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Our bodies, our pleasures, our fears, our fatigue, our friendships, our fights—these are in fact the stuff of our formation and transformation into the frail but infinitely dignified creatures we were meant to be and shall become. Our moments of exaltation and our stifled yawns—somehow they go together, part of the whole life that we are meant to offer to God day by day, as well as Sunday by Sunday, the life that God has taken into his own life. It is the life that Christ himself assumed, and thus rescued and redeemed.
The one who is worthy of worship, glory, and fanfare spent decades in obscurity and ordinariness. As if the incarnation itself is not mind-bending enough, the incarnate God spent his days quietly, a man who went to work, got sleepy, and lived a pedestrian life among average people.
But he is sent out with a declaration of the Father’s love. Jesus is eternally beloved by the Father. His every activity unfurls from his identity as the Beloved.
He loved others, healed others, preached, taught, rebuked, and redeemed not in order to gain the Father’s approval, but out of his rooted certainty in the Father’s love.
Baptism is the first word of grace spoken over us by the church.
In many liturgical churches baptismal fonts are situated at the back of the sanctuary. As people walk into church to worship, they pass by it. This symbolizes how baptism is the entrance into the people of God. It reminds us that before we begin to worship—before we even sit down in church—we are marked as people who belong to Jesus by grace alone, swept up into good news, which we received as a gift from God and from believers who went before us.
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.
My works and worship don’t earn a thing. Instead, they flow from God’s love, gift, and work on my behalf.
Grace is a mystery and the joyful scandal of the universe.
though these rituals and habits may form us as an alternative people marked by the love and new life of Jesus, they are not what make us beloved. The reality underlying every practice in our life is the triune God and his story, mercy, abundance, generosity, initiative, and pleasure.
What I in my weakness see as another monotonous day in a string of days, God has given as a singular gift.
God is forming us into a new people. And the place of that formation is in the small moments of today.
In The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard reminds us that where “transformation is actually carried out is in our real life, where we dwell with God and our neighbors. . . . First, we must accept the circumstances we constantly find ourselves in as the place of God’s kingdom and blessing. God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are.”
Christ’s ordinary years are part of our redemption story. Because of the incarnation and those long, unrecorded years of Jesus’ life, our small, normal lives matter. If Christ was a carpenter, all of us who are in Christ find that our work is sanctified and made holy. If Christ spent time in obscurity, then there is infinite worth found in obscurity. If Christ spent most of his life in quotidian ways, then all of life is brought under his lordship. There is no task too small or too routine to reflect God’s glory and worth.
Annie Dillard famously writes, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
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.
My morning smartphone ritual was brief—no more than five or ten minutes. But I was imprinted.
Without realizing it, I had slowly built a habit: a steady resistance to and dread of boredom.
The first activity of my day, the first move I made, was not that of a consumer, but that of a colaborer with God.
I’d lay out my worries, my hopes, and my questions before God, spreading them out in his presence like stretched-out sheets. I’d pray for my work and family, for decisions, for a meeting scheduled later in the day. But mostly, I’d invite God into the day and just sit. Silent. Sort of listening. Sort of just sitting.
But I sat expectantly. God made this day. He wrote it and named it and has a purpose in it. Today, he is the maker and giver of all good things. I’d lap up the silence like mother’s milk.
Most of our days, and therefore most of our lives, are driven by habit and routine. 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.”
Flannery O’Connor once told a young friend to “push as hard as the age that pushes against you.”
The church is to be a radically alternative people, marked by the love of the triune God in each area of life. But often we are not sure how to become this sort of alternative people. Though we believe deeply in the gospel, though we put our hope in the resurrection, we often feel like the way we spend our days looks very si...
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While these approaches may form us
as alternative consumers, they do not necessarily form us as worshipers.
We don’t wake up daily and form a way of being-in-the-world from scratch, and we don’t think our way through every action of our day. We move in patterns that we have set over time, day by day. These habits and practices shape our loves, our desires, and ultimately who we are and what we 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?”
These “formative practices” have no value outside of the gospel and God’s own initiative and power.6
Regardless of my professed worldview or particular Christian subculture, my unexamined daily habit was shaping me into a worshiper of glowing screens. Examining my daily liturgy as a liturgy—as something that both revealed and shaped what I love and worship—allowed me to realize that my daily practices were malforming me, making me less alive, less human, less able to give and receive love throughout my day. Changing this ritual allowed me to form a new repetitive and contemplative habit that pointed me toward a different way of being-in-the-world.
the question is, are there habits and practices that we acquire without knowing it? Are there ritual forces in our culture that we perhaps naively immerse ourselves in—and are thus formed
But whether we examine our daily activities theologically or not, they shape our view of God and ourselves. Examining our daily life through the lens of liturgy allows us to see who these habits are shaping us to be, and the ways we can live as people who have been loved and transformed by God.
need rituals that encourage me to embrace what is repetitive, ancient, and quiet. But what I crave is novelty and stimulation. And I am not alone.
The crucible of our formation is in the monotony of our daily routines.
In a culture that craves the big, the entertaining, the dramatic, and the shocking (sometimes literally), cultivating a life
with space for silence and repetition is necessary for sustain...
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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.
We can believe that the cumulative hours and years spent on the incessant care of our bodies are meaningless, an insignificant necessity on the way to the important parts of our day. But in orthodox Christianity, our bodies matter profoundly.
Christianity is a thoroughly embodied faith. We believe in the incarnation—Christ came in a body.
We were made to be embodied—to experience life,
pleasure, and limits in our bodies.
When Jesus redeems us, that redemption occurs in our bodies. And when we die, we will not float away to heaven and leave our bodies behind but will experience the resurrection of our bodies. Christ himself appeared after his resurrection in a mysteriously changed-...
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Our bodies and souls are inseparable, and therefore what we do with our bodies and what we do with our souls are always entwined.
He himself took on flesh in order to redeem us in our bodies, and in so doing he redeemed embodiment itself.
after the fall, having a body comes with the inevitable experience of shame.
because of the embodied life, death, and resurrection of Christ, we who are in Christ are “clothed in Christ.” The shame of embodiment—and ultimately the shame of sin—that Adam and Eve could not cover with fig leaves is resolved, permanently, in Christ himself.
