Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

by Tish Harrison Warren

There are times when we approach Scripture, whether in private study or gathered worship, and find it powerful and memorable—sermons we quote and carry around with us, stories we tell of being impacted and changed. There are other times when the Scriptures seem as unappetizing as stale bread. I’m bored or confused or skeptical or repulsed. There are times when I walk away from Scripture with more questions than answers.

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. 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.

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.

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.

And God has made us not merely to consume but to cultivate, steward, and bless.

consumers. Spirituality packaged as a path to personal self-fulfillment and happiness fits neatly into Western consumerism. But the Scriptures and the sacraments reorient us to be people who feed on the bread of life together and are sent out as stewards of redemption.

The economy of the Eucharist is true abundance. There is enough for me, not in spite of others, but because we receive Christ together as a community.

In Christ there will always be enough for us, with so much left over.

Like those under Screwtape’s influence, I often neglect the obvious, proclaiming a radical love for the world even as I neglect to care for those closest to me. But I am increasingly aware that 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.

The passing of peace is placed where it is in the liturgy for theological reasons. 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 us. It’s a liturgical enactment of the reality that we cannot approach the table of the Prince of Peace if we aren’t at peace with our neighbor.

Ordinary love, anonymous and unnoticed as it is, is the substance of peace on earth, the currency of God’s grace in our daily life.

Daily habits of peace or habits of discord spill into our city, creating cultures of peace or cultures of discord.

The slave trade was crippled, and eventually outlawed, not because of a few heroes but because thousands upon thousands of peacemakers made little choices that shone, light upon tiny light, which God used to overcome darkness.

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.

the problem of poverty is not simply a lack of money. It’s a lack of community, a lack of deep ties—family, friends, people you can count on, people to catch you when you fall.

And yet I also need to remember that my small sphere, my ordinary day, matters to the mission—that the ordinary and unnoticed passing of the peace each day is part of what God is growing in and through me. It will bring a harvest, in good time.

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.

Receiving God’s gift of reconciliation enables us to give and receive reconciliation with those around us.

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. It takes faith to believe that laying down my sword in my kitchen has anything to do with cosmic peace on earth. 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.”

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.

But God cares about my friend’s work and his research, and not solely as a means to an end. The Christian faith teaches that 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.

Christian holiness is not a free-floating goodness removed from the world, a few feet above the ground. It is specific and, in some sense, tailored to who we particularly are. We grow in holiness in the honing of our specific vocation.

We can’t be holy in the abstract. Instead we become a holy blacksmith or a holy mother or a holy physician or a holy systems analyst. We seek God in and through our particular vocation and place in life.

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.

We are part of God’s big vision and mission—the redemption of all things—through the earthy craft of living out our vocation, hour by hour, task by task. I want to do the big work of the kingdom, but I have to learn to live it out in the small tasks before me—the missio Dei in the daily grind.

There can be a deep sense of purposelessness in modern work, in our day in and day out punching the clock.

we must hone the crafts and habits that allow us to work well and to love our neighbors through our work, whether that neighbor is someone I’ve known for decades or someone sitting at a computer screen far away.

We can feel like we are always at work, since work can follow us everywhere we go. With these changes come an increased temptation to make work and productivity an idol to which we’ll sacrifice rest, health, and relationships.

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.

We are blessed and sent to work in this world, where we will face fallenness and toil. But even still our labor is not in vain. And one day all of it, even our smallest daily tasks—even email—will be sifted and sorted and redeemed.

And I wait for glory, for the coming King, for the resurrection of the body. Christians are people who wait. We live in liminal time, in the already and not yet. Christ has come, and he will come again. We dwell in the meantime. We wait.

When we practice the Sabbath, we not only look back to God’s rest after his work of creation but we look forward to the rest ahead, to the Sabbath to come when God will finish his work of re-creation.

I get angry in traffic because it reminds me that time is not at my bidding.

The reality is that time is a stream we are swept into. Time is a gift from God, a means of worship. I need the church to remind me of reality: time is not a commodity that I control, manage, or consume.

Time revolves around God—what he has done, what he is doing, and what he will do.

Scripture tells us that when we “hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Rom 8:25). We live each ordinary day in the light of a future reality. Our best life is still to come.

Yet our patience does not make us passive about the brokenness of the world. We are not blithely waiting to abandon this world for another. Christian faith is never an otherwordly, pie-in-the-sky sentimentality that ignores the injustice and darkness around us.

The future orientation of Christian time reminds us that we are people on the way. It allows us to live in the present as an alternative people, patiently waiting for what is to come, but never giving up on our telos. We are never quite comfortable. We seek justice, practice mercy, and herald the kingdom 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.

Redemption is crashing into our little stretch of the universe, bit by bit, day by day, mile by coming mile. We have hope because our Lord has promised that he is preparing a place ...

But while an individual relationship with Jesus is an important part of the Christian life, it is not the sum total of the Christian life. Our relationship with God is never less than an intimate relationship with Christ, but it is always more than that.

Instead, we rely on the global, historic church that Christ initiated and built. When we worship Jesus, we rely on millions of Christians over thousands of years whom God has used to bear witness to himself. The only reason we know anything at all about Jesus is because his disciples told their friends, neighbors, and enemies about him, the apostles preached and wrote down his teaching and stories about him, and believers have carried his message everywhere they’ve gone in each generation.

We profoundly need each other. We are immersed in the Christian life together. There is no merely private faith—everything we are and do as individuals affects the church community.

Christ did not send his Holy Spirit only to individuals. He did not merely seek personal relationships with his followers. The good news is not simply that I can believe and thus make it to heaven, or even that I can believe and live out my life among a band of Christian friends. Jesus sent his Spirit to a people. The preservation of our faith and the endurance of the saints is not an individual promise; it is a promise that God will redeem and preserve his church—a people, a community, an organism, an institution—generation after generation, and that even the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

In the sin and failure of the church, we see the darkness and ugliness for which Christ suffered and died. But we also see the spectacular hope that in the midst of sinners, God can bring forth redemption, repentance, and transformation. We gaze in weakness, with dim eyes, on the power of God.

in this body of Christ, we find a place where we can be gloriously and devastatingly human. We find a place where we can fail and repent and grow and receive grace and be made new. Like a family—but even closer than a family—we can learn to live together, weak and human, in the goodness and transformation of God.

We are drawn to those we find lovely and likable. Yet those Jesus spent his time among—and those most drawn to Jesus—were the odd, the disheveled, and the outcast. Those who were winning at life saw no need for this life-disrupting Savior. The people of God are the losers, misfits, and broken.