To many, an emphasis on liturgy may appear to be extra of a legal responsibility than a assist for ethics. Admittedly, the connection between liturgy and ethics can simply be framed negatively. Citing passages from the prophets reminiscent of Amos 5:21–27 or Isaiah 1:11–17, the place God declares his displeasure in rituals carried out by unjust, oppressive, idolatrous, and in any other case untrue worshipers, liturgy may be considered empty type or mere motions, too typically masking exhausting hearts and unjust palms.
But there’s one other method to contemplate the prophetic denunciations of such hypocritical worship: It’s exactly due to the right marriage between liturgy and ethics that the hypocritical apply of the previous is so abhorrent. The reality of liturgy just isn’t present in naked type, however in complete transformation and reorientation of life and, the place the latter is absent, the previous is made right into a mockery. Liturgy orders us in the direction of apply and is confirmed—and infrequently falsified—in it.
Orders that order our moral formation
That rituals, ceremonies, formalities, and liturgies needs to be ordered in the direction of transformative apply shouldn’t be exhausting to know. As an example, whereas some dismiss the formalization of a union in marriage as “only a piece of paper,” or a marriage as a “mere ceremony,” these formalities will not be empty, however they powerfully order contributors’ lives in the direction of lifelong union, inside which their very own that means is fulfilled.
The bond between liturgy and ethics is manifold and wealthy, far exceeding naked ethical didacticism. It’s mainly, but not solely, formational somewhat than informational. And it’s formational in a number of respects.
In a perceptive brief e-book, On Sacrifice, Moshe Halbertal argues that “self-transcendence is on the core of the human capability for an ethical life.” Towards figures reminiscent of Immanuel Kant, Halbertal contends that the best menace to morality just isn’t discovered primarily in self-interest, however in idolatry. The best evils of humanity haven’t been dedicated as expressions of self-interest a lot as expressions of false sacrifice. With out denying parts of self-interest motivating conflict, the truth of sacrifice for one thing higher than ourselves—an ideological trigger, an identification group, a nation, and many others.—is much stronger a justification and motivator.
As individuals have positioned their hope for self-transcendence in entities which can be unworthy of such hope, they’ve been responsible of one of the elementary sins recognized in Holy Scripture: idolatry. And nothing addresses this extra straight than the apply of true worship.
Christian worship is, above all else, our (re-)orientation to the true object of our reward and a correct hope for self-transcendence. Whereas we might be a part of varied issues which can be higher than ourselves and which might supply us a point of that means, it’s within the service of God alone that the opportunity of transcendence is discovered. And as our lives are ordered in the direction of God, all different potential masters we may be tempted to serve can be put and saved of their correct, subordinate locations.
“You shall don’t have any different gods earlier than me” (Exod 20:3) is the foundational moral fact, and worship—declaring God’s value—is a repeated return to this fact. It’s a fact from which we stray too simply.
Reorienting life by liturgical cycles
Liturgy, like different varieties, buildings and articulates. We aren’t consistently engaged in liturgy. Fairly, it’s set aside from unusual exercise and we return to it in line with a set rhythm. Each Sunday we regather and are despatched out once more, punctuating our lives.
In creating the world, God rested on the seventh day, blessing it and setting it aside from the times of labor (Gen 2:1–3). Nonetheless, the Sabbath day of relaxation was included inside the sequence of the seven days (Gen 1:1–31); the Sabbath completes the week and, despite the fact that not one of the labor of creation happens inside it, all of the labor of creation is ordered by and in the direction of it.
The liturgical scholar Louis-Marie Chauvet discusses the way in which that liturgy is about aside from unusual time and exercise, but in a manner that’s vitally related to it. Each the place worship is extraordinarily casual, trivialized in a fashion that blurs into common day by day life, or extremely ritualized in a fashion solely unusual and international to it, the right relationship between liturgy and life is undermined. Liturgy requires one thing of a suspension of and break with the quotidian order, with the preoccupations, values, and types of society that characterize it, permitting a better actuality of grace to reframe, right, remodel, and reorder them.
As such, the apply and place of liturgy just isn’t dissimilar to that of a sport, despite the fact that it’s a matter of weight and solemnity. By repeatedly taking us out of our day by day cycles of labor and exercise, worship frees us from a suffocating submersion inside their values and priorities, granting us house and distance from which transformation may happen. We’re reconnected with the previous of God’s decisive motion in historical past—mainly within the work of Christ—and his promised future, recalling us to our stations within the narrative they mark out, equipping us to behave in assured religion in a world of sight. Liturgy reorients us in time, delivering us from unrelenting cycles of toil or from the harmful pursuit of earthly utopias. We’re caught up within the charged house between the once-for-all motion of God in Christ and the breaking way forward for his promise, elevating our labors whereas defending us from the harmful and delusive mirages of artifical utopias.
Liturgy permits for and encourages repeated (re-)orienting, evaluative, and corrective apply, important to ethical life. On a weekly foundation, as we collect in worship, we return to actuality. Every time, we’re recalled to the reality of who God is, who we’re, what the world is, what the human vocation is, and the place our future is discovered. Liturgy lifts our eyes as much as the Lord and protects us from the myopia that’s frequent to a society that seldom seems to be past the preoccupying minutiae of its saturated speedy horizons.
Liturgy permits for and encourages repeated reorienting, evaluative, and corrective apply, basically to ethical life.
Turning into literate in liturgy’s ethical language
A lot of the duty of ethics is that of studying to call and to discuss God, the world, and ourselves appropriately. Liturgy practices us in language that’s international to fallen humanity. It teaches us to talk—and therefore to assume—by way of “sin” and “grace,” by way of “creation,” “repentance,” and “forgiveness,” or “thanksgiving.” It equips us to strip away the euphemisms beneath which sin dissembles itself, giving us language with which to determine and firmly to grab sinful realities in our lives and societies, by which we will start to know their character and dynamics, in order higher to uproot them.
Right here, as elsewhere, the repetitive character of liturgy issues. It inculcates habits of speech and thought, by which probably the most elementary ethical classes and narrative of the Christian religion are made second nature for us. By way of a weekly rehearsal of Christian language, Christian liturgy varieties us as individuals who understand and communicate in regards to the world clearly, discerning the ethical form of our vocations inside it precisely. As we acquire familiarity with and proficiency in such language, we’re enabled to behave appropriately on this planet.
Worship as transformative critique
Constructing on the work of the Brazilian theorist Paulo Freire, Mark Searle considers the way in which that liturgy can operate as a type of “essential pedagogy,” a repeated public meeting during which the established order and the assorted reality-constructs that we inhabit are uncovered to judgment, reassessment, and transformation. Liturgy affords us a place from which we will start extra precisely to understand the ideological frameworks, buildings of energy, and techniques of worth that body our worlds, and a place to begin for transformative praxis. Every Sunday morning, we regather with a group dedicated to the dominion of God. We surrender the works of Devil, confess our sins, and declare our religion in Jesus Christ. Such a liturgy is a repeated disruption and correction of the patterns of life that prevail in our societies, exposing them to the testing phrase of Christ. It consistently locations our lives and societies beneath the cross and judgment of Christ. In such a fashion it conscripts us in a continuing apply of judgment and repentance.
As we return each week to the liturgy, we current each ourselves and our works earlier than the Lord. In such a fashion, the common actions of our weeks are at all times positioned in relation to Christ and subjected to his analysis. This relation just isn’t merely retrospective, trying again over the affairs of the earlier six days, but additionally potential. Liturgy propels us into the enterprise of the week forward with assurance of God’s blessing, fee, and presence.
Liturgy resists the secularization and compartmentalization of our weekly labors and our wider societies from the purview of Christ and his gospel. Week after week, we current ourselves and our deeds to the Lord, confessing our sins and presenting tokens of our labor in providing; week after week, we’re forgiven, restored, blessed, and despatched out once more to do God’s work.
Liturgy (& ethics) begins with grace
Christian ethics doesn’t start with human ethical initiative and exertion, however with the restoring forgiveness and grace of God in Christ declared to needy sinners and our reconstitution as beloved little children of God. No different start line for true ethics exists than that which begins with enjoyment of forgiveness, grace, and new standing; with recognition of ourselves as unworthy recipients of God’s unfathomable goodness in creation and redemption; and with expression of dependence and gratitude.
Likewise, liturgy is grounded in God’s motion and style, somewhat than human initiative. The phrases of liturgy are borrowed and shared phrases, not expressions of our personal heroic particular person spirituality nor eloquent rhetoric. The practices of the liturgy will not be of our personal invention, however of divine establishment and an inheritance of the custom. We submit ourselves to the practices of the liturgy as a kind of enacted prayer, that we may be blessed by them, not by advantage of some benefit on our half however by religion in God’s grace and promise held out to us in them.
Liturgy addresses God’s grace to our our bodies, not merely to our minds. Our objectivity, givenness, embeddedness on this planet, and entanglement with others is encountered most potently within the realm of the physique. It’s in our our bodies that we most expertise the flesh, in its mortality, weak point, corruption, unruly passions, publicity to judgment, disgrace, and woundedness. Our our bodies are additionally probably the most fundamental dimensions of ourselves. Earlier than we ever developed subjectivity, company, and volition, we have been our bodies; as our colleges regularly forsake us as we transfer to the sleep of dying, our elementary embodiment turns into much less avoidable. In baptism, God declared his grace to us in our our bodies and the renewing handle of grace is repeated and prolonged within the liturgy and the sacraments. Our very our bodies are the temple of his Holy Spirit (1 Cor 6:19), and the embodied practices of the liturgy return us to God’s phrases of grace, to our our bodies, and to the promise of resurrection.
Christian ethics has an embodied character. We’re charged to current our our bodies as a dwelling sacrifice (Rom 12:1) and to current our bodily members to God as devices of righteousness. In Romans 6, the Apostle Paul causes from baptism—because the inclusion of our our bodies within the dying and resurrection of Christ—to a sacrificial type of ethics. Our our bodies, and their members severally, belong to the Lord and the sacrificial actuality of baptism—during which our our bodies have been supplied to God in Christ—have to be fleshed out within the newness of life inside which we current our bodily members to God in righteous service. Liturgy, with its consideration to the embodied worshiper, ought to habituate us to such methods of considering and appearing.
Christian ethics additionally issues the collective, company “physique.” The manifold our bodies of the members of the church are introduced as a single sacrifice in Christ (Rom 12:1). Advantage ethicists emphasize the significance of communities and their practices for the formation of advantage and character in people. Christian dwelling just isn’t a solitary endeavor, however a collective and collaborative matter.
Liturgy varieties group, educating us to acknowledge ourselves and one another anew in Christ and confirming us in a brand new shared type of life. Liturgy gathers and coordinates an meeting of individuals in the direction of united confession and expression of religion and elementary formation in Christian apply. A lot as households are renewed of their mutual- and self-recognition by their ordinary actions reminiscent of shared meals, the church because the physique of Christ is renewed in its self-understanding and its members of their mutual recognition by the liturgy. And this group shaped by liturgy ought to lengthen far past the realm of the sanctuary.
Christian dwelling just isn’t a solitary endeavor, however a collective and collaborative matter.
Energetic dedication to newness of life
The apply of liturgy additionally entails repeated self-commitment to a brand new orientation and lifestyle.
Gordon Wenham remarks upon the distinction between “basically passive” listening to the studying of the regulation, and maybe additionally to an evidence of it by a preacher, and the exercise of reciting the psalms. The latter exercise is self-involving in a way more pronounced method, committing us to sure attitudes. Each time we sing psalms or hymns or actively take part within the responses of the liturgy, we verbally commit ourselves to sure beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Wenham compares praying the psalms to the actions of “taking an oath, making a vow, [and] confessing religion,” writing:
In praying the psalms, one is actively committing oneself to following the God-approved life. That is totally different from simply listening to legal guidelines or edifying tales. It’s an motion akin to reciting the creed or singing a hymn. It entails robust dedication, and this is the reason I believe that the psalms have been so influential in molding Jewish and Christian ethics previously, and why as students we should always once more research them for his or her moral content material.
Neither empty liturgy nor moralism
There may be an intimate connection between liturgy and ethics, the previous orienting us towards the latter, and the latter confirming the reality of the previous. Chauvet writes of the prophetic critique of hypocritical worship:
All these roundly censure cultic formalism. All of them castigate a cult the place God is given solely lip service. All of them demand that the guts be in concord with what the cult expresses and that the latter result in the apply of what’s proper and simply—justice and judgment are the 2 foundations of the throne of God (Pss 89:14 and 97:2)—towards the widow, orphan, and stranger. The ritual reminiscence of the liberation from slavery in Egypt? Sure, however in view of the liberation of the slaves each seventh yr. Circumcision of the flesh? Sure, however in view of circumcision of the guts. The providing of firstfruits? Sure, however in view of respecting the products of others, of sharing with probably the most destitute, of exhibiting respect for employees … Sacrifices? Sure, however in view of the sacrifice of the lips towards God and of acts of kindness towards others.
Liturgy and ethics shouldn’t be positioned in opposition, however there should at all times be a fertile rigidity between them. Sacrifice and liturgy have at all times confronted the threats of complacency and presumption; some have at all times felt that, merely by advantage of their going by the ritual motions, they stand in proper relationship with God and that newness of life is optionally available. The prophets uncovered such errors, but with out ever rejecting sacrifice, as such. Fairly, they confirmed sacrifice—and liturgy extra typically—to be intrinsically moral, requiring affirmation in trustworthy apply.
Liturgy, nonetheless, resists the mere “ethicization” of Christian religion, its discount to an ethical system regardless of God. In liturgy, Christian ethics are grounded within the worship of God, in gratitude for his grace, within the renewed existence of the Christian, within the lifetime of church as a physique, and in God’s work in Christ in historical past. And, by the weekly apply of the liturgy, ethics isn’t allowed to change into untethered from this.
Liturgy precedes and has primacy with regard to ethics, but should problem forth in newness of life or falsify itself.
True ethics are grounded in worship
On the coronary heart of the liturgy is the apply of prayer, and the constitutive rigidity between ethics and liturgy is commonly greatest engaged right here. Ethics indifferent from liturgy—a graceless and prayerless ethics—is vulnerable to quite a few perversions, to self-righteousness, to ingratitude, to messianic ambitions, and far in addition to. True ethics each begins with prayer and extends it in apply that’s prayerful in its elementary character.
Worship just isn’t merely a helpful means to the top of non-public ethics and an ethical society, however affords true transcendence, catching us up within the expression of God’s value and glory, the right and orienting finish of all creation. With out the orientation of worship, ethics turns into one thing alien. Nonetheless, liturgy divorced from ethics just isn’t worship in any respect; its expressions of devotion to the Lord are hole and false.
In liturgy, we obtain the phrase of God, the phrase that assessments hearts, which animates and provides life, the phrase that’s most really encountered within the Phrase made flesh. Within the first chapter of his epistle, James explores this dynamic of the right relation between liturgy and ethics. Mainly in liturgy, we “obtain with meekness the implanted phrase” (v. 21). Nonetheless, we’re instantly charged to not be “hearers solely” (v. 22), this being in comparison with somebody who seems to be at himself in a mirror and instantly forgets what he seems to be like (vv. 23–24). James concludes, “faith that’s pure and undefiled earlier than God the Father is that this: to go to orphans and widows of their affliction, and to maintain oneself unstained from the world” (v. 27).
Liturgy orients and propels ethics, during which it’s confirmed, but the motion of liturgy out into ethics is adopted by a motion of trustworthy lives and their fruits again into worship. We by no means transfer past worship. The fruits of renewed lives are returned to God in thanksgiving and likewise strengthen the flesh out the elemental realities we encounter within the church’s gathering. Works of mercy, such because the visitation of orphans and widows, each stream from and into the church’s lifetime of worship.
Roberts’s really useful sources for additional research
- Louis-Marie Chauvet, Image and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1995)
- Jeffrey J. Meyers’ The Lord’s Service: The Grace of Covenant Renewal Worship (Canon Press, 2003)
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