Each Sunday, as people filter into the sanctuary where I worship, clutching a jacket or a cup of coffee, a hush comes over us all as the announcements end. Suddenly, some rousing music begins and we’re off and singing. Next we alternate between listening to a leader speak and speaking as a group. Some people read some ancient writings (often poetry), we sing some songs, another leader gets up and speaks for an extended period of time, and then we rush forward to eat a tiny meal of bread and wine.
These are things we almost never do in other spheres of our lives. Example: when’s the last time you did some group readings or sing-a-longs with your coworkers? I thought so. So what, exactly, is the deal? Why do we do what we do, and why do we do it the way we do it?
The early church fathers had a saying, “Lex orandi, lex credendi”, rendered something like, “the law of prayer is the law of belief”. However, the concept behind this phrase is about more than just prayer. As the leaders of the early church thought deeply about how the church should express her worship of Christ, it became clear that the way we worship actually informs our faith, it shapes what we believe. That is to say, form matters every bit as much as content.
I grew up in a small, rural Baptist church. Our worship service consisted of some coffee time, announcements, 3 simple hymns accompanied by piano, a time for all to offer prayer requests publicly (until the age of 7 I thought we were talking about ‘prairie quests’ and was consistently disappointed in the lack of adventure during that time), and a sermon. As I moved into jr. high and high school we added a guitar in our youth services. Unconsciously I began to think of Jesus as a cross-legged hippy, sitting with us in a circle, playing guitar, sweeping his hair out of his eyes.
In college, I had an opportunity to go with a friend to a Greek Orthodox Church on a Sunday morning. I was completely unprepared for what I would experience: prayer candles burning in the narthex, colorful icons and intricate woodwork throughout the narthex and nave, an ornately decorated priest in the fenced off sanctuary. The priest waved a censor as he led the liturgy; I’ll never forget that smell, one of the most beautiful scents I’ve ever experienced. A chanting choir was in the balcony behind us, giving voice to the praise of the angels.
That afternoon, as I tried to understand what I’d just experienced in that foreign worship service, I realized that for the first time I began to consider that God might actually be majestic. The way I worshipped, the sights, smells, sounds, the music, order of worship, all of it began to reshape my view of God. Growing up I got a picture of the nearness of God, that day in college I began to form a picture of his transcendency.
In his book, Desiring the Kingdom, James Smith reminds us that, “we are what we love, and our love is shaped, primed, and aimed by liturgical practices that take hold of our gut and aim our heart in certain ends.” In other words, we are constantly being shaped by our worship practices. The strange thing is that most of the time that reshaping is taking place subconsciously. It’s not until we’re faced with a choice in life, a way for us to express what is important to us, that we begin to see how we’ve been shaped by our worship.
In using liturgy, the elements of our worship have been chosen with care in order that we might be reshaped as the people of Jesus. We want to uphold the immanence and transcendence of God. We want to maintain our gathering as a time of worship, where we’re vertically oriented toward the Trinity, but also where we remain firm-footed on earth, pushing out the gospel in a horizontal line, pushing back the darkness and brokenness of the world and carrying forth the light and healing of Jesus.
We remind ourselves every week that confession and belief are at the core of the Christian life. We are called to constantly be giving up more of our life to the lordship of Jesus, turning to him in faith and hope. As we’re reminded of what the gospel has worked in our lives we sing out in joyous praise, and we give our money away. We situate ourselves under the preached Word, not so we have an opportunity to critique, not so we can gain some inner secret knowledge that will make us ‘truly Christian’--no, we sit under the Word because it is alive with the life of the Spirit of Jesus, because we need to hear the voice of Jesus wooing us again to enter in to his marriage proposal more deeply. We come to his table to be nourished, to be rebuilt in our faith, to imbibe his life as our life.
We do all these things as individuals, yes, each responding to and being reshaped by the liturgy, but we do all of these things corporately, as a community, always being reminded that we are indeed a family, a body, a church.
Then, as we exit the sanctuary, jackets in hand, we move back into God’s world, we run back into the city in smaller groups as people that have been reshaped by their worship of a God who has come near to all in Christ. We move back into this world to continue living a liturgical life.
