Sacred Worship and Sacred Service

“So don’t let anyone judge you about eating or drinking or about a festival, a new moon observance, or sabbaths. These religious practices are only a shadow of what was coming—the body that cast the shadow is Christ.” (Colossians 2:16-17, Common English Bible)

The C.S. Lewis Bible I bought recently has this from Lewis, which the editors thought related to the passage from Colossians. In Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, Lewis writes of the danger that “religion” becoming “one more department of life, an extra department added to the economic, the social, the intellectual, the recreational, and all the rest.” And yet, religion as a department seems to “thrive,” according to Lewis. “It thrives because there exists in many people a ‘love of religious observances,’” which Lewis calls a “merely natural taste.”

In other words, our ways of worshiping are just natural things of this world, which we call “sacred,” and can become ends in themselves, “an idol that hides both God and my neighbours.” Do Lewis’s words smack in your heart as an indictment, or a harsh and unfair criticism? Do Lewis’s words, as well those of Paul in Colossians, cut to close to home for us liturgical Christians with our love of ritual and ceremony?

For me personally, the answer is absolutely not. I witness to the transformation that God has worked in my life over the years through the liturgies of daily prayer and the Holy Eucharist. There was a time in my life when “truth” was something I zealously sought and considered my sole responsibility to defend. But in truth, my seeking of “truth” was a solitary quest. It was something I had to find, and then defend as though my life depended on it. But as I continued to take Holy Communion at Grace Episcopal Church in Alexandria, Sunday after Sunday, year after year, I became more and more a “living member” – a living hand and foot of the Body of Christ.

That Body is made up of many people, all with their own unique perspectives. And the more I became a part of that body, the more I realized that I needed other people to find the “truth.” In short, it was through the rituals and ceremonies of the Holy Eucharist that I was saved from my lonely search for truth, and born again into that wonderful and sacred mystery called the Church. To me, our worship is a beautiful “shadow” of what is coming—the Body of Christ.

And yet, while God used the “natural taste” of Episcopal worship to change my life, I agree with Lewis, and Colossians, that such natural tastes cannot box God in. God can use our natural tastes to reach us. And God can abandon them if the shadows become more important to us that the light that makes them. I also learned from Grace Church’s passion for Outreach that the shadows of Christ, which we see inside our churches, must be extended outside the walls of our church. We extend the shadow of Christ through our individual acts of service, and through our common actions as a parish church.

We need our sacred spaces to be nourished together with Christ himself. And so strengthened, we feed others with the same Christ.