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.

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 have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and

Whether we’re children or heads of state, we sit in our pajamas for a moment, yawning, with messy hair and bad breath, unproductive, groping toward the day.

In my tradition, Anglicanism, we baptize infants. Before they cognitively understand the story of Christ, before they can affirm a creed, before they can sit up, use the bathroom, or contribute significantly to the work of the church, grace is spoken over them and they are accepted as part of us.

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.

The psalmist declares, “This is the day that the Lord has made.” This one. We wake not to a vague or general mercy from a far-off God.

God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are.”

We tend to want a Christian life with the dull bits cut out.

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.”

How I spend this ordinary day in Christ is how I will spend my Christian life.

often we are not sure how to become this sort of alternative people.

we often feel like the way we spend our days looks very similar to our unbelieving neighbors—with

Some Christians seem to think that we push back against the age primarily by...

Liturgy is never a silver bullet for sinfulness.

many preferred undergoing electric shock to sitting alone with their thoughts.

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

it’s actually we who have been hollowed out.

We have lost our capacity to see wonders

Our worship together as a church forms us in a particular way. We must be shaped into people who value that which gives life, not just what’s trendy or loud or exciting.

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

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.

In the Scriptures we find that the body is not incidental to our faith, but integral to our worship.

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.

Apocalypse literally means an unveiling or uncovering. In my anger, grumbling, self-berating, cursing, doubt, and despair, I glimpsed, for a few minutes, how tightly I cling to control and how little control I actually have. And in the absence of control, feeling stuck and stressed, those parts of me that I prefer to keep hidden were momentarily unveiled.

This is not the Valley of the Shadow of Death. This is the roadside ditch of broken things and lost objects,

My lost keys reveal my anxiety that I won’t be able to do what I need to do to take care of myself and those around me.

“Everydayness is my problem. It’s easy to think about what you would do in wartime, or if a hurricane blows through, or if you spent a month in Paris, or if your guy wins the election, or if you won the lottery or bought that thing you really wanted. It’s a lot more difficult to figure out how you’re going to get through today without despair.”

In church each week, we repent together. We confess that we have sinned “in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone,” that we have neglected to love God with our whole hearts, and our neighbors as ourselves.

In Anglican liturgical practice we never confess without also hearing God’s blessing and forgiveness over us.

Norman Wirzba tells us that “to say grace before a meal is among the highest and most honest expressions of our humanity. . . . Here, around the table and before witnesses, we testify to the experience of life as a precious gift to be received and given again. We acknowledge that we do not and cannot live alone but are the beneficiaries of the kindness and mysteries of grace upon grace.”

Thousands of forgotten meals have brought me to today. They’ve sustained my life. They were my daily bread.

Instead of the focus of worship being that which nourishes us, namely Word and sacrament, the focus became that which sells: excitement, adventure, a sizzling or shocking spiritual experience.

Like when you eat on the way home from a fancy restaurant

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

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.

This “global theology” of consumerism has transformed both the way we eat and the way we worship. The evangelical quest for a particular emotional experience in worship and the capitalistic quest for anonymous, cheap canned goods have something in common. Both are mostly concerned with what I can get for myself as an individual consumer.

Old Testament prophets are terrible at tea parties.

Biblically, there is no divide between “radical” and “ordinary” believers.

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).

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

We learn the craft of holiness day by day in the living of a particular life. The missio Dei is lived out, not primarily in my theological reflections on the importance of motherhood (though that does matter), but as I hone the craft of motherhood

Part of our particular task as believers sent out by the church for the missio Dei is to learn to embody holiness, not only in blacksmithing or cheese making, but in and through work that is inevitably shaped by modernity and technology.

Here’s the thing: I hate email. Email makes me feel like I am a failure who can’t get her life together. Yet emailing is a holy task. Part of my sanctification and part of the world’s redemption is for me to learn to do my work well—or at least better than I currently do it.

Christians are people who wait. We live in liminal time, in the already and not yet. Christ has come, and he will come again. We dwell in the meantime. We wait.

I need the church to remind me of reality: time is not a commodity that I control, manage, or consume.

The singular mark of patience is not endurance or fortitude but hope. To be impatient . . . is to live without hope. Patience is grounded in the Resurrection. It is life oriented toward a future that is God’s doing, and its sign is longing, not so much to be released from the ills of the present, but in anticipation of the good to come.

I like the parts of the worship service when we talk to each other.

In antiphon, we are talking to God together—praying in agreement, even in the very same words. As

My best friendships are with people who are willing to get in the muck with me, who see me as I am, and who speak to me of our hope in Christ in the midst of it.