The question you may be asking is, why Liturgy? The word itself often evokes strong opinions one way or another. To some it is the relic of a dead and meaningless ritual. To others, it is the very life and breath of the Spirit moving within the worshiping community.
It has often been pointed out that the Greek word we get our English word ‘liturgy’ from basically means ‘the work of the people.’ But it has even deeper etymological roots. Originally the Greek word, leitourgia, referred to an action by which a group of people became something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals.[1] Too often what is passed off as ‘contemporary’ worship caters to the idea of the church being a collection of individuals—an aggregate of individual believers who have come together because they share a common interest. This is true whether one’s idea of contemporary is 2010 or 1950.
Historically, though, when the church comes together on Sunday, she does so as more than an aggregate of individual believers. Community is more than a social enclave of likeminded individuals. Community transcends the individual by insisting that only together do we become truly human. As Stanley Grenz points out, “Our human destiny is communal. Indeed, the biblical writers consistently present our eternal home in social, rather than individual terms.”[2] Liturgy reminds us that as the church we are a particular people imbued with a particular “constitutive narrative.”[3] The liturgy rehearses this narrative in a way that is embodied by the church and forms the church into the eschatological people of God. In this, the church stands as a reminder to the world that the end to which all creation moves is nothing less than the shared participation in the perichoretic community of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is this end—telos—that liturgy embodies as it forms the church into the new people of God.
It should also be noted that liturgy not only serves to help us become something corporately which we can never become as a mere collection of individuals, but it also stands in sharp contrast to the world. By doing so it reminds us that the church is uniquely the people of God—a royal priesthood, a peculiar people, a holy nation. Too often it seems that there is little difference between what we encounter in our worship service and what we encounter in the world. The church becomes subject to the world when she imitates the world. The church becomes idolatrous when she accommodates the world in the attempt to be relevant. Alexander Schmemann notes that, “In church today, we so often find we meet the same old world, not Christ and His Kingdom. We do not realize that we never get anywhere because we never leave any place behind.”[4] The Liturgy of the church sets the gathering apart from the world. When we enter into the sacred movement of the church at worship through the historical liturgy of Word and Table, we do not meet the same old world. We encounter a new world, a different world; we encounter the kingdom of God. And perhaps even more, we are encountered by the kingdom of God.
God’s kingdom encounters us through the retelling and the reenactment of God’s story. When we hear again (or perhaps hear for the first time) the grand narrative of God’s love, the liturgy reminds us that this is our story. It is about us. We are the ones who have wandered off to that far country to eat the slop of pigs; we are the ones who all too often find ourselves walking on the other side of the road so as not to encounter the one who needs our help; we are the ones caught in adultery; we are also the ones who stand all too ready to stone the poor sinner caught in their sin. The liturgy reminds us that we come to God’s table as Lazarus, begging for crumbs; we come as the unclean women seeking to simply touch the hem of Jesus’ cloak; we come as the Prodigal falling at his father’s feet pleading, “I am no longer worthy to be called your son, make me one of your servants.” The liturgy encounters us with the kingdom of God because it pulls us from the world and the culture that daily bombards us and immerses us in a new world and an alien culture that stand cross-wise to everything we know, and it declares that this strange new world is what is really real, this is what is truly true: the kingdom of God has come, and because of that we are being transformed.
The liturgy reminds us that we are more than a gathering of individuals. Instead, we are a community that finds its identity together in the shared story of God’s love and redemption. The liturgy calls us to remember that the Church, as God’s renewed people, stands in contrast as an alternative to what the world embodies, incarnating God’s vision for humanity and all creation. But the liturgy does one more thing for us as well. It teaches us a new language—a language of confession and forgiveness, a language of grace and love, a language of prayer and praise. Through the movement of the liturgy we learn the vocabulary of God. But it is more than just in the hearing of the words. Through the movement of the liturgy we perform these words. It is through their performance that words find their transformational power. As we enact and embody the words we hear and proclaim they begin to change us. We move from death to life, from darkness to light. And when the service draws to a close and we are dismissed to return back into the world, we take the performance with us. The language of confession and forgiveness, grace and love, prayer and praise goes with us because it has become a part of us. And the practices we perform in the church become the practices we perform in the world. In this way the Church serves the world by truly being the Church—a royal priesthood, a peculiar people, a holy nation.
[1] Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1963), 25.
[2] Stanley Genze, The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology. ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, "Ecclisiology" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 259.
[3] Ibid., 257.
[4] Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1963), 28.
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