Liturgy is one of those words that manages to be both rather vague, but also, in the right place, the perfect word. It is simply a tool of remembrance. Such tools can include everything from the yearly flow of the feasts God established for His people, Israel, to the order of worship at your local church, to returning thanks before a meal, or even my own habit of always breaking my bread before eating it.
Because of the baleful influence of romanticism we have grown suspicious of liturgies. We have come to believe that spontaneity is the font of sincerity, and sincerity the benchmark of authenticity. Liturgies seem to us old and outdated, inseparable from rote repetition, even a gateway drug to the dangers of Roman Catholicism.
The trouble with such culturally bound sweeping condemnations is they not only assault the real problem of formalism, but the very established patterns given by God Himself. That is, it is one thing to scoff at mindless repeating of the Hail Mary, quite another to look down our noses at the celebration of the Lord’s Table. If God has established liturgies for us, and He has, it cannot be that liturgies are bad things in themselves.
Consider how often God calls His people to remember. We are given to forgetting. When we bow our heads before our meals, we are laboring to remember that every meal is an answer to another liturgy, our prayer that He would give us this day our daily bread. When we come to the greatest of all meals we are laboring to remember that we broke His body, spilled His blood, and though we often forget, that He welcomes us as His children to His own table, that we are at peace with Him.
What though about personal liturgies? Are these legitimate, or are they strange fire, a violation of the 2nd commandment? I would suggest the dividing line between the two has less to do with what the liturgy in question is, more to do with how we see it. When I break my bread before eating it I am simply seeking, in the midst of daily life, to remind myself that He died for me. When I open my wife’s car door I am reminding myself of her great value and blessing.
What I don’t do with these two liturgies is elevate them to the level of God-given liturgies. I don’t seem to impose them on others, or even proselytize for them. They are personal, and except insofar as I use them as an illustration of a broader point in this piece, private. They are personal habits of the heart, not a command from on high. They are useful, in their place.
The irony is that liturgy is inescapable. That moment when the worship leader looks off in the distance while imploring the assembled to sing the chorus one last time is as much a liturgy as chanting the Apostles’ Creed. Wisdom dictates that we fight against forgetting, whether our forgetting flows from mindless liturgy, or from a lack of liturgy. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. Lord, help us to never forget.