BOOK: Liturgy of the Ordinary

By Tish Harrison Warren | Amazon.com | 184 pages
Published in November of 2016

SUMMARY: Many American Christians have bifurcated their lives into the secular and the sacred. We have divorced divine meaning from our mundane tasks and everyday jobs as we have adopted the rhythms, beliefs, and postures of the world. As a result, there is little difference between how Christians and non-Christians live their lives. Americans of all ages are leaving the church while depression, hopelessness, and suicide continue to climb. Author and priest Tish Harrison Warren says it doesn’t have to be this way.

“God, in delight and wisdom, has made, named, and blessed this average day,” Harrison Warren writes. “What I in my weakness see as another monotonous day in a string of days, God has given as a singular gift.”

Harrison Warren continues, “What if all these boring parts matter to God? What if days passed in ways that feel small and insignificant to us are weighty with meaning and part of the abundant life that God has for us?”

Not convinced? Harrison Warren aptly points out that much of Jesus’ life wasn’t recorded in the Bible. He worked as a carpenter doing mundane tasks living in obscurity. Throw in the fact that God chose to send his son in human form means God has put immense value on our human bodies.

“Because of the incarnation and those long, unrecorded years of Jesus’ life, our small, normal lives matter. If Christ spent time in obscurity, then there is infinite worth found in obscurity. If Christ spent most of this life in quotidian ways, then all of life is brought under this lordship. There is no task too small or too routine to reflect God’s glory and worth.”

Does that include folding the laundry? Yep. Making dinner night after night? Absolutely. Taking out the trash? You bet. How about answering e-mails? You know it! We have infinite worth and everything we do has divine meaning.

“God is forming us into new people. And the place of that formation is in the small moments of today,” Harrison Warren writes.

These “small moments,” the routines and practices that make up our daily liturgy reveal what we are being shaped by. Whether we choose to grab our smartphone and scroll through Twitter or choose to make the bed in the morning says, “something that both reveal(s) and shape(s) what (we) love and worship.”

I know the smartphone gets picked on a lot, but Harrison Warren’s reasoning for starting the day by making the bed instead of on the smartphone is compelling, “Starting  the day by making the bed in silence instead of on a smartphone starts the day as a co-laborer with God instead of a consumer.”

To be clear, Harrison Warren never guilt trips the reader — we are all guilty of doom scrolling in the morning or at night. The point she is making is that everything we do is sacred and therefore the practices we do from praying before meals to how we respond in an argument with our spouse are all meaningful opportunities to worship our Creator.

KEY QUOTE: “Because of the incarnation and those long, unrecorded years of Jesus’ life, our small, normal lives matter. If Christ spent time in obscurity, then there is infinite worth found in obscurity. If Christ spent most of this life in quotidian ways, then all of life is brought under this lordship. There is no task too small or too routine to reflect God’s glory and worth.”

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BONUS: Listen to Harrison Warren on The Gospel Bound podcast talk about her book.

BONUS II: Use TISH22 at ivpress.com to get 30% off The Liturgy of the Ordinary and free shipping.

DID YOU KNOW? Sunday to Saturday has a Good Reads page where we post all of the books we have read – even the ones that didn’t make the cut.

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