peek into a worship space and you’ll find incense, flowers, bright whites of vestments, dancing, candles, banners, or works of art and music. Glory. We taste, we smell, we hear, we see, we feel. Our senses come alive in worship.

By embracing sleep each day we submit to the humiliation of our creatureliness and fragility. And in that place of weakness we learn to rest in the reality that our life and death—our days and everything in them—are hidden in Christ.