Divine Service

I have come to love the phrase "divine service," for what we do as Christians, because it allows for such a play of meanings:

When we come together, we perform the "divine service" of the Holy Eucharist or Holy Communion. The canons of the Diocese of Texas say that our yearly council must begin with "divine service," even though there is nothing called that in our prayer book, we all know what it means. The Eastern churches call it the "Divine Liturgy," and I hope we can come more to call in the divine service in the West. Most of the ways we talk about this central act of worship for us as Christians are names from parts of the service, e.g.: Holy Communion, The Holy Eucharist, The Lord's Supper, the "Synaxis," etc. The "Divine Service" is the only one I know that names the whole.

When we live the Christian life, we perform "divine service." So now it sounds like we are finally talking about something that is not liturgical, not "merely" ritual. The ritual divine service can be for us a sign or symbol of the real service: being loving to others. But that is not the case. At least, it isn't the whole of the truth. Our primary goal in life is to love God. The goal of the Christian life is to live as though our entire lives were a liturgical service of love and service before the Lord. At that is because the holy temple of the Lord is his whole cosmos. And all who are baptized into Christ Jesus are priests of this New Covenant temple. Service to others is a necessary and inherent part of this "divine service" but it neither sums it up nor exhausts it.

Most importantly, the Divine Service is what God has done on our behalf through Jesus Christ our Lord. And so now one might think: we finally have gotten to the bottom of it: this is the ground of all this "liturgy" stuff that itself is not liturgy. But that also would be wrong. For the work that Christ does on behalf of the cosmos is to serve as its Priest-King and to preside over the cosmic liturgy: the liturgy that is cosmos, that brings cosmos out of chaos! So it is all liturgy, all the way down. Whether ritually at the Divine Service every week, or ascetically, in our lives as Christians in the world during the week, or ultimately, in our share of the worship of the Lord in the heavenly places, it is all liturgy, Jesus' liturgy, all the way down.