LITMIR.BIZ

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the perspective of the reign of God. It was clear that by God’s presence in Christ, God’s reign was breaking into the world, yet it was not of the world. Jesus’ responses were rarely intended to confuse, yet they continually confounded the world’s ways. His answers constantly challenged the assumptions of the inquisitors. He also challenged their presumptions about their prerogative in deciding what was right and what was true.

In his gospel narrative, Matthew records a monumental conversation, one between Jesus and a group of Pharisees.15 A scribe asked Jesus, “Which commandment in the law is the greatest?” They were seeking to test Jesus. It did not occur to them that they, like so many others, were offering Christ the opportunity to speak truth almost beyond their willingness (if not their ability) to understand. The first commandment, Jesus replied, is “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” This is a response the inquisitors could have even predicted. Jesus’ reference to the opening statement of the Shema16 was likely a pleasing sound to their ears. Christ answered their question, succinctly and directly. Yet his response was only beginning. He continued: “The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” As predictable as the first portion of Jesus’ response was, this auxiliary dictum likely caught them unprepared.

      These high-minded experts in the law were unaccustomed to such testing. Jesus’ statement likening the love of people to the love of God transcended their long-held traditionalism. Their devotion to the Decalogue and the practice of their own well-established rules were legendary. Respect for another person and that person’s possessions, family, and life was far from a strange notion. Yet the notion of esteeming another person on the same level as oneself made for an interesting juxtaposition with Jewish and even Roman social customs that maintained distinctions between persons of privilege and those outcast by virtue of economic, gender, health, or ethnic status.

Jesus makes yet another astounding claim—that all of the prophets and law are bound up in these two commandments.17 The law and prophets constituted the Hebrew Scriptures, an enormous body of highly regarded and historically momentous teaching. By likening the two commandments and saying that all other prophetic and ruling principles were summed up in them, Jesus pointedly drew the inquisitors to the locus of God’s reign. This is the grand liturgy of the kingdom of God: God is to be loved first and foremost with every fiber of our being and every moment of life, and treating people with dignity and care is like unto honoring God. Here Jesus laid a necessary foundation for faithfulness in worship according to the eternal kingdom of heaven.

What must become clear to the church is that faithfulness to God in worship in affect “establish[es] a world” and “worship makes available to us a different world than the one we normally inhabit.”18 As will be noted below, the church’s worship in various times and places became more focused on managing life in this world with its own “settled arrangements” rather than encountering God’s coming reign—present now, yet coming to its fullness. “Church,” when it is faithful however, “is where we worship God by enacting and proclaiming a different set of values, a different understanding of reality.”19

      Jesus’ contemporaries were confused regarding his refusal to participate in their grand schemes for gaining worldly sovereignty. That same temptation has confronted Christ’s followers in every moment of the church’s history. The challenge for Christ’s followers is that participating in the in-breaking of this new kingdom not only seeks different meaning and ends to those of the world but also requires discernment regarding ways and means to those ends. As evidenced by Jesus Christ himself, the ways of the kingdom of heaven will at times conflict with the ways of the world’s established practices.

Jesus came saying, in effect, by his life, teachings, and ministry, that the way the world operates—its cultures, societies, nations, and values—is irrelevant to the reign of God. Christ came to call people to participate in the irrupting reign of God, which has a vastly different tenor to it than worldly structures or entities. Much of the mystery of the kingdom of heaven is “that it is rooted in a new reality, a new social order, a new way of doing things.”20 Yet it is not enough that God’s reign defines a distinct reality. The divinity-in-humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ is a signal this new reign must be lived, even if at immense risk.

      Liturgy and Kingdomness

The dynamic fusion of love of God and love of people as outlined by Jesus invests liturgical exigency in the participation of God’s people in the continuing in-breaking of the kingdom of heaven. It is essential to grasp the deep implications of what is perhaps one of the most misunderstood yet meaningful and necessary words to understanding worship—the word liturgy. The word derives its meaning from the Greek leitourgia, a word commonly found originally in the official idiolect of Greek city-states; it described service rendered by individuals or groups “on behalf of the political community.”21 Like the use of the term ekklesia (which has similar heritage), the use of such a term from the broader culture indicates the perception of the Christians that their faith community had political connotations.

      Liturgy is certainly the work of the people of God in worship. Described in that phrase, liturgy exists as a functional characteristic of communal worship. It is service rendered to God by all participants through various acts and elements of worship in a communal setting. Yet the term has lost much of its patina within many free-church traditions. A resistance to the use of any traditional liturgy has itself become a de facto liturgy, with deeply entrenched patterns of various acts and elements. Even further, the exclusive use of the term in reference to corporate worship settings has limited its meaning among many faith communities, representing a formalistic approach to worship largely devoid of worth or vitality.

True liturgy, however, does not limit itself there. The liturgical dynamic has a profound effect upon the communal identity, becoming more than simple function. The whole range of actions form the community since “a group of people become something corporately which they had not been as a mere collection of individuals—a whole greater than the sum of its parts” (emphasis mine).22 Deeply embedded in the Spirit-life of Christ’s followers is the need to be connected to other Christ-followers. We are incomplete without one another; our common faith is collectively more than our personal devotion. The service of the body is a greater witness than the efforts of any one part by itself.

It finds fulfillment as it extends itself beyond communal gatherings to permeate every dimension of life. In its broadest sense of meaning, we are reminded that even the most simple day-in-day-out events and activities can be invested with kingdom significance. An even more profound expression is derived from the teachings of Eastern Orthodoxy, wherein this work of the people of God in worship becomes the liturgy after the liturgy—as work on behalf of the world. This lies at the heart of this grand liturgy of the kingdom of God: service to the world co-inheres with service to God in worship. The church is ultimately “a leitourgia, a ministry, a calling to act in this world after the fashion of Christ, to bear testimony to Him and His kingdom.”23

      There is, then, an incarnational liturgical vibrancy for followers of Christ as agents of God’s kingdom in the world. Without this liturgical agency on behalf of the world, liturgical expression in communal gathering for worship is incomplete. The two do not diverge one from the other; the liturgy lived in the world for the sake of Christ is a fulfillment of the liturgical celebration of God’s supreme worth and eternal redemptive activity.

      Practicing the Reign

      The

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