Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

by Tish Harrison Warren

Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury in the mid-twentieth century, wrote, “We do not know the whole fact of Christ incarnate unless we know his church, and its life as part of his own life. . . . The Body is the fullness of Christ, and the history of the Church and the lives of the saints are acts in the biography of the Messiah.”6 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. Instead, our own small stories are wrapped up in the story of all believers throughout time, which are together part of the eternal story of Christ.

Yet Christ’s bride and body, which will one day be spotless and whole, is currently blemished

and broken.

There is, of course, the plain fact of institutional disu...

And beyond the grim reality of institutional disunity, many of us

bear scars from fractured relationships or institutional sin in the church.

There are times, though, when the wounds the church gives are even more profound and complex than conflicts between individuals, as painful as they can be. Sin in the church can be insidious and systemic. We can be injured by a misuse of power or entrenched institutional pathology. Any of us who have hung around the church long enough have a few scars to show. I was once deeply wounded by someone in a position of power in my church. Suddenly, a place that had always been a refuge for me became a place of rejection and condemnation. The pain of that hurt felt sharp, even physical, a blow that knocked the breath out of me. I was tempted to give up on the church altogether. I felt that everywhere I looked, left and right, I saw ecclesial dysfunction and brokenness. I was becoming cynical and guarded.

Flannery O’Connor said, “You have to suffer as much from the church as for it. . . . The only thing that makes the church endurable is that somehow it is the body of Christ, and on this we are fed.”7

In the sin and failure of the church, we see the darkness and ugliness for which Christ suffered and died. But we also see the spectacular hope that in the midst of sinners, God can bring forth redemption, repentance, and transformation. We gaze in weakness, with dim eyes, on the power of God.

am as much part of the church as (in the words of Paul) a hand is a part of a body. That means that when I see sin in the church, I am implicated in it. I contribute to the brokenness of the church. I have dealt wounds to others; I have been unfaithful to the bridegroom. Every church leader and church member is, in no insignificant way, a failure. But here too we see God’s power because, in this body of Christ, we find a place where we can be gloriously and devastatingly human. We find a place where we can fail and repent and grow and receive grace and be made new. Like a family—but even closer than a family—we can learn to live together, weak and human, in the goodness and transformation of God.

The body of Christ—ancient, global, catholic—is only known, loved, and

served through the gritty reality of our local context.

And that’s where things get both more difficult and ...

there are other people around me in the pews, people I find irritating or awkward, people who vehemently hold political opinions I find suspect, people with whom I have nothing in common outside of our shared membership in this community of the saints. Some of those I practice call and response with each week would not be people I’d ever want to go with on a long road trip.

The body of Christ is made of all kinds of people, some of whom I find obnoxious, arrogant, self-righteous, or misguided (charges, I’m sure, others have rightly applied to me).

From the beginning, relationships in the church were fraught. Peter and Paul must have made for awkward dinner guests when Paul publically opposed Peter to his face, as we’re told in Galatians. If I had been there, I’d likely have changed the subject, offered everyone dessert, and made a note not to invite Peter and Paul to the same party.

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. Those who were winning at life saw no need for this life-disrupting Savior. The people of God are the losers, misfits, and broken. This is good news—and humiliating. 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. I

In Letters to Malcolm, C. S. Lewis devotes a delightful letter to the subject of pleasure. His advice: begin where you are. He writes that he once thought he had to start “by summoning up what we believe about the goodness and greatness of God, by thinking about creation and redemption and ‘all the blessings of this life.’”10 Instead, he says, we ought to begin with the pleasures at hand—for him, a walk beside a babbling brook; for me at the moment, the wonder of hot water and dried leaves. 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.”11 Yet so much wars against these little moments of glory in our day. For me, anxiety and needling worries are always clanging in the background, robbing me of the ability to simply exhale. I have to learn to surrender, to give up my flimsy illusion of control, and relax into beauty. As busy, practical, hurried, and distracted people, we develop habits of inattenti...

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

In Jewish culture, days begin in the evening with the setting of the sun. (We see this in Genesis 1 with the repetition of “And there was evening and there was morning.”) The day begins with rest. We start by settling down and going to sleep. This understanding of time is powerfully reorienting, even jarring, to those of us who measure our days by our own efforts and accomplishments. The Jewish day begins in seemingly accomplishing nothing at all. We begin by resting, drooling on our pillow, dropping off into helplessness. Eugene Peterson says,

“The Hebrew evening/morning sequence conditions us to the rhythms of grace. We go to sleep and God begins his work.”14

Though the day begins in darkness, God is still at work, growing crops, healing wounds, giving rest, protecting, guarding, mending, redeeming.15 We drop out of consciousness, but the Holy Spirit remains at work. In his brief theology of sleep, Scottish pastor John Baillie writes that in Christ, we “wake up better men than when we went to sleep.”16 If it is hard for us to believe that God is at work in us and in the world even while we sleep, it reveals who we truly think is the mover and maker of our lives and spiritual health. Baillie speaks of God’s unlimited, constant activity in the world and in us: We habitually suppose ourselves to be more the masters of our spiritual development than we actually are. . . . If some of the processes that are necessary for our physical well-being g...

Flannery O’Connor wrote that we must “push as hard as the age that pushes against

you.” How do you think practices and liturgies function in that challenge?