Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

by Tish Harrison Warren

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.

According to Lutheran theologian Martin Marty, Lutherans are taught to begin each day, first thing, by making the sign of the cross as a token of their baptism.

Dorothy Bass explains this practice: “For all Christians, baptism embodies release from yesterday’s sin and receipt of tomorrow’s promise: going under the water, the old self is buried in the death of Christ; rising from the water the self is new, joined to the resurrected Christ.”

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.

My works and worship don’t earn a thing. Instead, they flow from God’s love, gift, and work on my behalf. I am not primarily defined by my abilities or marital status or how I vote or my successes or failures or fame or obscurity, but as one who is sealed in the Holy Spirit, hidden in Christ, and beloved by the Father. My naked self is one who is baptized.

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.

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.

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?

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.”

They remind me that today is the proving ground of what I believe and of whom I worship.

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.

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

Throughout the day I fed on a near-constant stream of news, entertainment, stimulation, likes, and retweets. Without realizing it, I had slowly built a habit: a steady resistance to and dread of boredom.

I’d stop waking up with my phone, and instead I’d make the bed, first thing. I also decided to spend the first few minutes after I made the bed sitting (on my freshly made bed) in silence. So I banished my smartphone from the bedroom.

I began to notice, very subtly, that my day was imprinted differently. The first activity of my day, the first move I made, was not that of a consumer, but that of a colaborer with God.

At times, I’d read Scripture. Most often I’d pray. I’d begin with the Lord’s Prayer. Then I’d invite God into the day. I’d pray the words of the Morning Office: “Open my lips, O Lord, and my mouth shall declare your praise

Flannery O’Connor once told a young friend to “push as hard as the age that pushes against you.”3 The church is to be a radically alternative people, marked by the love of the triune God in each area of life.

to be an alternative people is to be formed differently—to take up practices and habits that aim our love and desire toward God.

Therefore, the question is not whether we have a liturgy. The question is, “What kind of people is our liturgy forming us to be?”

Some of these, like my smartphone ritual, may need to be changed. As we examine them we realize that we need to make new habits that form us as more faithful worshipers. Some habits may simply need to be examined as the important spiritual practices they are.

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 sustaining a life of faith.

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.

“Everyone wants a revolution. No one wants to do the dishes.”

you can’t get to the revolution without learning to do the dishes. The kind of spiritual life and disciplines needed to sustain the Christian life are quiet, repetitive, and ordinary.

Christians are often accused of two wrong-headed views of the body. One is that we ignore the body in favor of a disembodied, spirits-floating-on-clouds spirituality. The other is that we are obsessed with bodies, focusing all our attention on policing sexual conduct and denigrating the body as a dirty source of evil. In certain communities at certain moments in history these accusations may have been legitimate. But the Christianity we find in Scripture values and honors the body.

We believe in the incarnation—Christ came in a body.

he spent his days in the same kind of bodily mainte...

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.

Our bodies and souls are inseparable, and therefore what we do with our bodies and what we do with our souls are always entwined.

But in Christ, these bodily tasks are a response to God’s creative goodness. These teeth I’m brushing, this body I’m bathing, these nails I’m clipping were made by a loving Creator who does not reject the human body.

But 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.

Because of Christ’s embodiment, the ways we care for our bodies are not meaningless necessities that keep us well enough to do the real work of worship and discipleship. Instead, these small tasks of caring for our bodies, as quotidian as they are, act as an embodied confession that our Creator, who mysteriously became flesh, has made our bodies well and deserves worship in and through our very cells, muscles, tissues, and teeth.

In his book Earthen Vessels, Matthew Lee Anderson argues that just as basketball players train their bodies through practice drills, “practicing the presentation of our bodies as living sacrifices in a corporate context through raising hands, lifting our eyes to the heavens, kneeling, and reciting prayers simply trains us in our whole person, body and soul, to be oriented around the throne of grace.”2

The proliferation of pornography and sexually driven advertising trains us to understand bodies (ours and other people’s) primarily as a means of conquest or pleasure. We are told that our bodies are meant to be used and abused or, on the other hand, that our bodies are meant to be worshiped.

If the church does not teach us what our bodies are for, our culture certainly will.

Instead of temples of the Holy Spirit, we will come to see our bodies primarily as a tool for meeting our needs and desires. Or we might believe that our bodies should be flawless

Or we may attempt to ignore embodiment altogether, eating and drinking what we will, with no regard for the way our choices violate a call to steward our bodies as gifts.

Our bodies are instruments of worship.

The scandal of misusing our bodies through, for instance, sexual sin is not that God doesn’t want us to enjoy our bodies or our sexuality. Instead, it is that our bodies—sacred objects intended for worship of the living God—can become a place of sacrilege. When we use our bodies to rebel against God or to worship the false gods of sex, youth, or personal autonomy, we are not simply breaking an archaic and arbitrary commandment. We are using a sacred object—in fact, the most sacred object on earth—in a way that denigrates its beautiful and high purpose.

Sexual sin is a scandal in the Scriptures not because the apostles were blushing prigs—they were, in reality, a rather salty bunch—or because the body is dirty or evil, but because our skin and muscles and feet and hands are more sacred than any communion chalice or baptismal font. Ignoring Scripture’s teaching about the proper use of the body and using our bodies for our own false wor...

though words failed me, prayer without words—prayer in and through my body—became a lifeline. I couldn’t find words, but I could kneel. I could submit to God through my knees, and I’d lift my hands to hold up an ache: a fleshy, unnamable longing that I carried around my ribs. I’d offer up an aching body with my hands, my knees, my tears, my lifted eyes. My body led in prayer and led me—all of me, eventually even my words—into prayer.4

as a priest is to participate in house blessings. When people move into a new house, we come together to pray throughout their new home, moving from room to room and using a special liturgy for the occasion.

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.

It’s easy to look into the mirror and take stock of all that we feel is lacking or wrong about our bodies. Instead we must learn the habit of beholding our bodies as a gift, and learn to delight in the body God has made for us, that God loves, and that God will one day redeem and make whole.

my body is inseparable from my soul, and that both deserve care.

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.

Brushing my teeth, therefore, is a nonverbal prayer, an act of worship that claims the hope to come.

But little things gone wrong and interrupted plans reveal who I really am; my cracks show and I see that I am profoundly in need of grace.