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Liturgy and Life, Sacrament and Struggle,
by Murphy Davis
N o v e m b e r 1 9 9 6
Liturgy is a word that comes from the Greek, meaning “the work of the people.”
When we come together on Sunday, we make liturgy: we make work together.
We say often that what we do here at the Open Door—all of the meals
that we serve, all of the showers and clean clothes that we offer, all of the prison
visits, all of the small acts of charity that respond to the suffering of our friends,
as well as the advocacy—all of our work that we do, comes from the worship
that we share. We worship together every day. We gather at least a couple of
times each day to pray and reflect on scripture and to share our concerns. But
the time we gather with each other on Sunday afternoon is a very particular
time, a time set apart to sing, to pray, to listen, to reflect on scripture, and to celebrate
the sacrament together. Every Sunday we celebrate the Eucharist—the
Lord’s Supper—Communion—around a table that is always in the middle of
our circle, which brings us bread and juice that become for us the broken body
and spilled blood of Jesus Christ. From time to time we also have the privilege
of celebrating baptism. On a somewhat regular basis we celebrate what we also
believe to be a sacrament: foot washing.
We celebrate these sacraments and our liturgy together in a context of two
thousand years of experience and tradition in the church of Jesus Christ. Over
these two thousand years, the disciples of Jesus have tried to live out the liturgy,
to form it, and to come together around worship in different ways, at different
times in history. The liturgy is the way, through the tradition and the sharing of
worship with Christians around the world, that we mark our time. We divide
the liturgy into a cycle and order, so that we have ways of remembering and celebrating
the drama of our faith.
Soon we will begin the cycle again with Advent. Then we celebrate Christmas
and Christmastide, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Eastertide, and Pentecost. By
celebrating this cycle we affirm that there is a holy quality to time. Time is not
just something that passes on a calendar, where we mark the days and turn the
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