Last week, I talked about how everybody does liturgies – in and outside the church. If we think broadly of a liturgy as any shared practice or discipline that situates us within a particular narrative, a narrative that gives our life context and meaning. Liturgies provide language, images, events, and storyline. They work that stuff down into our bones, until whatever story we’re practicing becomes the measure for everything. 

But we lose the story very easily don’t we? And constantly there are other stories sneaking into our consciousness. We are entangled in a wide variety of secular liturgies that get into our marrow and train us toward hopelessness. For instance, often Hollywood trains us to think we have only one category for working out our human desire for love, namely, sex. That’s a particular narrative with a particular conclusion, isn’t it? And we are so deeply trained by Hollywood’s teaching and by rehearsing its liturgies, that it can be quite difficult to even begin to imagine other options. However, the late Marva Dawn pointed out that Christianity has always taught that the human desire for love can be expressed and fulfilled in many ways – through friendship, celibacy, marriage, family membership, and so on. Christian worship and teaching can supply those options, by providing language, events, real-life examples, and stories.  

Personally, I write almost no love songs, because romantic love and sex comprise almost nothing of my lived experience. I write mostly about friendship, family, and the beauty of Jesus, because that’s the shape of my love-life, and I’m not unhappy about it. But that’s an underrepresented option I want to make available to people through the things I make.  

Speaking of underrepresented options, some friends recently went to pray in front of a local abortion clinic. My friend Annie has spent a lot of time making herself available as a sidewalk counselor to those who approach the clinic. Many of them are in despair; they feel this is their only choice. They don’t realize they have options. Beyond the scope of their vision, are various resources set up to help them work out a variety of possibilities for their truly desperate situation. But, in many cases, my friend Annie tells me, these other possibilities have been intentionally obscured. This creates a particular narrative that systematically narrows the choices available to these women, until only one desperately sad choice remains. They walk towards abortion, because they often see no other possible destination. There is no joy set before them. 

What cultural liturgies have worked that wicked yeast all through the dough? What practices, what phrases repeated, have so established this ruling narrative of death in the marrow for these women? Honestly, I’m not equipped to answer that, other than saying that you don’t arrive at that conclusion by accident. The souls of these women and children have enemies, human and otherwise, sowing stories that are not true.  

Part of the Christianity’s work in the world has always been to make hitherto unknown possibilities newly available. The Gospel is news in the most basic sense, because it’s new information about a new possibility for a different kind of life that we’d never dreamed of having access to. And the news has always been contrarian. Not contrarian because it really goes against the grain of reality, because in fact it is the grain of reality, but because it contradicts all the systems and stories humanity has invented to cope in a state of rebellion against reality. The thing about those coping mechanisms like all coping mechanisms is that we wouldn’t keep using them if there wasn’t something about them that we rather liked. We do all kinds of things that hurt us and those around us, as long as the benefit outweighs the cost. We lie as long as we don’t get caught. Blame makes us feel better, until it doesn’t. Escaping into substances and pleasure kind of works, until it doesn’t. The gospels are not naive about the fact that even religious fanaticism can become a coping mechanism that opposes the very grain of reality, since to cut down Jesus was to hack away at the tree on which you yourself are a branch. 

So, we are always being offered a variety of stories within which to locate ourselves, a variety of dramas inviting us onto some stage to act out. For instance, Joseph E. Davis says, 

“Freedom of choice [is a phrase that] means a lot more than it does [just] in the context of the abortion controversy. It’s a market language. Choice is a market term – [it’s the idea that] we are truly free when we have this world of unlimited choices. Of course, the assumption is that we somehow on our own, disconnected from our past and from our present, can somehow freely make these choices. I think that’s an illusion.”

 What Davis is pointing out is that consumerism is one more of the ruling narratives whose liturgies provide us with language, images, events, and storyline. Consumerism contextualizes human life within market terms; which trains the imagination and the affections away from conceiving of anything having long term value worthy of serious commitment or anything like faithful love. In Consumerism, everything and everyone is disposable. So, Davis goes on to say, that in the story of consumerism,

“Ideally, nothing should be embraced by a consumer firmly, nothing should command a commitment forever, and no needs should be seen as fully satisfied, no desires considered ultimate. There ought to be a proviso ‘until further notice’ attached to any oath of loyalty and any commitment.”

Davis then points out that the market cycle of unlimited choices that dissolves any imagination for longterm love, tricks us into an ironic false sense of power about our choices, saying,

“This cycle of desire is a compulsion, a must, for the fully fledged, mature consumer; yet that [compulsion], that internalized pressure, that impossibility of living one’s life in any other way, is seen as the free exercise of one’s will.”

This is all just a long way of pointing out that we’re constantly being pulled off into other storylines, and that those storylines include practices and liturgies that shape our desires, our sense of what is possible, even the terms or names by which we understand ourselves in relation to the world. Try on these names… Am I a citizen? A consumer? Am I a product for consumption? A piece of hardware? A thing? A person? Am I a family-member? A beloved son or daughter? A Temple of the Holy Spirit? Am I just a pretty face or a beach bod? 

It’s worth asking this question, “Who is naming me?”  Now, the nature of naming, generally, is that names are gifts bestowed upon us by trusted family members while we ourselves are vulnerable. We need help seeing the truth about ourselves, don’t we? For instance, a baby doesn’t have the capacity to name itself, so God sets it within a family, and that family’s holy work is to nurse this vulnerable member on the milk of God’s lovingkindness, to cultivate a habitat of song, story, images, practices, liturgies and events – in short a culture of beauty, goodness, and truth – that open up the vistas of a God-breathed imagination for life lived as God’s image bearer and beloved within the eternal realm of the life of the Trinity.

Our naming embeds us in a storyline, and every story attempts to name us. Becoming aware of those stories, and realizing we must be deliberate about which ones we practice is very important. 

I once read about a ministry in Southeast Asia that rescued women from the sex-trade. These women had been named and embedded in that story, many of them for the majority of their lives. They were objects, merely products for consumption and discard, according to the liturgies they had been made to practice. 

Once rescued, they were moved to a new location safe from their oppressors, where they’d spend months or years unlearning those names in a group home. When they were ready, the ministry held what they called a ‘Naming Ceremony’. Someone had brought into their darkness, Good News of a life they’d never imagined could be possible for them. Someone in a position of power redeemed a vulnerable one from the hands of oppressors too strong for them. And now, they were learning a new story, in a new family, and discovering a whole realm of righteous possibility really did stand open before them in Christ. And having passed through a kind of baptismal death, they emerged like a newborn welcomed by a room of loving onlookers to receive a new name: Beloved, Beautiful, child of God, brought into this world for endless embrace and everlasting joy. 

Closing Prayer

Lord Jesus, you brought us hitherto unimaginably good news about our real Father and his shocking love for us. You, through your death and resurrection, have yourself become for us an open door into a new household, promising that we can truly be born again into a new family – one unlike any we’ve ever known before. This new house, new family, and new life are where we discover the truth of our own astonishing belovedness, our dignity and, indeed, the very reason we exist. There is no rags to riches story, no Cinderella tale we could possibly more desperately wish were true – and it is true! And for that we praise you. Fill us with your Holy Spirit, so that we may be ever more deeply enfolded in the truth and named by your God and Father, who now is our God and our good Father, too. Amen.