We do not shape liturgy, liturgy shapes us.

One of the many tasks that I have at my seminary is to take part in planning the weekly community night liturgies that are celebrated in our chapel.  Week after week, a group of seminarians come together with members of the staff and faculty to plan a liturgy including its prayers, music, and movement.  It is a practice to help seminarians to learn how to plan and celebrate liturgies in their future parishes.  It also is a chance to expose seminarians to more liturgical and musical resources that hopefully can be of service to them in their future ministries.  On the whole, I think this is a positive experience, but there are certain dangers that come from such a thing.

Protestantism, and broadly speaking many Western and some Eastern Christian traditions in the twentieth century began processes of reevaluating and reexamining how they worship.  Certain things like accessibility, lay participation, and overall praxis were discussed and debated.  Older and ancient liturgical forms and documents were reexamined as a means to shed light on modern practice.  Some reforms that came into play were minor and tepid, and others quite extreme.  Some sought to return to a glorious past of liturgy that may or may not have actually existed, some sought to modernize and reform the liturgy so as to have it be contextualized into a post-modern society, some wanted to reflect on the documents and writings of the past and make certain reforms that can coincide with other developments over the centuries, and others merely wanted minor reforms that would not alter too much of their practices.

One of the oft-stated things is that the liturgy is the work of the people.  Though this is partially true, it is actually linguistically and theologically incorrect.  Liturgy, or leitourgia (λειτουργία), is more properly understood as work done for the people, or done on behalf of the people.  In a Christian context, the liturgy is the offering or sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving offered by the Church to God on behalf of the faithful of the Church.  Nevertheless, despite the nuancing, the popular understanding of liturgy continues to be that of “the work of the people,” and this continues to influence our relationship with liturgy as Christians.

One of the troubling things that I think is a by-product of this misunderstanding of liturgy is the formation of many liturgies by people and communities that seemingly reflect their own image rather than the image of the divine worship in Heaven.  What I mean by that is that the priorities of these liturgies seem to be off.  Instead of them placing God at the center of the liturgy, and instead of worshipping God through the Sacraments, prayers, and hymns, we instead see the centrality of certain ideas and concepts within liturgy, and the worshipping of those ideas and concepts as the central act of the liturgy.

Of course, the immediate things that come to mind with this are the clown masses, U2charists, and Macklemore mass, but there are also things that are more subtle.  Sometimes we like to have liturgies that highlight diversity, unity, hospitality and welcome, family, youth, children, and other such things.  These are good things to embody within our community, but these are things that our communities ought to strive to embody, not things we hang upon the liturgy as if the liturgy were a tree that we hang ornaments on.

One of the things that appears to be lost in our liturgical renewal over the past few years is that in our rush to try new and interesting things, we have forgotten that we do not shape liturgy, liturgy shapes us.  Within the liturgy, we engage with the all of history as time and space collapse down into the life, death, resurrection, ascension, and second coming of Jesus Christ.  We join with angels and saints before the throne of God where we offer a sacrifice of praise, and share in Christ’s Body and Blood.  In this we see our humanity, our frailty, and our salvation.  It shapes us by joining us into the Divine History, and by deifying us so that we may be restored completely into the image and likeness of God.  This happens each and every liturgy, and yet each and every liturgy is different in its own way.  This is because in the liturgy, God causes the Earth and Heaven, the temporal and eternal to coincide in the same place in time.  It is everyplace, it is no place, and it is the only utopia we will ever encounter within our lives.

This is not to say there cannot be variation within liturgies.  Beyond different hymns, prayers, and Anaphoras, there are also Feast Days and Votive liturgies that help expand our understanding of that Divine History as it has interacted with holy men and women, the Saints of God, and events where God’s hand has moved in our history.  What happens though when we place human things as the centerpiece of the liturgy, we not only fashion a liturgy that exists solely in our own image, but we run the risk of worshipping ourselves rather than God.  We can try to frame it as the God who “welcomes all” or “laughs with all” but we forget that God does not just meet people where they are at, but desires to take them somewhere else, beyond the bounds and scope of human imagination of what is possible.  Human shaped liturgies do not do this because they do not demand anything from us, whereas liturgy that focuses on God demands something from us.

In the end, the liturgy, we should not hang our own agenda onto it, but let it wash over us and transform us into being that can embody the love of Christ in the world.