Status Updates From Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sa...

All Christians often want to skip the boring, daily stuff to get to the thrill of an edgy faith. But it is in the deadlines of the Christian Faith the making the bed, they’re doing the dishes, the praying for our enemies, they’re reading of the Bible, the quiet, the small – – that God uses to transform us and make roots and grow us.

I am a Christian who belongs for revolution, for things to be made new and whole and beautiful and in big ways. But what I am slowly seeing is that you cannot 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.

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.

When we gaze at the richness of the gospel and the Church and find them dull and uninteresting, it is actually we who have been hollowed out. We have lost our capacity to see wonders where true wonders lie. We must be formed as people who are capable of appreciating goodness, truth, and beauty.

Every church denomination in the world has a repetitive practice of worship. Therefore, the question is not whether we have a liturgy. The question is, “What kind of people is our liturgy forming us to be?”

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.

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

The church is to be a radically alternative people, marked by the love of the triune God in each area of life.

The first activity of my day, the first move, I made, was not that other consumer, but that other collaborator with God.

In the creation story, God entered, chaos, and made order in beauty. And making my bed I reflected that creativity act in the tiniest, most ordinary way. Am I small Chaos, I made small order.

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.

God is forming us into a new people.
And the place of that formation is in the small moments of today..