Everyday Liturgists
Offering the totality of our lives to God as a “reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice.”
The purpose of Everyday Liturgist is to break the dividing wall between the sacred and mundane so that our whole lives become a leitougia — a holy offering — to God. This purpose emerges from what I deem to be the central enterprise of the Christian life: to live in holiness and righteousness before God, not through our own merits, but by joining Jesus through whom everything that could possibly be offered to God has already been offered. This, not harps and halos, is the meaning of eternal and abundant life. It is the life of him who is the true life of the world. If in Christ all of Creation, including “our selves, our souls, and bodies,” has been reclaimed by God, then it follows that every moment, every person, and every thing bears the possibility of God. Our work is to allow our lives to be perfected by God so that we experience more and more of this life in this world in preparation for the world to come. In the words of one of my favorite missiologists Bishop Lesslie Newbigen, “The deepest motive for mission is simply the desire to be with Jesus where he is, on the frontier between the reign of God and the usurped dominion of the devil.” The individual Christian’s life and the Church’s life are spent on this frontier, establishing what Fleming Rutledge calls “signs and beachheads” of our ultimate victory. Through the Church, God claims more and more of Creation for its true Lord in whose life Creation finds its ultimate destiny and fulfillment.
A necessary question follows this assertion: how? If the life of the Christian and the life of the Church is spent in this disputed frontier, and the vocation of the Christian and the Church has something to do with claiming this territory for God, how do we do it? This question might be the question underneath all of church history. Missionaries went across the known world hoping to reclaim territory for God, and while the Church is a global community in no small part thanks to their efforts, the question must be asked: at what cost? Conquest, crusade, and colonialism all sought to reclaim the world for God through coercive power. Each of these enterprises ignored one essential claim underpinning the Gospel: temporal power cannot bring about the Kingdom of God. In fact, temporal power is corrupting by its very definition. This is the tragedy of the Old Testament. Judges and kings — even those anointed by God — cannot create God’s kingdom. Throughout the books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, we see a few bright spots — leaders who feared God — but overall, the enterprise is a resounding failure resulting in the exile of God’s people from the Promised Land. This reality doesn’t deter those committed to the idea that God’s kingdom depends on coercive power. We fail to realize that as long as we are committed to the idea that power must be exploited — even in the service of what we deem “good”— we are doomed to repeat the tragedy of history.
Jesus shows us a different path. In St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, he writes:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
This excerpt, considered by many scholars to be an early Christian hymn, illustrates the kenotic — self-emptying — posture of Christ and the proper posture of those he claims: humility. In God’s kingdom, power is neither to be grasped nor exploited; rather, power is to be given away in the loving service of others, even costly service. In the counterintuitive wisdom of God, this is the path to life. Although Jesus’s divestment from power results in his death, St. Paul says,
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
In his Resurrection and Ascension, Jesus’s divestment from power is shown to be the path to true life. However, his divestment from power — his humility — is only half the story. His humility makes his sacrifice possible. Without wading into the various theories of atonement (which are essential discourses, but not the subject of this author at this time), I had found it often enough to consider that Jesus’s offering of himself to God, even, in the words of St. Paul, to “death on the cross,” fulfills something of the human vocation. In For the Life of the Word, Fr. Alexander Schmemann claims that the ultimate sin — “original sin” if you must — is “first of all the deviation of man’s love and his alienation from God.” Schmemann continues,
“That man prefers something — the world or himself — to God, this is the only real sin and in it all sins become natural, inevitatble. This sin destroys the true life of man [humanity]. It deviates life’s course from its only meaning and direction. And in Christ this sin is forgiven, not in the sense that God now has forgotten it and pays no attention to it, but becuase in Christ man has returned to God and has returned to God becuase he has loved him [God] and found in him [God] the only true object of love and life. And God has accepted man and, in Christ, reconciled him with himself. Repentence is thus the return of our love, of our life, to God.”
In other words, Jesus’s offering of himself fulfills the whole purpose of humanity: to live lives of worship to God. Our lives find their ultimate fulfillment in this sacrificial and worshipful posture. This truly worshipful posture allows humans to truly be a blessing to one another and the cosmos. We might understand inside of the walls of a church or even in our own prayer and devotion time. The true challenge is integrating this into the other hours of our days. How might we love God through our places of employment? Through our encounters with other people, especially those most different from ourselves? Through how we steward the planet and its resources?
I discovered a practice a few years ago: the Ignatian Examen. The Examen is a form of prayer that invites reflection on the day that is passed. In the forms of the Examen that I have practiced, I was invited to prayerfully review my day and call to mind everything I did — every meeting, every task, every encounter with another person — and to ask: did I experience God’s closeness or God’s absence in this encounter, meeting, etc.? Whatever my response, I am invited to offer that moment to God in thanksgiving before moving on to the next. The idea is that every moment is an opportunity to experience the life of God in this life. Sometimes our inability to experience God’s life in a particular moment is outside our control. This speaks to the pervasive power of sin and our ongoing need for a savior. Often, it is not. The difference is usually found in our awareness of the possibility of the moment. Thankfully, awareness can be honed through prayer and reflection — like the Examen.
Living as everyday liturgists is about reclaiming our lives (our jobs, families, relationships, politics, etc.) for God through humility and servanthood. Imagine how different our world would be if the highest ideal weren’t power for power’s sake but humility and sacrifice. What if, instead of grappling for power to use it as a cudgel against our opponents, we outdid one another in serving one another and the marginalized?
Each of us is a priest, called to offer the totality of our lives to God as a “reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice,” thus enabling the life of God to enter and claim more of our world until the whole world is filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the water covers the sea.