Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

by Tish Harrison Warren

It’s remarkable that when the Father declares at Jesus’ baptism, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” Jesus hasn’t yet done much of anything that many would find impressive.

God made this day. He wrote it and named it and has a purpose in it.

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.

“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.”

Ignoring Scripture’s teaching about the proper use of the body and using our bodies for our own false worship is a misuse of the sacred akin to using consecrated bread and wine in a Wiccan goddess ceremony.

But when we use our bodies for their intended purpose—in gathered worship, raising our hands or singing or kneeling, or, in our average day, sleeping or savoring a meal or jumping or hiking or running or having sex with our spouse or kneeling in prayer or nursing a baby or digging a garden—it is glorious, as glorious as a great cathedral being used just as its architect had dreamt it would be.

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.

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.

At the Last Supper Jesus tells his disciples to eat in remembrance of him. Of all the things he could’ve chosen to be done “in remembrance” of him, Jesus chose a meal.

The contemporary church can, at times, market a kind of “ramen noodle” spirituality. Faith becomes a consumer product—it asks little of us, affirms our values, and promises to meet our needs, but in the end it’s just a quick fix that leaves us glutted and malnourished.

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.

I should pray and be thankful for every single life that particpated in providing my meal.

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.

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.

God intended man to have all good, but in . . . God’s time; and therefore all disobedience, all sin, consists essentially in breaking out of time.

All good will be given in God's time.

Before Christians can say things about what the church ought to be, their first need is to say what the Church is, here and now amid its own failures and the questionings of the bewildered. Looking at it now, with its inconsistencies and perversions and its want of perfection, we must ask what is the real meaning of it just as it is. As the eye gazes upon it, it sees the Passion of Jesus Christ; but the eye of faith sees further: it sees the power of Almighty God.8

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).

The church body is not just made up of people who think and share my values. There will be people who I believe are incredibly misguided, but they are part of the body of Christ and are part of God's plan for the church, even if I can't understand why.

The more we indulge, the less pleasure we find. We are hedonistic cynics and gluttonous stoics. In our consumerist society we spend endless energy and money seeking pleasure, but we are never sated.

But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

He told me to take up the practice of pleasure: to intentionally embrace enjoyment as a discipline.14