Over the past few weeks, we've considered the
role that repetition plays in our formation.
We concluded last week that anything that is
formative requires repetition.
From learning how to swing that golf club
to playing an instrument, the great discipline it
takes in order to minister beauty.
You know, we don't see all of the
practice, and that's not what we enjoy, that's
not what we take in when someone has
become a master and they're doing something second
nature, right?
But getting to second nature, you know, first
nature is like breathing.
Nobody has to teach us how to breathe.
We come out of the womb, and we
take that first gasp, and we wah, and
it comes out, and we just know how
to do it.
It's first nature.
But all of the various disciplines of life
usually require a lot of repetition in order
to gain a skill.
Now, since the Enlightenment at least, we've had
a tendency to separate church and spirituality and
spiritual formation from the rest of the world,
in a sense.
We've split nature and grace apart.
But really, it takes repetition for us to
grow as Christians, right?
Memorization, a remembering of the Lord's death.
We have to remember because we forget.
It's just so easy to forget.
And so, in the wisdom of the church
streaming out of the wisdom of the worship
of Israel, really, we get the Psalter, we
get the scriptures, we get the idea that
creation is good, and that everything he made
is good, and when he made human beings,
he said it's very good.
Then something happened.
Something happened in that garden that we call
a break in communion.
That's what sin produces.
It's a break in breathing.
Breathing that fresh breath of the Holy Spirit.
And so we were cast away east of
Eden.
We're walking through the journey of Israel and
the scriptures and coming into Egypt and going
out of Egypt and crossing the Red Sea.
All of these are types and symbols of
what our life in Christ will be.
Because Jesus is that new Moses who is
delivering us and bringing us through the waters
of baptism into the wilderness and sustaining us
with the manna, which is communion, holy communion.
So all of this is pointing in the
old covenant scriptures to something far greater.
And so out of that, we say matter
matters.
Our physical bodies matter and what we certainly
do with our physical bodies matter.
Paul says in Romans six to submit the
members of your body, the various parts of
your body as instruments of righteousness.
And so he's saying, I want you to
connect your body, your physicality and your physical
being with the soul and the spirit that
we are one united person.
Body, soul and spirit.
Now, in the wisdom of the church, our
worship has been liturgical since the beginning.
Since the beginning, even in Acts two, where
it's talking about they continued steadfastly in the
apostles doctrine and the plural prayers.
It's not just any kind of prayer, but
it was liturgical prayer that they learned in
the synagogue.
The repetition of that prayer followed Peter and
John.
They were going to the temple and they
saw the layman.
It was they were on their way to
prayer.
Well, it wasn't just any time of prayer.
It was a specific time of prayer that
everyone stopped everything and prayed together.
There is this rhythm that the early church
always had.
And we got it from our Jewish connection,
our roots in Judaism.
And so we heard this morning out of
the second century, a description of worship.
That sounds very much akin to what we
do and what we're doing this morning.
It's been handed down to us.
We're doing what Justin Martyr was describing, even
in the second century.
So that's not Roman Catholicism.
You get that right.
Roman Catholicism really wasn't officially formed until the
split of East and West.
1054, the church was undivided and they worshipped
as one.
The things that we call Roman Catholic are
not Roman Catholic.
They're Catholic with a little C, you could
say, which means universal.
The one church worshipped and was in agreement
for the first millennium.
And so if you want to romanticize something,
we're all romantics and I know it's not
right to do this.
But I love first millennial Christianity.
I love the unity of the church and
the idea that the church is undivided.
And so we as Christians and, you know,
here we are is kind of semi Protestants.
You know, Anglicans are semi Protestants.
Because we've hung on and we've claimed so
much of the Catholic church that we can
buy into, that we can accept and that
has been done everywhere at all times by
everyone in the first millennium.
So here we are.
And, you know, the prayer of Jesus in
John 17 about Father, make them one as
you and I are one.
I just pray that that would be one
of the great burdens of our hearts as
we live out our lives in Kansas City
and as we relate to other Christians that
do things differently than us.
As long as they call on the name
of the Lord, their Lord and ours.
Amen.
Right.
We're all one body.
And so we just need to act that
way.
You know, what we've been talking about is
liturgical worship.
And so we do have distinctives, but we're
not saying that we're better than other people
who don't worship liturgically.
That's all we're trying to say.
But repetition is the mother of learning and
practice makes perfect.
And the liturgy, liturgical worship throughout when you
open up the calendar year, it's not just
what we do on Sunday morning, but it's
the commemoration of those who have gone before
us on feast days and the various movements
of Jesus from his.
We're getting ready to go into Advent and
then we'll go into Christmas and Epiphany.
And then we'll celebrate the life of Christ
as he makes it to Holy Week.
And we journey with Christ to the cross
and his death.
And then Holy, Holy Saturday, where he is
entombed and everything is quiet and somber.
And then all of a sudden, Sunday, he's
appearing to people.
You see, this is not a one off
thing for us.
This is the life of Christ that has
to be formed inside of us.
That's why we rehearse it throughout the year,
because if we don't, you can go Sunday
after Sunday without hearing the gospel.
You can go Sunday after Sunday without understanding
that our life is in Christ.
We can get off on these topics that
will take us so far away from the
centrality of Jesus Christ.
And so sometimes when our teaching does that,
our liturgy keeps us there.
Our liturgy preaches the gospel every Sunday.
Amen.
So we want the liturgy, as it were,
to become second nature.
As long as you have to think about
it, it's always going to feel a little
awkward.
As long as you're trying to get that
swing down and you're thinking about it, you're
going to mess up.
But once it becomes second nature, then it
just flows out of you and you know
what's coming and you can put the page
down.
You don't have to follow it anymore.
It just flows out of you.
And you've got morning prayer and evening prayer
and compliment Sunday Eucharist, which we we serve
the Eucharist every every day now, except Saturday.
It's a beautiful rhythm that we're just beginning
to develop in our church.
And so there we go.
So we feel like the liturgy becoming second
nature in us will create this life force
in us that will take us out.
So that when we're sent out into the
world and we're caught off guard, as it
were, we've got the word of Christ dwelling
in us richly.
Amen.
Liturgy means the work of the people.
We've said I'd like to think about this.
Liturgy means the worship of the people because
worship can be work.
It's a good work.
And so liturgy as the work of the
people, the worship of the people implies participation.
Right.
Implies participation over merely spectating, just going to
hear this amazing preacher.
Right.
Where the you know, this is not here,
this is over here and the preacher be
the center.
Right.
I mean, just even our architecture says no
to that.
I mean, we love preaching and we want
it to be good.
But when all else fails, we have the
liturgy.
Amen.
We have backup and we're participating in more
than just a podium.
We're participating in the work of the altar
and we're restoring the altar in Kansas City
by what we're doing.
This is a restoration of something very precious
and ancient in the worship of the church.
Amen.
Thank you, man.
I love it.
And so it implies participation.
Worship is not like a passive thing, is
it?
It's very, very active.
It's not like watching television where you can
just zone out, you know, and sometimes TV
is therapy for us because we don't want
to think and we don't want to participate.
We just kind of want to do that.
But, you know, we can be so trained
in that that we come to church like
that.
It's kind of like it requires participation, it
requires paying attention, it requires thinking, it requires
worship from the deepest place of the heart.
Right.
Are you trying to do all of this
and you're reading the script and you're hey,
it's got to become second nature.
Right.
It takes time.
It's just becoming second nature more and more
to me now.
But it's not always second nature to me.
It's OK.
Liturgy calls us to employ our bodies.
That's why we call the name of the
sermon.
Why liturgy?
And this is the third message on liturgy.
Embodied practices as catechesis.
OK, I'm going to explain that embodied practices
as catechesis.
What am I talking about?
Another word for catechesis would be discipleship.
Another word would be spiritual formation, maybe in
certain traditions.
Catechesis is the way the faith is taught
and caught.
And a lot of times it's more caught
than taught.
And the liturgy is meant for you in
your participation to catch it.
What am I talking about?
The presence of Christ entering into Jesus Christ
as the central player in our lives, leading
us forward.
Right.
So it's just another word for how we
are formed in Christ outside a classroom setting,
which there's a place for that.
Our liturgy and all of its forms from
morning and evening prayer, compliment, baptism, ordination, Eucharist,
on and on and on through the prayer
book.
Call us to participate in the mystery of
Christ.
The annual cycle, the liturgical cycle, we call
it centered around the life of Christ, which
I've already mentioned.
It's a powerful form of embodied catechesis, embodied
catechesis.
For we learn to center our lives in
Jesus, using our bodies, offering our bodies, as
Paul was talking about today in Romans 12.
Offer your bodies, that means the sum total
of who you are, really.
It's not a brainless body.
That means body, mind, soul, right.
All of your heart, soul, mind and strength.
That's how we're to love the Lord with
all of it.
And that strength sometimes is not very strong.
Sometimes I'm tired, I'm weary, I'm distracted.
OK, you offer your body and things begin
to drop off.
You offer yourself heart, soul, mind and strength
and a new strength begins to come.
The joy of the Lord becomes your strength.
But unless you enter in by faith into
the liturgical cycle, it can be just tradition
learned of men.
It can be wrote.
It can be just dead religion.
But the liturgy is not dead.
We are.
The liturgy is not alive.
We are.
The liturgy has to be embodied inside of
us as this icon here.
I mean, this is the icon of the
first coming of Jesus Christ, the incarnation, fully
human and fully divine.
This is the solution to what happened in
Genesis three.
It all culminates in this.
And yet God loves us so much that
Jesus Christ has the DNA, the very flesh
of who?
Mary, Jesus Christ in his physical body with
the conception of the Holy Spirit is deriving
his physicality from Mary.
He carries the DNA of Mary and he
carries our DNA in the resurrection.
We are all gathered up into Jesus Christ.
One new humanity, one new humanity in him.
Right.
That's where we're headed.
And so catechesis is the way the faith
is taught and caught, embodied.
Our personhood is a unity of body, soul
and spirit.
The unity of exterior and interior.
Wow.
Getting those two things together is the life,
right?
Where there's an agreement, there's a unification of
the exterior self and the interior self.
And this happens through worship and listening and
repenting.
The repentance is a really good word.
It just means to change your mind, have
a change of mind.
Because when you change that deep heart and
you confront that deep heart that's wavered inside
of you and you begin to turn to
Jesus Christ.
On a daily basis, that's repentance.
That's how we live.
That's how we walk in the spirit and
not in the flesh.
We have to repent from fleshly ways of
thinking and living and natural ways of thinking
and living that are grievous to the Lord.
And we turn, we repent and we receive
the life of Christ every time.
Romans 12 exhorts us to offer our bodies
as living sacrifices in worship, living sacrifices, a
paradox, right?
A living sacrifice to get in touch with
all the senses aimed towards worship of the
living God.
And once again, Paul connects worship with love.
We've been doing this every Sunday now and
I'm seeing it everywhere I go.
You see, every time I read the New
Testament, especially Paul, I'm seeing worship and love.
If you look on page seven, you'll see
those things tying in everywhere now.
It's really cool and offering our bodies as
living sacrifices.
Then our minds begin to become renewed and
we are transformed as we not only offer
our minds and our thinking, but our bodies,
the entirety of who we are.
And then grace is given and the spiritual
gifts begin to flow through all of you
and you begin to serve one another by
the empowerment of the Holy Spirit out of
your weakness.
A lot of times out of your resistance.
A lot of times you you just say,
I will obey.
I will do this.
I will say this.
I will serve this person.
You don't have to feel like it.
Don't wait to feel like it, because we
won't do anything if we wait to feel
like we must not be ruled by our
emotions.
We must be obedient to what we know
is right.
And so we must be obedient to stuff
like this out of that worship experience, out
of that body life in the Holy Spirit.
Verse nine, he just goes right into it.
Let love be sincere.
Let love be genuine.
Poor, what is evil?
Hold fast to that which is good.
Love one another with brotherly affection.
It's beautiful, isn't it?
Brotherly affection.
Outdo one another in showing honor.
Another word is veneration, honor and veneration are
the same meaning.
Right.
So we venerate one another because we know
that everyone in this place right now and
everyone on the face of the earth is
made in the image.
And what Christianity is doing is that progressive
recovery of the likeness.
We're not all in the likeness of God
yet.
We're made in his image and likeness, but
the likeness is continuing to grow Christ like.
And we've said that the father is Christ
like because if you've seen me, you've seen
the father.
There is no difference in nature.
And so through faith and grace, we can
become like Jesus, not by nature, but through
faith and grace.
Amen.
This happens in the worship experience policy where
we learn in the presence of the Lord
how to start honoring one another above ourselves.
This is community life in the power of
the Holy Spirit.
It's liturgical.
This is intentional.
You know, you have to plan this.
You have to do it.
You have to think about it.
You have to like be intentional.
Right.
It's liturgical.
And the more we do it, the deeper
our love will grow for one another.
You see, it's so beautiful, so beautiful.
I'm seeing this happen.
I mean, I've seen this happen in the
last five years in this church.
I mean, people getting tremendously loved on.
Somebody needed a car the other day.
This happened twice.
You know, I put it out to everybody
within five minutes.
Four offers came up.
Now you can use my car.
You can use my car.
That's what I'm talking about.
That's good stuff.
Amen.
Just like Chris said, you know, when they
were off on their honeymoon and they came
back and their house was painted.
Their bed was made.
I guess they put the bed in there.
I don't know.
I mean, it's really nice to have a
bed when you come back from your honeymoon.
Right.
Yeah, it's good stuff.
So this is not just about what we're
doing on Sunday morning, but how what we
do on Sunday morning flows into every day.
And of course, the nature of embodied worship
isn't limited to offering our physical bodies.
It involves the wider realm of creation.
Thus, the use of water in baptism.
I mean, we need to be baptized in
water.
It's important.
You can't be baptized without it.
Why?
What does water symbolize?
This flow of the life from the throne
of God, the Holy Spirit himself.
And so it has so many primordial like
images.
When we think about the nature of water
without it, we cannot live.
We can live without food a lot longer
than we can live without water.
And so water in our baptism, oil we
use in our healing.
And it's blessed oil from our bishop.
If you want some, I'll get it to
you.
Yeah.
Got a whole vial of it back here.
But everywhere I go, I carry this little
oil stock.
You ought to get one.
It's not just priests that need to be
doing this, right?
I mean, you know, ordained priests that all
of you.
I mean, somebody needs prayer for healing or
something.
Pull it out.
Dab it on.
Pray for him.
Oil.
It's good stuff.
And there's something about having it on you.
Will create the potential for you to use
it more than if you don't have it.
Bread and wine in communion.
To commune with God, we need to eat.
How did we lose communion?
Through a meal.
How do we regain communion?
Through a meal.
Do this.
Don't don't even think about it.
Just do it.
Don't try to figure out how this becomes
the body and blood of Christ.
Be a good Eastern Orthodox there.
Right.
It's a mystery.
That's all you need to know.
It's a mystery, but I believe it.
It was a mystery to Justin Martyr.
Right.
That wasn't just bread and wine.
He's talking about there.
It becomes.
But he didn't get into Aristotelian language of
substance and accidents and all of this like
scholastic theology that developed in the high Middle
Ages.
No, no, no, no.
You're into that and it works for you.
Good.
It's just too complex for me.
I don't need Aristotle to get that right.
And Aristotle's got some great stuff.
I mean, I used him last week.
Right.
He came up with the word second nature.
Aristotle did.
That's why we use it today.
And it's through repetition that you develop virtuous
habits.
That's what Aristotle is talking about.
Yeah.
OK, so bread and wine and communion incense.
I know.
You know what, though?
I ordered from Ethiopia hypoallergenic incense.
I paid.
We paid extra cash so that you won't
go.
No, it's really great.
We've been using it at the ministry center
and in our morning prayer time.
And our guys won't pray without it now.
They love it.
I mean, and the rose incense are beautiful.
We're going to have them next week.
We'll come through with a thoroughfare with the
rose incense and we'll test them out.
Right.
But no, they're hypoallergenic.
Right.
Now, they loaded it up right when I
was doing the Eucharist and it was wafting
up under me the other morning.
And it's like I was really trying to
get the words out, but it was too
much.
It was too much smoke.
Right.
So we don't need to during that time,
we don't need two more granules, I think.
It was great, though.
I love it, man.
And, you know, the incense, they actually are
talking about transformation.
From the the actual substance of the incense,
it's transformed into an aroma.
And that's what happens to our lives in
Jesus.
We're transformed into the aroma of Christ.
It's the incense.
Remind us of that.
They also remind us of the glory cloud
rising up in the temple.
This is Jewish worship.
Right.
And it got carried over into Christian worship.
So it's good stuff.
Smells and bells in a gym.
Go figure what makes the sacred space sacred.
That's right.
The presence of the Lord as we pray
and we set it apart.
That that makes it sacred.
That makes it holy.
So what makes water holy?
We bless it.
There's no magic there.
It's just returning it to its original intention.
Right.
In the garden, we communed with God through
eating.
Right.
Everything that he made was infused with his
presence.
And so Jesus restores that in the Eucharist.
Amen.
We're dealing with word and table.
I've lost my time now, so we'll pick
up here next week.
The movement of our liturgy is divided up
into two parts.
It's called word and sacrament or word and
table.
And so the first part, all the way
up to the piece, deals with.
It deals with matters of the word, scripture,
prayer, creed, preaching.
We confess our sins, which is under word.
And then I bless you with the forgiveness
that's in Jesus Christ.
That's word.
That's proclamation of his forgiveness over your life.
May the peace of the Lord be always
with you.
Also with me.
Let's share that piece.
And that's where we segue into table or
altar.
OK, so we'll pick that up next week.
But I think we got today that matter
matters because of the incarnation of Jesus Christ.
Amen.
Father, thank you so much.
Lord, you've given us the scriptures.
You've given us one another.
You've given us Holy Church.
Lord, we bless you.
That you are restoring in us the the
image of Jesus Christ.
So do that.
Lord, we submit to that.
We want to be like you.
We want to be that transformed fragrance throughout
this city.
In the name of the Father and the
Son and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Stand together and we will recite the Nicene
Creed.