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February 25 - March 5, 2025
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.
But there is also the more subtle quest for a suitably “radical” life, a life of conspicuous sacrifice and service—a life that seems obviously set apart for something more than the mundane and (so we start to think) unimportant life. In this version of the ancient error, nonprofit work is more spiritual than for-profit work; urban neighborhoods are more spiritual than suburban ones; bicycles are more spiritual than minivans.
We want life to have meaning, we want fulfillment, healing and even ecstasy, but the human paradox is that we find these things by starting where we are. . . . We must look for blessings to come from unlikely, everyday places.
That we ought not to be weary of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed. That we should not wonder if, in the beginning, we often failed in our endeavors, but that at last we should gain a habit, which will naturally produce its acts in us, without our care, and to our exceeding great delight.
Together with our community we sang “Jesus Loves Me” over the newly baptized. It was a proclamation: before you know it, before you doubt it, before you confess it, before you can sing it yourself, you are beloved by God, not by your effort but because of what Christ has done on your behalf. We are weak, but he is strong.
everything I do in the liturgy—all the confessing and singing, kneeling and peace passing, distraction, boredom, ecstasy, devotion—is a response to God’s work and God’s initiation.
God is forming us into a new people. And the place of that formation is in the small moments of today.
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?
I have a friend who was a missionary in Calcutta among the poorest of the poor. He told me that what struck him was how mundane life was even in such a foreign and challenging place. His decision to go overseas felt daring and bold, but he was surprised to find that wherever he was on earth, much of his day was spent sitting with people, taking care of business and chores, taking care of his own body, knowing his neighbors, seeking to love people—sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing.
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.
Our way of being-in-the-world works its way into us through ritual and repetition.
We are shaped every day, whether we know it or not, by practices—rituals and liturgies that make us who we are. We receive these practices—which are often rote—not only from the church or the Scriptures but from the culture, from the “air around us.”
Smith, following Augustine, argues that to be an alternative people is to be formed differently—to take up practices and habits that aim our love and desire toward God.
Even those traditions that claim to be freeform or nonliturgical include practices and patterns in worship. Therefore, the question is not whether we have a liturgy. The question is, “What kind of people is our liturgy forming us to be?”
Our Sunday liturgies teach us a particular idea of the good life, and we are sent out into our week as people who bear out that vision in our workaday world.
corporately as a people over millennia. As we learn the words, practices, and rhythms of faith hewn by our brothers and sisters throughout history, we learn to live our days in worship.
I need rituals that encourage me to embrace what is repetitive, ancient, and quiet. But what I crave is novelty and stimulation.
Our hearts and our loves are shaped by what we do again and again and again.
I worry that when our gathered worship looks like a rock show or an entertainment special, we are being formed as consumers—people after a thrill and a rush—when what we need is to learn a way of being-in-the-world that transforms us, day by day, by the rhythms of repentance and faith. We need to learn the slow habits of loving God and those around us. 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 biblical call to an embodied morality—to sexual purity, for instance, or moderation in food and drink—comes not out of a disdain for the body and its appetites, but out of the understanding that our bodies are central to our life in Christ.
In my tradition, when a chalice is broken or an altar cloth is torn, we don’t throw it in the trash; it must be buried or burned. Leftover consecrated wine is either drunk or poured into the ground, never down the drain. We do this because these objects are sacred, set apart, and worthy of care. In the same way, care for the body—even these small, daily tasks of maintenance—is a way we honor our bodies as sacred parts of worship.
Theologian Stanley Hauerwas argues that to truly learn a story, we can’t just hear it. We must also act it out. In our worship—and Hauerwas specifically cites the practices of baptism and communion—we act out the story of the gospel with and through our bodies.
He anoints the bathroom mirror with oil and prays that when people look into it, they would see themselves as beloved images of God. He prays that they would not relate to their bodies with the categories the world gives them, but instead according to the truth of who they are in Christ.
So I will fight against my body’s fallenness. I will care for it as best I can, knowing that my body is sacred and that caring for it (and for the other bodies around me) is a holy act. I’ll hold on to the truth that my body, in all its brokenness, is beloved, and that one day it will be, like the resurrected body of Christ, glorious.
I spent a few months in a war-torn area of the world and was surprised to find that there, in the midst of tensions and dangers, I felt far more at peace than in my average American, housebound day with a baby and a toddler. I had a theology of suffering that allowed me to pay attention in crisis, to seek small flickers of mercy in profound darkness. But my theology was too big to touch a typical day in my life. I’d developed the habit of ignoring God in the midst of the daily grind.
I need to cultivate the practice of meeting Christ in these small moments of grief, frustration, and anger, of encountering Christ’s death and resurrection—this
Repentance is not usually a moment wrought in high drama. It is the steady drumbeat of a life in Christ and, therefore, a day in Christ. 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.4 This practice of communal confession is a vital way to enact the habit of confession that marks our daily lives. Through it we learn together the language of repentance and faith.
Our communal practice of confession reminds us that failure in the Christian life is the norm.
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.
N. T. Wright reminds us that in the upper room, right before Jesus’ death, he didn’t offer his followers theories of the atonement or recite a creed or explain precisely how his death would accomplish salvation. Instead “he gave them an act to perform. Specifically, he gave them a meal to share. It is a meal that speaks more volumes than any theory.”2
To have church, all we need is Word and sacrament.
My subculture of evangelicalism tends to focus on excitement, passion, and risk, the kind of worship that gives a rush. Eugene Peterson calls this quest for spiritual intensity a consumer-driven “market for religious experience in our world.” He says that “there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness. Religion in our time has been captured by a tourist mindset. . . . We go to see a new personality, to hear a new truth, to get a new experience and so somehow to
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We’ve inherited a faith that, while beautiful in many ways, was formed and shaped by the concept of a market-driven religious experience.
How should we respond when we find the Word perplexing or dry or boring or unappealing? We keep eating. We receive nourishment. We keep listening and learning and taking our daily bread.
with anonymity and ingratitude comes injustice. Like so much of what we consume in our complicated world of global capitalism and multinational corporations, purchasing this corn and these beans involves me, however unwittingly, in webs of systemic injustice, exploitation, and environmental degradation that I am ignorant about and would likely not consent to.
When I get caught up in pettiness and exhaustion, I need to be reminded that my family and community are part of a larger mission. And
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.
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.”
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.
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. Therefore, holiness itself is something like a craft—not an abstract state to which we ascend but an earthy wisdom and love that is part and parcel of how we spend our day.
We learn the craft of holiness day by day in the living of a particular life.
We are not great shots across the bow of history; rather, by simple grace, we are hints of hope.
Living a third way of work—where we seek vocational holiness in and through our work even as we resist the idolatry of work and accomplishment—allows us to live with work as a form of prayer.
Discovering the liturgical calendar felt like discovering real time. It gave a transcendent shape to my life. Time was no longer arbitrary—an academic calendar, a marketing ploy, a back to school sale, a Labor Day blowout, a national holiday, a sports season. Now time was sacred. It was structured by worship. It marked the church as a global, alternative people. Time had shape and meaning. All of a sudden, time was a story. And I could live in a story.
In the church calendar we learn the rhythm of life through narrative. Every week we reenact God’s creative work and rest. Every year we retell the story of Jesus. Advent, Christmas, Epiphany:
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.
The liturgical calendar reminds us that we are people who live by a different story. And not just by a story, but in a story. God is redeeming all things, and our lives—even our days—are part of that redemption. We live in the truth that, however slowly or quickly we may be traveling, we are going somewhere. Or, more accurately, somewhere (and Someone) is drawing near to us.
She’s the kind of friend—one of just a handful—whose life has become so bundled up with mine that I can’t make sense of me without her. She knows me, good and bad.
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.
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.
