Christianity Today Op-Ed: I Met God on the Mountaintop of Ritual, by Esau McCaulley (Wheaton; Author, Lent: The Season of Repentance and Renewal (2022)):
AAs someone who came from outside the liturgical expressions of Christianity, I had a certain suspicion of the whole enterprise. I thought the liturgical tradition, with its vestments, rituals, rules, and customs, was the very thing Jesus had come to destroy. I intuited that what God wanted was a broken and contrite heart. He owned the cattle on a thousand hills; he didn’t need our formalized prayers and spiritual sacrifices. …
The liturgical life seemed, from the outside, to stifle the Spirit. … Jesus wanted prayers from my heart that revealed my own wrestling with God, not the repeated words of those long dead. God was, of course, on the side of the informalists and against the formalists. In the language that became omnipresent during my college years, it wasn’t about religion but relationship. Religion was shorthand for any ritual activity I was uncomfortable with.
Here, I want to approach the liturgy from a different perspective. I do not wish to engage in debates about particular texts of the Bible. I want instead to zoom out and look at the nature of the Old and New Testaments themselves. I want to press in on the method by which God forms a people. When God revealed himself to a spiritually malnourished group who needed to be taught the things required for holiness, what did he do? How did God do it?
He gave his people rituals. He gave them feasts tied to certain parts of the year and a system of sacrifice to teach his ways to coming generations. …
Established prayers and actions pass on the faith—not as magic activities that contain meaning in themselves but as occasions for remembering. And these rituals are not in conflict with deeply emotive experiences of God. Every psalm and song, every word of prayer and lament in the Old Testament, was written by Jewish people steeped in the rituals of Israel. The deeply personal relationship with God demonstrated in the Psalms, Jeremiah, and Isaiah gives lie to the idea that God only values informality.
As Christians, then, both the ritual piety and the apostolic doctrines are part of our inheritance. This doesn’t mean that ritual or even the Lord’s Supper is limited to a pedagogical technique. Christians throughout the centuries have maintained that God comes to meet us in and through things like the bread and wine of the Eucharist. Christ doesn’t just teach us about himself in communion; he comes to us and nourishes the weary believer. We can have both. Ritual is a means of spiritual formation (we learn through repetition) and an encounter (God meets us in the act of worship and praise in the liturgy).
What does any of this have to do with Lent and its prayers? The set prayers of Lent are not a limitation on Christian devotion. They do not stand in the way of offering our own heartfelt cries to God. They are a way of accepting that we are not the first ones to encounter the God who has tossed our lives into a glorious confusion. Others have left a testimony. Their witness deserves to be heard.
Other op-eds by Esau McCaulley:
- The Christian Response to the Coronavirus: Stay Home (Mar. 22, 2020)
- What The Bible Has To Say About Black Anger: 'The Cross Helps Us Make Sense Of The Lynching Tree' (June 21, 2020)
- MLK's Legacy: Push Past Tweetable Quotes To True Christlike Love (Jan. 18, 2021)
- Why Christians Must Fight Systemic Racism (Aug. 1, 2021)
- The Dangerous Politics Of ‘We Will Not Forgive’ (Oct. 3, 2021)
- MLK's Legacy: Push Past Tweetable Quotes To True Christlike Love (Jan. 17, 2022)
- Does The Meaning Of A Christmas Song Change Depending On The Race Of The Man Who Wrote It? (Dec. 25, 2022)
- There Is Glory And God In Our Struggles (Feb. 12, 2023)
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