Invited to Liturgy (PM Service)

Would you pray with me? Dear Lord, I confess that I am entering this space with my mind in a million different directions, my heart in a million different places, a lot that has been wearing on my shoulders. And I pray that as I am up here, Lord, that you would take over, that you would speak through me, that the words that you have given me to preach would be precisely the words that you want someone to hear.

I just thank you for bringing us all here in the midst of our daily lives, allowing us to worship, to celebrate, to bring all of ourselves before you. In Jesus' name, amen. I am a creature of habit.

Some of my habits are beneficial. For example, I have been making it a point the past couple of years to wake up early to read a good book with my morning coffee. And this habit grounds me at the beginning of my day because it is one of those few moments that is for me and nobody else.

But some habits are a little bit less beneficial. Like when I tell myself late at night, oh, I'm just going to sit down on the couch for five minutes and rest my eyes and then I'm going to go to bed. And then I flash forward 20 minutes later and I am passed out on the couch.

I have recently been feeling like I am stuck in a rut. And this thought has only strengthened with a new year, which is so often a time when we're encouraged to reflect on our lives, to make a ton of changes. And I've also felt stuck in my relationship with God.

Pastor Anthony spoke last week about one of the mountaintop experiences he had at a youth retreat where he audibly heard God's voice. And in my high school and college years, I treasured those moments at a small group meeting or a college retreat where I physically felt God's presence with me. And sometimes it seems nowadays that I have to step outside of my life to experience God's presence the way I did before.

Or else there's like a checklist of things I need to complete or a list of tasks that I need to do or questions that I need answered before God will meet me the way God did once before. And I know so many of us probably resonate with this feeling. And if you do, I hope that you know that you are not alone.

In this sermon series, we have been spending a couple of weeks talking about how God is inviting us into a deeper journey of our faith. We are invited to follow Jesus with our whole selves, knowing that God does not call us to abandon who we are, but rather to step fully into the freedom of our authentic selves. And we're invited to worship, knowing that it connects us to God and to one another.

And this week, we are going to talk about how God invites us to liturgy. Now, liturgy is one of those churchy words that probably has different connotations to everybody listening to this sermon. There are so many different faith traditions represented in this congregation, ranging from Catholicism, which has kind of like a formal liturgy of call and response, and ritualized prayers and behaviors, all the way to Pentecostalism, which is more free-flowing and charismatic.

And we often make distinctions between so-called high church traditions, like a Catholic mass, and so-called low church traditions, like a house church. But every Christian community, including this one, has a liturgy. And the definition of liturgy has many different shades of meaning, as I'm kind of going to unpack throughout this sermon.

But I like the description offered by Bruce T. Morrill in his book, Divine Worship and Human Healing, Liturgical Theology at the Margins of Life and Death. He defines liturgy as the symbolic ritual activity of the assembled church. Put simply, liturgy structures our services.

You can think of it a little bit like a trellis, because it's what our experience is built upon. There are two, sometimes three songs in our services, then we have a prayer, then another song, then announcements, sermon, communion, and benedict. And recently, we've been having a time at the end of service for anybody who would like to linger and worship in this space.

So when you attend a table service, you generally know what to expect. And liturgy also goes hand-in-hand with the sacraments, especially baptism and communion. And gathering for the Lord's Supper is so important and pivotal to the life of this community that we celebrate it every week.

But what is so important about it? After all, for us, it's just bread and grape juice. But there is something about this ritual that forms us as a community.

And if you're looking for more of a deep dive into communion and why we practice it as a community, I would highly recommend going back to watch Matt's sermon from this morning at Fort Totten. In many ways, I feel like my sermon is a part two to his. So I would highly recommend going to see it.

So being invited to liturgy does mean that we're invited to participate in the rituals of our faith that happen on a Sunday. But I want us to expand our definition of liturgy tonight. The original Greek word for liturgy, liturgia, as Tanetta said earlier, literally means the work of the people.

So it goes beyond mere participation in the rituals of our faith on a Sunday. Considering the work of the people invites us to question what work we are participating in, both as an individual and as a community, and how that work forms us. It's an invitation to expand our definition of liturgy into every moment of our lives.

If God can be found in bread, juice, and water, then God can be found even in the most mundane, everyday moments of our lives. So to expand my little working definition of liturgy in this sermon, liturgy involves those habits and practices of our lives that allow us to experience the abundant presence of God here and now. So I want us to look at Romans chapter 12, verses 1 through 2, to kind of unpack this idea a little bit more.

I appeal to you, therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. This passage teaches us three very important lessons about liturgy.

First, is that liturgy invites us to bring our full selves, mind, body, and soul, before God. In the first verse, we read that we are called to present our bodies as a living sacrifice before God, which is our spiritual worship. Other translations call this our reasonable worship, or our true and proper worship.

Now, at first, this idea of being a living sacrifice kind of raises my hackles a little bit. This verse has so often been used to argue that God will be pleased with us until we sacrifice everything, even our bodies, and it's only then that we are made holy and acceptable before God. But I wonder if it might be, in fact, it might, in fact, be the opposite.

Underneath this statement, Paul is speaking within the context of ancient temple worship and centuries of actions and rituals that we must do in order to be deemed worthy of God. And Paul isn't saying that those rituals are unimportant, but he's saying that God really desires something of infinitely more value, our very selves. God isn't asking us to deny our bodies, but to acknowledge the gift that is our bodies and the fact that that is what God wants all along.

And when we present our bodies before God, we see how those bodies are treasured by God. The act of sacrifice isn't what makes our bodies holy. Our bodies have been acceptable to God all along, and we are called to bring them before God, knowing that God values them.

So let's consider this quietly radical statement. Our bodies are holy and acceptable to God. I never heard the statement growing up.

There was a separation between our bodies and our spirits, and God wanted our spirit, God wanted our spiritual worship to look like prayer and right belief, but God didn't really care about our bodies and what we did with them. And in a culture where we're taught from an early age to feel shame about our bodies, for not living up to certain standards, for not being skinny enough, or white enough, or male enough, or female enough, or healthy enough, not being enough in general, let us refuse to surrender to that idea.

We are invited to celebrate our bodies as holy and acceptable before God, and this leads us into worship with our whole selves, not just our minds. There is a reason why so many formal forms of liturgy that we find in our church services are embodied. They urge us to consider our voice, our hands, our feet, and they urge us to look anew at the common elements of bread and wine and water.

And there is a quiet revolution that happens when we extend that to every aspect of our lives. Tish Harrison Warren talks about this expansive view of liturgy in her book, Liturgy of the Ordinary, and in her chapter about brushing her teeth, of all things, she talks about Christianity as an embodied faith.

She says, that the body is not incidental to our faith but integral to our worship. We were made to be embodied to experience life, pleasures, and limits in our bodies. When Jesus redeems us, that redemption occurs in our bodies.

And when we die, we will not float away to heaven and leave our bodies behind, but we'll experience the resurrection of our bodies. And Christ himself appeared after his resurrection in a mysteriously changed, but fleshly eating and drinking body. and even now he remains in his body.

Our bodies and our souls are inseparable. And therefore, what we do with our bodies and what we do with our souls are always entwined. I love how Tish Harrison Warren connects us to the idea of brushing her teeth, because it's hard for me to think of anything more mundane than that, especially at night when all I want to do is rest my eyes on the couch for a few minutes.

But brushing our teeth is a daily habit that reminds us of the goodness of our bodies and the importance of taking care of what God has given to us. God meets us in our bodies, and God meets us in the everyday moments of our lives. Warren reminds us that the only life any of us ever live is in our daily pedestrian humanity.

We are shaped by our daily liturgies. The call for us today in this sermon is not to leave behind those practices to find God. Instead, the call is for us to bring our everyday selves, our embodied selves, our weary selves, our lost and our hurting, our hopeful and compassionate selves before God, knowing that God always finds us

in the ordinary moments of our life. And this does require us to reconsider what it means to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, to bring our days and our weeks before God, to see how God is already working. But this sacrifice leads us to abundance.

By attending to God's presence during those mundane moments, we slowly become people who spend our days and our weeks and our lives marked by the love of God. The message version of Romans 12 verse 1 embodies this idea perfectly. It reads, So here's what I want you to do.

So here's what I want you to do. God helping you. Take your everyday, ordinary life.

You're sleeping, you're eating, you're going to work, you're walking around life, and place it before God as an offering. And when we do that, it leads me to my second point about liturgy. Liturgy invites us into community with one another.

Paul talks about brothers and sisters. He talks about our bodies, not just our singular life. Liturgy is not just something we participate in on our own, but liturgy brings us into community with one another.

Later in this exact chapter, Paul talks about how each person ought not to think more highly of themselves than they ought, but to consider ourselves part of the same body of Christ. We all have our unique purposes, we all go about our daily lives, but we're called to view that work in light of our community. It is about the work of the people.

And there is no better illustration of this idea than communion. When we recite the words of our communion liturgy, we are not only joining our voices with one another, but we are joining a chorus of generations spanning all the way from the first century to today. We are not alone.

We participate in the life of Christ among all of those alive and all of those who have passed on. When we go up to receive the elements, we are reconnecting to God and to one another. And when we eat the bread and we drink of the cup, we are reminded of the presence of Christ in the daily elements of our lives.

Come, the gifts of God for the people of God. Come and feast. These words can seem a bit silly when we consider the tiny communion pod that we hand out every Sunday, but not when we consider our lives together.

About a year and a half ago, we started a ritual that has, for me, become an extension of this moment of communion. One evening in late August or early September, a bunch of us were standing right out there in that lobby, just in a little conversation circle, getting to know each other. And a newcomer to the church, Kristen Carr, made us all laugh with her exuberance, and we enjoyed talking to each other, getting to know each other.

And then, out of the blue, she asked, do you all ever go out to dinner together? And up until that moment, we hadn't. In that strange era of kind of post-COVID, but not really, we were trying to figure out how to be in community with each other again.

But it sparked an idea, and we all agreed that we would like to go out to dinner the next week. And a group of five of us went out to Chipotle that next week, and we have continued that every single Sunday since. We all began looking forward to figuring out what restaurant we would try out, although we did quickly exhaust some of the better options, because if you don't know, the food scene in downtown D.C.

could be better. And this moment of connection has branched out into game nights and community groups and holiday parties and so much more. Those Sunday dinners have become the best part of my week.

That weekly liturgy of bringing our lives together around the table made strangers into friends, into family. and there is always, always room for more. We share everything together, including our dating woes, workplace challenges, the death of loved ones, inside jokes galore.

And across that table, as we join for a meal, something probably most of us would have enjoyed alone or with one or two people otherwise, we see a glimmer of what it means to create communities of authentic belonging here at the table. And this moment is particularly sacred to me now because Kristen moved away early last year and she passed away by suicide in June.

And this moment of unimaginable loss made me recall anew all of those moments that we had spent together, all of those moments that we might not have shared if she had not had the boldness to ask us to go out to dinner one random Sunday evening. And every time I go out to dinner, I think of her memory, her laughter, her boldness, her strength, her fierce devotion to justice.

And I think of how our community created this ritual because of her. There are rituals in our lives that become sacred precisely because of the people around us in those moments. When someone passes away, their presence still resides in those rituals that live on.

And by carrying on those liturgies, those practices and habits of our lives, we carry forward their memory just as we carry Christ together in our bodies during communion. I want us to turn toward Romans chapter 12, verse 2. Paul urges the Romans, do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you may discern what is the will of God,

what is good and acceptable and perfect. Finally, liturgy invites us to follow the prophetic, thoughtful, and radical way of Jesus. As Matt and I were preparing for this sermon, Pastor Tanetta provided us with a nugget of wisdom that I'm going to share now.

She said, the longer I do pastoral work, the more I believe that you can't practice revolutionary justice without deep grounding in liturgy. And this statement stuck with me because it has been so true to my own experiences lately. In response to injustice, I often feel paralyzed by the weight of all that is evil in the world.

Most recently, from far off, the current genocide unfolding in Gaza and from so close by, the gun violence on the streets of D.C. are stark reminders of the horrors of humanity. And it can feel hopeless and impossible to create the change that we seek or else there's a tendency to try to fix everything immediately, to try to burn it all down

and start anew. And I think there's space for radical change and I think that what the world needs is more of that radical change. But liturgy teaches us that our daily habits, what we repeatedly do, matters.

It shapes us. When we pray the Lord's Prayer, when we call out for our daily bread, when we call out for the Kingdom of God to come on Earth as it is in Heaven, we find the strength to carry on.

and when we invest in our communities, when we daily challenge the injustices around us, it creates a ripple effect. When we start a conversation, when we begin a small group, when we ask people to join us in a weekly action, we begin to dismantle the chains that keep us all bound.

injustice is one indivisible cloth. Whatever we do to unravel our one tiny corner of it helps to unravel the entire thing. When we are faced with evil and injustice, sometimes the only way forward seems marred with unimaginable loss and violence.

We must hope anyway. When it seems like the only response to anger and fear and violence is more anger and fear and violence, we must resist the forces that seek to conform us to that image.

When it seems easier to turn our eyes away, we must pay attention and find renewal and our embodied practices of hope and liberation. Remember how Jesus created change. He didn't do it by overthrowing the Roman Empire with force.

Instead, he spoke on hillsides. He shared meals with people. He washed feet.

He healed. He listened to people's stories. He invited people to follow, but he also invited people to stay, to return to their communities and invest in what was already happening.

We are invited to follow Jesus' way of listening and hoping. We are invited to share meals together and bring healing, no matter what that might look like. But this only happens in the context of our boring, monotonous, daily lives.

The work of the people still requires us to go to our day jobs, to go to school, to bring our kids to daycare, to go grocery shopping. Being invited to liturgy means that we begin to pay attention to those moments. And when we pay attention to those daily habits and practices that form us, we realize that God always meets us there no matter what.

And this leads me to the invitation of this sermon. And you might find it a little bit silly, but I think that it has the potential to be transformative. consider that most mundane, annoying, silly little task that you need to complete on a regular basis.

For me, it's easily taking out the trash. It's the worst part of living alone, and I would willingly clean my house from top to bottom every single week that meant that I never had to take out the trash and see another DC rat ever again.

So consider what that task is for you and ask, how is God present in this moment? What is sacred in this moment? For me, you don't really want to think about the liturgy of taking out the trash, but it's important to consider.

For example, taking out the trash creates a tiny space of order in an otherwise disorderly space. It makes my home more welcoming and it feels like a fresh start. And it even makes me consider how I want to live in the world.

If I don't want to take out the trash so often, perhaps I should find a way to generate less trash. It's better for the planet and it's better for me too. So, this week, consider the liturgy of taking out the trash.

God is not only found on the mountaintops or the valleys, God can be found in the boring daily liturgies of our lives. We are invited into a deeper experience of our lives to find out the ways that God has been showing up all along. And in this invitation, we find the goodness of our embodied existence, the love of community, and the hope for better things to come.

Would you pray with me? Dear Lord, thank you for bringing us to this space, for allowing us to go through our weeks with all the work that we have to do, all of the obligations and the cares of this world that are on us, the joys and the celebrations too.

I thank you for all the ways that you are working in this space and that you are bringing us together to participate in this weekly liturgy of coming to service, of praying together, of worshipping together, and coming to the Lord's table. I pray that as we go through our lives, we realize that the call has never been to step outside of our lives to find you, but rather the call is to

step into our lives and find how you are working within our breath, within all that we do over the course of our lives. I pray that you would give us a greater awareness of this in the next week. In Jesus' name, amen.