Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

by Tish Harrison Warren

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.

Alfred Hitchcock said movies are “life with the dull bits cut out.”5 Car chases and first kisses, interesting plot lines and good conversations. We don’t want to watch our lead character going on a walk, stuck in traffic, or brushing his teeth—at least not for long, and not without a good soundtrack. We tend to want a Christian life with the dull bits cut out. Yet God made us to spend our days in rest, work, and play, taking care of our bodies, our families, our neighborhoods, our homes. What if all these boring parts matter to God? 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?

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

Whether you’re Mother Teresa or a stay-at-home mom, whether you’re a revolutionary, a student, or a tax attorney, life is lived in twenty-four-hour days. We have bodies; we lag in energy; we learn slowly; we wake daily and don’t know what lies ahead. In these pages we look at life in one day. We look at faith in small moments, spiritual formation in its molecular form—not because this is all that matters, but because the only life any of us live is in daily, pedestrian humanity.

I like big ideas. I can get drunk on talk of justification, ecclesiology, pneumatology, Christology, and eschatology. But these big ideas are borne out—lived, believed, and enfleshed—in the small moments of our day, in the places, seasons, homes, and communities that compose our lives. Annie Dillard famously writes, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”6

And every new day, this is the turn my heart must make: I’m living this life, the life right in front of me. This one where marriages struggle. This one where we aren’t living as we thought we might or as we hoped we would. This one where we are weary, where we want to make a difference but aren’t sure where to start, where we have to get dinner on the table or the kids’ teeth brushed, where we have back pain and boring weeks, where our lives look small, where we doubt, where we wrestle with meaninglessness, where we worry about those we love, where we struggle to meet our neighbors and love those closest to us, where we grieve, where we wait. 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.

Christian worship is arranged around two things: Word and sacrament. The Word, in this context, refers to the Scriptures, both read and preached. The sacraments, for most Protestants, are baptism and Communion, also called the Eucharist.1 Together, Word and sacrament are, inseparably, the centerpieces of Christian worship. The reading and preaching of Scripture is fulfilled and completed by the proclamation of the gospel in the Communion meal. Communion, in turn, is interpreted and given context by the preaching of the Word. And both Word and sacrament are profoundly related to food. These two central acts of worship, Scripture and Communion, are compared to my bowl of taco soup, my daily bread. Both are necessary because both, together, are our nourishment. In Ezekiel and again in Revelation we find the startling image of God commanding his prophets to eat the scroll—the words of God set before them (Ezek 3:1-3; Rev 10:9-10). In his temptation in the wilderness Christ says that we are not only nourished by bread but by “every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Mt 4:4). Later, Paul compares God’s teachings to milk and solid food (1 Cor 3:2). At the Last Supper Jesus tells his disciples to eat in remembrance of him. Of all the things he could’ve chosen to be done “in remembrance” of him, Jesus chose a meal. He could have asked his followers to do something impressive or mystical—climb a mountain, fast for forty days, or have a trippy sweat lodge ceremony—but instead he...

I can

get caught up in big ideas of justice and truth and neglect the small opportunities around me to extend kindness, forgiveness, and grace.

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

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.

Biblically, there is no divide between “radical” and “ordinary” believers. We are all called to be willing to follow Christ in radical ways, to answer the call of the one who told us to deny ourselves and take up our cross. And yet we are also called to stability, to the daily grind of responsibility for those nearest us, to the challenge of a mundane, well-lived Christian life.

“Passing the peace” in every way we can, in the place and sphere to which God has called us, is neither a “radical” practice nor an “ordinary” practice; it is merely a Christian practice, one that each of us must inhabit daily. We can become far too comfortable with the American status quo, and we need prophetic voices that challenge us to follow our radical, comfort-afflicting Redeemer. But we must also learn to follow Jesus in this workaday world of raising kids, caring...

Anne Lamott writes that we learn the practice of reconciliation by starting with those nearest us. “Earth is Forgiveness School. You might as well start at the dinner table. That way, you can do this work in comfortable pants.”7

Because we are broken people in a broken world, seeking shalom always involves forgiveness and reconciliation. Paul tells the Corinthians that “Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation;

that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation” (2 Cor 5:18-19). This is not easy. Today’s small spat in the kitchen was minor, but there are hurts in relationships—even patterns of hurt—that go deep. In those de...

for it, through time ...

The truth we enact each week when we pass the peace with those worshiping around us is, at times, a ha...

In the Anglican liturgy the passing of the peace comes after confession and absolution, on the heels of our reminder that we

are forgiven.

We cannot seek peace out of our own strength.

But God has reconciled us to himself, and he brings reconciliation and peace to every sphere of life.

God’s ministry of reconciliation works its way into all of life, even into these small moments of our day.

Sunday—the passing of peace—is a prayer. We are asking that God would do something we cannot, so that we can extend peace, not of our own making, but of Christ’s, our Reconciler.

We are quarreling people, but God is reforming us to be people who, through our ordinary moments, establish his kingdom of...

a faith. It takes faith to believe that our little, frail faithfulne...

And it takes faith to believe that God is making us into people—slowly, through repentance—who are capable of saying to the world through our lives, “Peace of Christ to you.”

We often understand the Protestant Reformation as a conflict about doctrine. Justification. Grace versus works. Ecclesiology. Indulgences. And it was. But what captured the imagination of the commoners in Europe during the Reformation was not only the finer points of doctrine, but the earthy notion of vocation.

The idea that all good work is holy work was revolutionary. The Reformation toppled a vocational hierarchy that had placed monks, nuns, and priests at the top and everyone else below. 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. Even now, often subconsciously, we tend to rate some jobs as holier or more spiritual than others. Whether we place missionaries, social activists, artists, the rich, the powerful, the famous, or the hypereducated at the top, we tend to value certain types of work above others. In his book Every Good Endeavor, Tim Keller outlines what

The kingdom of God comes both through our gathered worship each week and our “scattered” worship in our work each day. Thus all work, even a simple, small task, matters eternally.

The missio Dei, the mission of God (it could also be translated “the sending of God”)—the idea that every part of creation will be redeemed and rightly ordered around worship of the Trinity—is manifest in an integral way in our work.

Luther said, “God himself will milk the cows through him whose vocation it is.”7 But could God himself check email through me? Could he balance the family budget and fold the laundry through me? Could he fill out bureaucratic work forms through me? Does he care about any of this? The Puritans, who talked more about work and vocation than almost any community before or since, articulated a helpful idea that Eugene Peterson later termed “vocational holiness.”8 The idea is that we are sanctified—made holy—not in the abstract but through our concrete vocation. Christian holiness is not a free-floating goodness removed from the world, a few feet above

the ground. It is specific and, in some sense, tailored to who we particularly are. We grow in holiness in the honing of our specific vocation. We can’t be holy in the abstract. Instead we become a holy blacksmith or a holy mother or a holy physician or a holy systems analyst. We seek God in and through our particular vocation and place in life.

Our task is not to somehow inject God into our work but to join God in the work he is already doing in and through our vocational lives.

a mixed life combining the activity of Martha with the reflectiveness of Mary.” Hilton concluded that “such a spirituality needs to be consciously modeled and taught.”12

This third way avoids the frenzied workaholism that arises from our attempts to earn our own blessedness and steer our own destinies. And yet it doesn’t abandon our daily tasks, nor does it devalue them as less holy.

“tendency . . . to restless activity” at the expense of spiritual depth.

Warfield reminds us that “activity, of course, is good. . . . But not when it is substituted for inner religious strength. We cannot get along without our Marthas. But what shall we do when, through all the length and breadth of the land, we shall search in vain

for a Ma...

“ten minutes on your knees will give you a truer, deeper, more operative knowledge of God than ten hours over your books”

we were made for a day when God’s chosen people will “long enjoy the work of their hands” (Is 65:22).

We are blessed and sent to work in this world, where we will face fallenness and toil. But even still our labor is not in vain. And one day all of it, even our smallest daily tasks—even email—will be sifted and sorted and redeemed.

One of my favorite scenes in literature is when the Lilliputians in Gulliver’s Travels think that, because Gulliver keeps checking his clock, it must be his god.1 It was Swift’s clever commentary on his

era’s worship of time, hurry, and efficiency, which applies just as easily to us today. (By the Lilliputians’ logic, my god is my smartphone.)

Christians are marked not only by patience, but also by longing. We are oriented to our future hope, yet we do not try to escape from our present reality, from the real and pressing brokenness and suffering in the world. As Smith puts it, 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.’”9 We live in a brutal world. But in the life of Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit we glimpse redemption and participate in it. 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.

when we recite the Psalms antiphonally or responsively. We are talking to God, too. Reminding one another and God of his promises and our complaints. We are witnessing one another’s cries for help and reminding God that we are in this together.”2

Our relationship with God is never less than an intimate relationship with Christ, but it is always more than that. Christians throughout history—Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox alike—have confessed that it is impossible to have a relationship with Christ outside of a vital relationship with the church, Christ’s body and bride.

when we take Communion, we mysteriously feast with all those who are in Christ.4 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. Hopefully Rebekka and I will be seated near each other, and near the butter. 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

Really?? We coo mine with humans who have died? Don’t understand this.

Yet many believers of my generation are not sure what the church is for. Some have denigrated the need for it all together. We have produced a me-centered faith that would be foreign to most Christians throughout history.