The Liturgy as Spiritual Formation
If you are new to liturgical worship, you may find it a little confusing at first because this kind of worship requires a great deal of participation on the part of the congregation. The word liturgy in fact means “work of the people.”
In liturgical worship, the people in the congregation are not just spectators or an audience. There is, of course, an audience, and that audience is God. Everything we do during our service is done to bring Him glory.
Thus, there is good reason for everything that we do in a liturgical worship service, and the more we participate in it and the more attention we give to what we are doing, the more we find that the liturgy not only becomes second nature, but it becomes an aid to our formation in Christ too.
You see the liturgy really is a means to spiritual formation and a microcosm of what all our life should look like. If you take the parts of the liturgy seriously, then you find that you have many of the ingredients you need for pursuing a fruitful Christian life. If you just go through the motions (which you can easily choose to do), then the liturgy becomes a bore and bears little fruit in your life.
Now, even when the liturgy becomes more second nature, it doesn’t always mean that it is feels easy to worship in this way. On some occasions, it takes a bit more concentration than we would like because if we are honest with ourselves, true worship of God doesn’t always come easy to us. That is the genius of the liturgy. When this is the case, the liturgy serves as a guide to help us.
So with this all in mind, we may then ask, “What are the ingredients of a fruitful spiritual life that are found in the liturgy and how can they help form us into more mature Christians?”
Here are some:
Developing a Proper Awe of God and an Understanding of Who We Are
Cultivating a Life of Prayer and Praise
Hearing and Meditating on the Scriptures/Making Space for Jesus
Praying for the World
Cultivating an Attitude of Thanksgiving
Confessing our Sins
Being Reconciled with Others
Serving Christ in the World
Developing a Proper Awe of God and Understanding of Who We Are
For any of us who have grown up or spent any degree of time in the Evangelical world, we are well aware of how close Jesus is to us. He is our friend. He dwells in our hearts. We can develop a relationship with Him. How wonderful this truth is!
Yet, sometimes in celebrating this truth, we forget that this is only possible because Jesus died for our sins. Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension provide the means for us to be reconciled to God. This reality doesn’t change the fact though that at heart, we are still a people who fall short all the time, and at the opposite end, God is One who is always and completely Holy.
It is by God’s amazing grace and mercy that we are able to not only approach God, but to cultivate a close relationship with Him. We recognize this truth at several points during our liturgy, and it is a good truth for us to carry with us as we go about our lives. It helps us to cultivate proper humility and an attitude of thanksgiving and dependence upon the Lord.
Cultivating a Life of Prayer and Praise
The Scriptures encourage us to “pray without ceasing”. Does that mean we should be hermits or monks so that we can pray all the time? Of course not, but we can cultivate a life where we aim to bring glory to God in all that we do. Our lives can become living acts of prayer and praise. This, in fact, is what the liturgy is. It is an extended act of prayer and praise to God. Perhaps, we may have not seen the liturgy in this light before, but when we do so, then hopefully, we can also start to see everything we do or say as opportunities for prayer and praise to God.
Hearing and Meditating on the Scriptures/Making Space for Jesus
The Scriptures play a big part of our service. We hear from four passages of Scripture (A reading from the Old Testament, a Psalm, the New Testament, and the Gospels). Then we hear a sermon that reflects upon these Scriptures. Why do we do this? Because it is in the written word of God (and of course Communion too) where we have an encounter with the Living Word of God, Jesus Christ. In some sense, we can think of this hearing and reflecting on Scriptures as a sacramental act. It is a means of God’s grace and Christ’s presence to us. Of course as Christians, we not only want to read and meditate on Scriptures on Sunday only, but throughout the week, both individually and with others. We want to make space for Jesus throughout the week.
Praying for the World
It is so easy for our prayers to only focus on our needs and the needs of those close to us (family members, friends, neighbors, etc.). As Christians, however, we have a vocation to pray for the whole world, and this is something that we do each week when we pray the Prayers of the People. It is a great reminder to us that throughout the week, we should also be praying for more than just our own personal concerns. We should be praying for the world.
Cultivating an Attitude of Thanksgiving
We call our service the Holy Eucharist. Eucharist is derived from a greek word “eucharisteo”‘ which means to “give thanks”. At heart, our service is not only an extended act of prayer and praise, but it is also and extended act of thanksgiving too. This shows up in a number of ways. It shows up in our Offertory – the time at the center of our service where we offer up our gifts and tithes to the Lord, recognizing that all we offer to Him is actually a gift that He has already given to us.
It also shows up clearly at the beginning of Communion in the section we call “The Great Thanksgiving”. We say, “It is right, and a good, and joyful thing, always and everywhere to give thanks to you, Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.”
Thus, our service is one where we continually give thanks to God for our creation, for the gifts of creation, and for the gift of redemption that we have in Jesus Christ. This attitude of thanksgiving is something we should carry with us at all times as we go about life.
Confessing our Sins
As mentioned before, as Christians we recognize that we fall short of the glory of God in small and in big ways. Even though we are made right with God through Christ’s work on the Cross, on this side of heaven, we never quite “arrive”; we are on a continual journey of transformation and of becoming more and more like Christ. Thus, when we fail and sin, we need to be honest before God. He, of course, already knows our failings, but by confessing our failures, we bring the dark places of our lives into the light, opening ourselves up to the work of Holy Spirit and often finding true freedom from the sins that beset us. Of course, in order to be able to confess these sins, we have to cultivate regular habits of self-examination. In fact, cultivating self-awareness through such habits of self-examination is an important aspect of growth in Christian maturity and one that should occur not only on Sundays but throughout the week.
Being Reconciled with Others
After the Confession, we have a time to pass the Peace. This is not primarily a time to greet one another (although that of course happens), but it is a time to extend God’s peace to another. After having made peace with God, we can now extend that peace to one another.
This is especially important because we are about to enter into the Offertory (time to offer gifts) and Communion. As Matthew 5: 23-24 tells us, “Therefore if you are presenting your offering at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your offering there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and present your offering.” Now of course, we don’t have the time to do full-scale reconciliation at this point in the service, but by passing the Peace, we are making a pledge that we will seek out reconciliation with those whom we are not fully at peace.
This is good and right because after all, we Christians are all called to a ministry of reconciliation. Having been reconciled to God through Christ, we are now called to grow in wholeness and to bring that wholeness and reconciliation to all relationships in our lives, to the creation, and to the world, as we are able.
Serving Christ in the World
We end our service by praying the Post-Communion Prayer, and in that prayer, we say, “And now, Father, send us out into the world, to do the work you have given us to do, to love and serve you as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord.” And then we are dismissed with one of several dismissals, including “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”
As Christians, we really do believe that we are to bring glory to God in all that we do. We are to share the Gospel with others through Word and deed, and that includes the vocation to which God has called us. We believe that work matters and that each person created by God is gifted in unique ways and is called to be a co-creator with God. God has designed each one of us for a special purpose – for some that purpose looks quite spectacular, for most it looks quite ordinary. For some that purpose is most realized in our paid jobs; for others it is something pursued after work hours. Whatever God has called us to, we believe that we are to leave Sunday worship knowing that we are to go in peace to love and serve the Lord. When we think of it in this way, we then realize that our Sunday worship service is really just the beginning of our worship of God throughout the week.
Conclusion
So as you can see, the liturgy provides us with ingredients to a fruitful spiritual life in Christ, and as such it is an aid to our spiritual formation in Christ. What we do on Sundays is really only a foretaste of how we should be living our lives throughout the week and throughout all our lives. By the grace of God, may we become more like Christ and may be glorify Him in all that we do. Amen.
At the closing of this blog post, I would like to give thanks to Fr. Michael Petty whose teaching during an instructed Eucharist gave me lots of food for thought and is behind much of what I say here.