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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.
In my tradition, Anglicanism, we baptize infants. Before they cognitively understand the story of Christ, before they can affirm a creed, before they can sit up, use the bathroom, or contribute significantly to the work of the church, grace is spoken over them and they are accepted as part of us. They are counted as God’s people before they have anything to show for themselves.
“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.”
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.
The psalmist declares, “This is the day that the Lord has made.”
When Jesus died for his people, he knew me by name in the particularity of this day. Christ didn’t redeem my life theoretically or abstractly—the
“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.”4
If Christ was a carpenter, all of us who are in Christ find that our work is sanctified and made holy.
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.”
If I am to spend my whole life being transformed by the good news of Jesus, I must learn how grand, sweeping truths—doctrine, theology, ecclesiology, Christology—rub against the texture of an average day. How I spend this ordinary day in Christ is how I will spend my Christian life.
While doctrinal orthodoxy is crucial in the Christian life, for the most part we are not primarily motivated by our conscious thoughts. Most of what we do is precognitive.
Whoever we are, whatever we believe, wherever we live, and whatever our consumer preferences may be, we spend our days doing things—we live in routines formed by habits and practices. Smith, following Augustine, argues that to be an alternative people is to be formed differently—to take up practices and habits that aim our love and desire toward God.
“What kind of people is our liturgy forming us to be?”
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.
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.
Our hearts and our loves are shaped by what we do again and again and again.
The crucible of our formation is in the monotony of our daily routines.
when we gaze at the richness of the gospel and the church and find them dull and uninteresting, it’s actually we who have been hollowed out.
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 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.
Being surrounded by such great minds was a gift, but I began to feel like the sort of Christianity that I gravitated toward only required my brain.
What would it mean to believe the gospel, not just in my brain, but also in my body?
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.
Brushing my teeth, therefore, is a nonverbal prayer, an act of worship that claims the hope to come. My minty breath—a little foretaste of glory.
And yet here is where I find myself on an ordinary day, and here, in my petty anger and irritation, is where the Savior deigns to meet me.
Today my lost keys provide a moment of revelation, revealing the lostness inside me and my misplaced reliance.
It would be good with the execs in the SLI class to have them jot down specific examples of things like lost keys at work that create anxiety or anger within them. Then, it would be good to have them reflect on what those moments of anxiety or anger .2 that needs God‘s transforming work in their lives.
When the day is lovely and sunny and everything is going according to plan, I can look like a pretty good person. 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.
In Letters to Malcolm, C. S. Lewis says that people are “merely ‘amusing themselves’ by asking for patience which a famine or a persecution would call for if, in the meantime, the weather and every other inconvenience sets them grumbling.”1
Rod Dreher writes about his struggle with despair in an average day. “Everydayness is my problem. It’s easy to think about what you would do in wartime, or if a hurricane blows through, or if you spent a month in Paris, or if your guy wins the election, or if you won the lottery or bought that thing you really wanted. It’s a lot more difficult to figure out how you’re going to get through today without despair.”2
For some of us, the idea of repentance can bring to mind a particular emotional experience, or the minor-key songs of an altar call at a revival meeting. But repentance and faith are the constant, daily rhythms of the Christian life, our breathing out and breathing in.
Over time, through the daily practices of confession and absolution, I learn to look for God in the cracks of my day, to notice what these moments of failure reveal about who I am—my false hopes and false gods. I learn to invite the true God into the reality of my lostness and brokenness, to agree with him about my sin and to hear again his words of blessing, acceptance, and love.
This “global theology” of consumerism has transformed both the way we eat and the way we worship. The evangelical quest for a particular emotional experience in worship and the capitalistic quest for anonymous, cheap canned goods have something in common. Both are mostly concerned with what I can get for myself as an individual consumer.
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. We recall and reenact Christ’s life poured out for us, and we are transformed into people who pour out our lives for others.12
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 in Christian worship we are reminded that peace is homegrown, beginning on the smallest scale, in the daily grind, in homes, churches, and neighborhoods. Daily habits of peace or habits of discord spill into our city, creating cultures of peace or cultures of discord.
“Earth is Forgiveness School. You might as well start at the dinner table. That way, you can do this work in comfortable pants.”7
I’m fairly certain that one day there will be three numbers engraved on my tombstone as a legacy and a warning: my birth date, my death date, and the number of unopened emails still awaiting a response in my inbox.
What does worship have to do with my work?
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.
The Reformers taught that a farmer may worship God by being a good farmer and that a parent changing diapers could be as near to Jesus as the pope. This was a scandal.
Every Good Endeavor,
He says that we receive different (and conflicting) messages about work. We’re told that the main way to serve God in our work is by being personally honest and evangelizing our coworkers. Or by furthering social justice. Or by simply doing excellent and skillful work. Or by creating beauty. Or by working from a Christian motivation to glorify God by impacting culture. Or by having a “grateful, joyful, gospel-changed heart.” Or by doing whatever gives you the greatest sense of satisfaction. Or by making as much money as possible and being generous.
Warfield integrates the value of prayer and stillness with his vocation as an academic. He counters the charge that “ten minutes on your knees will give you a truer, deeper, more operative knowledge of God than ten hours over your books” by saying that a right understanding of his vocation would lead to “ten hours over your books, on your knees.”15 I want to learn how to spend time over my inbox, laundry, and tax forms, yet, mysteriously, always on my knees, offering up my work as a prayer to the God who blesses and sends. Living a third way of work—where we seek vocational holiness in and
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ora et labora, or “pray and work,”
Brother Lawrence, who wrote, “The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer, and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen . . . I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.”16
But I want to remember that we were made for a day when God’s chosen people will “long enjoy the work of their hands” (Is 65:22).
But in my life, time is most often something I seek to manage, or something I resent—something, it seems, that I never have enough of. In my frenetic life, I forget how to slow down and wait. For the good of my own soul I need to feel what it’s like to wait, to let the moments march past. And here I am, plunged into an ancient spiritual practice in the middle of the freeway—forced, against my will, to practice waiting.
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.
