Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

by Tish Harrison Warren

We’ll have to keep forgiving all day, every time we think back to our argument, every time we’re tempted to pick up the sword again. Peace takes a whole lot of work. Conflict and resentment seem to be the easier route. Shorter, anyway. Less humiliating.

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

this practice each 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.

There is no competition between the work we do as a people in gathered worship—liturgy means “the work of the people”—and our vocations in the world. For believers, the two are intrinsically part of one another.

We are fed in worship, blessed, and sent out to be “hints of hope”

I judge the people who honk in traffic, but if my feelings made sounds they’d be honking too.

We are impatient people. We want happiness now. Fulfillment and gratification now. Time is just another commodity that we seek to maximize.

Scripture tells us that when we “hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Rom 8:25). We live each ordinary day in the light of a future reality. Our best life is still to come.

“I always felt like I was waiting for the gift. But I’ve come to see that the waiting is the gift.”

God’s timing is perfect and that, mysteriously, there is more happening while we wait than just waiting.

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

To be impatient . . . is to live without hope.

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.

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.

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).

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.

intentionally embrace enjoyment as a discipline.

The cry of “Encore!”—the demand for more and more and ever more—can turn a healthy pleasure into an addiction.

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.

My disordered sleep reveals a disordered love, idols of entertainment or productivity.

Our bodily limits are our chief daily reminder that we are but dust. We inhabit a frail, vulnerable humanity. And we hate being reminded.

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.

We need holistic rest—physical, psychological, and spiritual.

Though the day begins in darkness, God is still at work, growing crops, healing wounds, giving rest, protecting, guarding, mending, redeeming.

In our workaholic, image-barraged, overcaffeinated, entertainment-addicted, and supercharged culture, submission to our creatureliness is a necessary and often overlooked part of discipleship.