Hey Church!

When we look back on historic church liturgies with modern eyes, we are tempted to see only the idolatries that resulted during the Middle Ages. A “traditional service,” to many in this generation, is equated with a stuffy, dead religion. One imagines pipe organs, vestments, long wooden pews, and lofty orators, perched high in a pulpit, forthwith beseeching thee thusly and so on, and so forth. 

Whatever your impression may be of liturgical forms in worship, their structured predictability once provided generations of believers with an alternative pattern of life in which was found refuge from the chaotic emptiness of the world. Endless innovation, tireless work, immoderate passions, and all manner of envy and strife were–and still are–the hallmarks of the day. When one would break free of that tilt-a-whirl and enter the sanctuary of God, there was a profound sense of stillness, order, and fullness of life. Worship was a spiritual defibrillator that called dead souls back to life. 

The call to worship summoned believers to step into a realm of free grace. Songs of praise and adoration were offered to the King who sat enthroned in their midst. Sinful worldly preoccupations were confessed and left behind like incense at the altar. Sinners were then assured of absolution in Jesus’ name. The Scriptures were then read, exposited, and made visible in the sacraments. Worshipers left the sanctuary with God’s “good word” of blessing, carrying the Light of the World back into the darkening anti-creative void. 

Central to the theology and worship of our church fathers were the sacraments of baptism and communion. It was through the incarnation of invisible grace in bread, wine, and water that Christ’s Bride was sustained, heartened, and taught to hunger and thirst for a better Kingdom. By partaking of the ordinary elements of bread, wine, and water, the Holy Spirit granted to worshipers “covenant signs… means of divine grace and… ordered rites which provide[d] both form and vitality to the disorder of human life.”* 

My brothers and sisters, what we do on Sunday matters! It matters to God, who is jealous for our worship. It matters immensely for the health of our souls to be regularly reoriented to true north (even pagan studies agree). It matters to our loved ones who have to put up with us when our loves become disordered for lack of attention to the things of eternal significance. And it matters to the watching world, who so desperately need to find sanity and stillness in a reality that exists outside of their own invention. 

So, come to church, bring your unbelieving friend, and rediscover the gospel’s “form and vitality” for the otherwise disordered life.