Beyond Rituals: How Liturgy Shapes Ethics

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To many, an emphasis on liturgy might seem to be more of a liability than a support for ethics. Admittedly, the relationship between liturgy and ethics can easily be framed negatively. Citing passages from the prophets such as Amos 5:21–27 or Isaiah 1:11–17, where God declares his displeasure in rituals performed by unjust, oppressive, idolatrous, and otherwise unfaithful worshipers, liturgy might be thought of as empty form or mere motions, too often masking hard hearts and unjust hands.

Yet there is another way to consider the prophetic denunciations of such hypocritical worship: It is precisely because of the proper marriage between liturgy and ethics that the hypocritical practice of the former is so abhorrent. The truth of liturgy is not found in bare form, but in comprehensive transformation and reorientation of life and, where the latter is absent, the former is made into a mockery. Liturgy orders us towards practice and is confirmed—and occasionally falsified—in it.

Orders that order our ethical formation

That rituals, ceremonies, formalities, and liturgies should be ordered towards transformative practice should not be hard to grasp. For instance, while some dismiss the formalization of a union in marriage as “just a piece of paper,” or a wedding as a “mere ceremony,” these formalities are not empty, but they powerfully order participants’ lives towards lifelong union, within which their own meaning is fulfilled.

The bond between liturgy and ethics is manifold and rich, far exceeding bare moral didacticism. It is chiefly, yet not solely, formational rather than informational. And it is formational in several respects.

In a perceptive short book, On Sacrifice, Moshe Halbertal argues that “self-transcendence is at the core of the human capacity for a moral life.”¹ Against figures such as Immanuel Kant, Halbertal contends that the greatest threat to morality is not found primarily in self-interest, but in idolatry. The greatest evils of humanity have not been committed as expressions of self-interest so much as expressions of false sacrifice. Without denying elements of self-interest motivating war, the reality of sacrifice for something greater than ourselves—an ideological cause, an identity group, a nation, etc.—is far more potent a justification and motivator.

As people have placed their hope for self-transcendence in entities that are unworthy of such hope, they have been guilty of one of the most fundamental sins identified in Holy Scripture: idolatry. And nothing addresses this more directly than the practice of true worship.

Christian worship is, above all else, our (re-)orientation to the true object of our praise and a proper hope for self-transcendence. While we can be part of various things that are greater than ourselves and which can offer us some degree of meaning, it is in the service of God alone that the possibility of transcendence is found. And as our lives are ordered towards God, all other potential masters we might be tempted to serve will be put and kept in their proper, subordinate places.

“You shall have no other gods before me” (Exod 20:3) is the foundational ethical truth, and worship—declaring God’s worth—is a repeated return to this truth. It is a truth from which we stray too easily.

Reorienting life through liturgical cycles

Liturgy, like other forms, structures and articulates. We are not constantly engaged in liturgy. Rather, it is set apart from ordinary activity and we return to it according to a set rhythm. Every Sunday we regather and are sent out again, punctuating our lives.

In creating the world, God rested on the seventh day, blessing it and setting it apart from the days of labor (Gen 2:1–3). However, the Sabbath day of rest was included within the sequence of the seven days (Gen 1:1–31); the Sabbath completes the week and, even though none of the labor of creation occurs within it, all the labor of creation is ordered by and towards it.

The liturgical scholar Louis-Marie Chauvet discusses the way that liturgy is set apart from ordinary time and activity, yet in a way that is vitally connected to it.² Both where worship is extremely informal, trivialized in a manner that blurs into regular daily life, or highly ritualized in a manner entirely strange and foreign to it, the proper relationship between liturgy and life is undermined. Liturgy requires something of a suspension of and break with the quotidian order, with the preoccupations, values, and forms of society that characterize it, allowing a higher reality of grace to reframe, correct, transform, and reorder them.

As such, the practice and place of liturgy is not dissimilar to that of a game, even though it is a matter of weight and solemnity. By repeatedly taking us out of our daily cycles of work and activity, worship frees us from a suffocating submersion within their values and priorities, granting us space and distance from which transformation might occur. We are reconnected with the past of God’s decisive action in history—chiefly in the work of Christ—and his promised future, recalling us to our stations in the narrative they mark out, equipping us to act in confident faith in a world of sight. Liturgy reorients us in time, delivering us from unrelenting cycles of toil or from the dangerous pursuit of earthly utopias. We are caught up in the charged space between the once-for-all action of God in Christ and the breaking future of his promise, elevating our labors while protecting us from the destructive and delusive mirages of manmade utopias.

Liturgy allows for and encourages repeated (re-)orienting, evaluative, and corrective practice, essential to moral life. On a weekly basis, as we gather in worship, we return to reality. Each time, we are recalled to the truth of who God is, who we are, what the world is, what the human vocation is, and where our destiny is found. Liturgy lifts our eyes up to the Lord and protects us from the myopia that is common to a society that seldom looks beyond the preoccupying trivialities of its saturated immediate horizons.

Liturgy allows for and encourages repeated reorienting, evaluative, and corrective practice, essentially to moral life.

Becoming literate in liturgy’s moral language

Much of the task of ethics is that of learning to name and to speak about God, the world, and ourselves correctly. Liturgy practices us in language that is foreign to fallen humanity. It teaches us to speak—and hence to think—in terms of “sin” and “grace,” in terms of “creation,” “repentance,” and “forgiveness,” or “thanksgiving.” It equips us to strip away the euphemisms beneath which sin dissembles itself, giving us language with which to identify and firmly to take hold of sinful realities in our lives and societies, by which we can begin to understand their character and dynamics, so as better to uproot them.

Here, as elsewhere, the repetitive character of liturgy matters. It inculcates habits of speech and thought, by which the most fundamental moral categories and narrative of the Christian faith are made second nature for us. Through a weekly rehearsal of Christian language, Christian liturgy forms us as people who perceive and speak about the world clearly, discerning the moral shape of our vocations within it accurately. As we gain familiarity with and proficiency in such language, we are enabled to act appropriately in the world.

Worship as transformative critique

Building on the work of the Brazilian theorist Paulo Freire, Mark Searle considers the way that liturgy can function as a form of “critical pedagogy,” a repeated public assembly in which the status quo and the various reality-constructs that we inhabit are exposed to judgment, reassessment, and transformation.³ Liturgy offers us a position from which we can begin more accurately to perceive the ideological frameworks, structures of power, and systems of value that frame our worlds, and a starting point for transformative praxis. Each Sunday morning, we regather with a community committed to the kingdom of God. We renounce the works of Satan, confess our sins, and declare our faith in Jesus Christ. Such a liturgy is a repeated disruption and correction of the patterns of life that prevail in our societies, exposing them to the testing word of Christ. It constantly places our lives and societies under the cross and judgment of Christ. In such a manner it conscripts us in a continual practice of judgment and repentance.

As we return every week to the liturgy, we present both ourselves and our works before the Lord. In such a manner, the regular activities of our weeks are always placed in relation to Christ and subjected to his evaluation. This relation is not merely retrospective, looking back over the affairs of the previous six days, but also prospective. Liturgy propels us into the business of the week ahead with assurance of God’s blessing, commission, and presence.

Liturgy resists the secularization and compartmentalization of our weekly labors and our wider societies from the purview of Christ and his gospel. Week after week, we present ourselves and our deeds to the Lord, confessing our sins and presenting tokens of our labor in offering; week after week, we are forgiven, restored, blessed, and sent out again to do God’s work.

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Liturgy (& ethics) starts with grace

Christian ethics does not begin with human moral initiative and exertion, but with the restoring forgiveness and grace of God in Christ declared to needy sinners and our reconstitution as beloved sons and daughters of God. No other starting point for true ethics exists than that which begins with enjoyment of forgiveness, grace, and new standing; with recognition of ourselves as unworthy recipients of God’s unfathomable goodness in creation and redemption; and with expression of dependence and gratitude.

Likewise, liturgy is grounded in God’s action and grace, rather than human initiative. The words of liturgy are borrowed and shared words, not expressions of our own heroic individual spirituality nor eloquent rhetoric. The practices of the liturgy are not of our own invention, but of divine institution and an inheritance of the tradition. We submit ourselves to the practices of the liturgy as a sort of enacted prayer, that we might be blessed through them, not by virtue of some merit on our part but through faith in God’s grace and promise held out to us in them.

Liturgy addresses God’s grace to our bodies, not merely to our minds. Our objectivity, givenness, embeddedness in the world, and entanglement with others is encountered most potently in the realm of the body. It is in our bodies that we most experience the flesh, in its mortality, weakness, corruption, unruly passions, exposure to judgment, shame, and woundedness. Our bodies are also the most basic dimensions of ourselves. Before we ever developed subjectivity, agency, and volition, we were bodies; as our faculties gradually forsake us as we move to the sleep of death, our fundamental embodiment becomes less avoidable. In baptism, God declared his grace to us in our bodies and the renewing address of grace is repeated and extended in the liturgy and the sacraments. Our very bodies are the temple of his Holy Spirit (1 Cor 6:19), and the embodied practices of the liturgy return us to God’s words of grace, to our bodies, and to the promise of resurrection.

Christian ethics has an embodied character. We are charged to present our bodies as a living sacrifice (Rom 12:1) and to present our bodily members to God as instruments of righteousness. In Romans 6, the Apostle Paul reasons from baptism—as the inclusion of our bodies in the death and resurrection of Christ—to a sacrificial form of ethics. Our bodies, and their members severally, belong to the Lord and the sacrificial reality of baptism—in which our bodies were offered to God in Christ—must be fleshed out in the newness of life within which we present our bodily members to God in righteous service. Liturgy, with its attention to the embodied worshiper, should habituate us to such ways of thinking and acting.

Ethics within a liturgically formed community

Christian ethics also concerns the collective, corporate “body.” The manifold bodies of the members of the church are presented as a single sacrifice in Christ (Rom 12:1). Virtue ethicists emphasize the importance of communities and their practices for the formation of virtue and character in individuals. Christian living is not a solitary endeavor, but a collective and collaborative matter.

Liturgy forms community, teaching us to recognize ourselves and each other anew in Christ and confirming us in a new shared form of life. Liturgy gathers and coordinates an assembly of people towards united confession and expression of faith and fundamental formation in Christian practice. Much as families are renewed in their mutual- and self-recognition through their habitual activities such as shared meals, the church as the body of Christ is renewed in its self-understanding and its members in their mutual recognition through the liturgy. And this community formed through liturgy should extend far beyond the realm of the sanctuary.

Christian living is not a solitary endeavor, but a collective and collaborative matter.

Active commitment to newness of life

The practice of liturgy also involves repeated self-commitment to a new orientation and way of life.

Gordon Wenham remarks upon the difference between “essentially passive” listening to the reading of the law, and perhaps also to an explanation of it by a preacher, and the activity of reciting the psalms.⁴ The latter activity is self-involving in a much more pronounced manner, committing us to certain attitudes. Every time we sing psalms or hymns or actively participate in the responses of the liturgy, we verbally commit ourselves to certain beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Wenham compares praying the psalms to the activities of “taking an oath, making a vow, [and] confessing faith,” writing:

In praying the psalms, one is actively committing oneself to following the God-approved life. This is different from just listening to laws or edifying stories. It is an action akin to reciting the creed or singing a hymn. It involves strong commitment, and this is why I think that the psalms have been so influential in molding Jewish and Christian ethics in the past, and why as scholars we should again study them for their ethical content.⁵

Neither empty liturgy nor moralism

There is an intimate connection between liturgy and ethics, the former orienting us toward the latter, and the latter confirming the truth of the former. Chauvet writes of the prophetic critique of hypocritical worship:

All these roundly censure cultic formalism. They all castigate a cult where God is given only lip service. They all demand that the heart be in harmony with what the cult expresses and that the latter lead to the practice of what is right and just—justice and judgment are the two foundations of the throne of God (Pss 89:14 and 97:2)—toward the widow, orphan, and stranger. The ritual memory of the liberation from slavery in Egypt? Yes, but in view of the liberation of the slaves every seventh year. Circumcision of the flesh? Yes, but in view of circumcision of the heart. The offering of firstfruits? Yes, but in view of respecting the goods of others, of sharing with the most destitute, of showing respect for workers … Sacrifices? Yes, but in view of the sacrifice of the lips toward God and of acts of kindness toward others.⁶

Liturgy and ethics should not be placed in opposition, but there must always be a fertile tension between them. Sacrifice and liturgy have always faced the threats of complacency and presumption; some have always felt that, merely by virtue of their going through the ritual motions, they stand in right relationship with God and that newness of life is optional. The prophets exposed such errors, yet without ever rejecting sacrifice, as such. Rather, they showed sacrifice—and liturgy more generally—to be intrinsically ethical, requiring confirmation in faithful practice.

Liturgy, however, resists the mere “ethicization” of Christian faith, its reduction to a moral system without reference to God. In liturgy, Christian ethics are grounded in the worship of God, in gratitude for his grace, in the renewed existence of the Christian, in the life of church as a body, and in God’s work in Christ in history. And, through the weekly practice of the liturgy, ethics is never allowed to become untethered from this.

Liturgy precedes and has primacy with regard to ethics, yet must issue forth in newness of life or falsify itself.

True ethics are grounded in worship

At the heart of the liturgy is the practice of prayer, and the constitutive tension between ethics and liturgy is often best engaged here. Ethics detached from liturgy—a graceless and prayerless ethics—is prone to numerous perversions, to self-righteousness, to ingratitude, to messianic ambitions, and much besides. True ethics both begins with prayer and extends it in practice that is prayerful in its fundamental character.

Worship is not merely a useful means to the end of personal ethics and a moral society, but offers true transcendence, catching us up in the expression of God’s worth and glory, the proper and orienting end of all creation. Without the orientation of worship, ethics becomes something alien. However, liturgy divorced from ethics is not worship at all; its expressions of devotion to the Lord are hollow and false.

In liturgy, we receive the word of God, the word that tests hearts, which animates and gives life, the word that is most truly encountered in the Word made flesh. In the first chapter of his epistle, James explores this dynamic of the proper relation between liturgy and ethics. Chiefly in liturgy, we “receive with meekness the implanted word” (v. 21). However, we are immediately charged not to be “hearers only” (v. 22), this being compared to someone who looks at himself in a mirror and immediately forgets what he looks like (vv. 23–24). James concludes, “religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world” (v. 27).

Liturgy orients and propels ethics, in which it is confirmed, yet the movement of liturgy out into ethics is followed by a movement of faithful lives and their fruits back into worship. We never move beyond worship. The fruits of renewed lives are returned to God in thanksgiving and also strengthen the flesh out the fundamental realities we encounter in the church’s gathering. Works of mercy, such as the visitation of orphans and widows, both flow from and into the church’s life of worship.

Roberts’s recommended resources for further study

Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Reinterpretation of Christian Existence (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1995)
Jeffrey J. Meyers’ The Lord’s Service: The Grace of Covenant Renewal Worship (Canon Press, 2003)