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There are indeed moments of spiritual ecstasy in the Christian life and in gathered worship. Powerful spiritual experiences, when they come, are a gift. But that cannot be the point of Christian spirituality,
Word and sacrament sustain my life, and yet they often do not seem life changing. Quietly, even forgettably, they feed me.
We keep eating. We receive nourishment. We keep listening and learning and taking our daily bread. We wait on God to give us what we need to sustain us one more day. We acknowledge that there is far more wonder in this life of worship than we yet have eyes to see or stomachs to digest. We receive what has been set before us today as a gift.
habits shape us, meal by meal.
am shaped almost imperceptibly by Word and sacrament.
It arrives on my table seemingly by magic. With this anonymity comes ingratitude—I do not recall those farmers and harvesters to whom I owe a debt of thanks. I do not think of God’s mercy in providing a harvest. And with anonymity and ingratitude comes injustice.
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. These anonymous kidney beans say that what mainly matters about me is the fact that I need to buy things to stay alive. But God knows the harvester of these beans and cares about justice. And God has made us not merely to consume but to cultivate, steward, and bless.
The word Eucharist literally means “thanksgiving.”
The Eucharist—our gathered meal of thanksgiving for the life, death, and resurrection of
Christ—transforms each humble meal into a moment to recall that we receive all of life, from soup to salvation, by grace.
We are born hungry and completely dependent on others to meet our needs. In this way the act of eating reorients us from an atomistic, independent existence toward one that is interdependent.
we feast on Christ, and are thereby mysteriously formed together into one body, the body of Christ.
the economy of the Eucharist calls me to a life of self-emptying worship.
We must guard against those practices—both in the church and in our daily life—that shape us into mere consumers.
There is enough for me, not in spite of others, but because we receive Christ together as a community.
What we are actually arguing about is our fears, anxieties, identities, and hopes.
The struggle to “love thy neighbor” is most often tested in my home, with my husband and my kids, when I’m tired, fearful, discouraged, off my game, or just want to be left alone.
longing for and vision of God’s shalom—a very pregnant word that means God’s all-consuming, all-redeeming peace. The hope of a kingdom where God is worshiped wholly, where humanity extends love and mercy with generosity, where systemic injustice is broken and “the oppressed are set free” was (and is) inconceivably beautiful and intoxicating.
can get caught up in big ideas of justice and truth and neglect the small opportunities around me to extend kindness, forgiveness, and grace.
I cannot seek God’s peace and mission in the world without beginning right where I am, in my home, in my neighborhood, in my church, with the real people right around me.
Before we come to the Eucharist, before we take the body and blood of Christ, we actively extend peace to the members of the body of Christ right around
we cannot approach the table of the Prince of Peace if we aren’t at peace with our neighbor.
Early Christians took seriously Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 5 that if someone is approaching the altar and remembers that their brother has something against
them, they must leave and go make peace with the offended brother before offering a gift to God.
the extension of peace is vital to worship, that worshiping God is inextricably tied with seeking God’s kingdom of shalom by making peace with her neighbors.
The passing of the peace finds its way into our day mostly in small, unseen moments as we live together, seeking to love those people who are the constants, the furniture in our lives—parents, spouses, kids, friends, enemies, the barista we chat with each week as we wait for coffee, the people in the pew behind us with the noisy toddler, the old man next door who doesn’t get out much.
the peace of our small sphere and the broader peace of our city, nation, and world are inextricably bound up together: “Seek the peace of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its peace, you will find your peace”
And when we seek peace, we begin where we are.
Each time we make a small choice toward justice, or buy fair trade, or seek to share instead of hoard, or extend mercy to those around us and kindness to those with whom we disagree, or say “I forgive you,” we pass peace where we are in the ways that we can.
And God can take these ordinary things and, like fish and bread, bless them and multiply them. He can make revolution stories out of smallness.
But I need my friend and I need to be reminded, more than is comfortable, of the marginalized. And he needs us: young parents who are ordinary and worn out.
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.
we are also called to stability, to the daily grind of responsibility for those nearest us, to the challenge of a mu...
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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.”
seeking shalom always involves forgiveness and reconciliation.
When we have been wounded by those around us, extending forgiveness—“not counting their trespasses against them”—is giving up our right to recompense, to resentment, to self-righteousness.
Our forgiveness and reconciliation flow from Christ’s forgiveness of us.
In the end, God is the peacemaker. It is not simply “peace” that we pass to each other. It is the peace of Christ, the peace of our peacemaker. Christ’s peace is never a cheap peace.
We are quarreling people, but God is reforming us to be people who, through our ordinary moments, establish his kingdom of peace. Believing this is an act of a faith. It takes faith to believe that our little, frail faithfulness can produce fruit.
“And now, Father, send us out to do the work you have given us to do, to love and serve you as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord . . .”
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.
The work we do together each week in gathered worship transforms and sends us into the work we do in our homes and offices.
Likewise, our professional and vocational work is part of the mission and meaning of our gathered worship. We are people who are blessed and sent; this identity transforms how we embody work and worship in the world, in our week, even in our small day.
The idea that all good work is holy work was revolutionary.
all work that is not immoral or unethical is part of God’s kingdom mission.
The kingdom of God comes both through our gathered worship each week and our “scattered” worship in our work each day. Thus all work, even a simple, small task, matters eternally.
The missio Dei, the mission of God (it could also be translated “the sending of God”)—the idea that every part of creation will be redeemed and rightly ordered around worship of the Trinity—is manifest in an integral way in our work.
We grow in holiness in the honing of our specific vocation.
Not sure
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.
