Earth Filled with Heaven: Finding Life in Liturgy, Sacraments, and other Ancient Practices of the Church

INTRODUCTION

BEARING FRUIT IN A TIME OF DROUGHT

How the sacramental life nourishes Christians, churches, and cultures in a secular age

The idea that Christianity could be sacramental might sound strange to you—even scandalous. What are your associations with the word sacramental? Perhaps words like idol worship, liturgy, smells and bells, works salvation, praying to the saints, superstition, guilt, and dead religion come to mind. Yikes. That’s a scary list.

Here’s a bold proposition: the best association for the word sacramental is Jesus. Yes, Jesus—the wonderful grace of Jesus; the glory of Jesus, His face shining like the sun; the life of Jesus, overflowing like a thousand geysers into our world.

You see, the word sacrament means sign—a pointer to a reality we cannot see.

On a recent bike trip, I came across a sign with the words Deer Crossing. The sign indicated that oft-hidden deer could lurch out in front of cyclists at random times, so I paid attention. The sign helped me orient my speed and raise my awareness.

If we’re ready to pay attention, we’ll find that life is filled with signs alerting us to a good, true, and beautiful Savior who is behind and above all reality. Scripture is full of those signs, and so are the historic practices of the early church. Followers of Jesus can deepen their own spiritual roots by paying attention and participating in those signs.

You might be, like me, an evangelical Christian. We believe the Bible is God’s inspired Word, that salvation is a gift we personally receive by faith, and that works cannot save us. We are not interested in dead religion or idol worship. We are interested in the person and mission of Jesus, and we’re curious to know how the practices of His earliest followers can root us more deeply in His life.

The sacramental life is a three-dimensional expression of God’s nourishing, cleansing grace for us in Christ. On our way to see Jesus face to face, the sacramental life helps us experience His presence in a tangible way.

Maybe you feel run down on your journey of seeking Jesus. I often hear the words, I’ve been hurt by the church, and there are so many variations on the stories that follow. Some are just exhausted by the church; the earlier draw of hype and excitement is now just wearing them out. Many with leadership responsibilities feel some despair when, after years of ministry outpouring, we aren’t ourselves being refreshed by the living waters of Christ.

Others may be discouraged that our ministry or church isn’t having the impact for which we’ve prayed and labored. It seems like the credibility and witness of Jesus’ family gets worse every year as yet another celebrity preacher falls and yet another scandal reveals rot in the system. Unfairly or not, this trickles down to our local communities. Many of the people to whom we’ve given our love and life—especially the next generation—are walking away from their Christian inheritance altogether.

Others grapple with a post-traumatic faith. Some of us trusted church leaders and have been burned. Others inherited a faith that blessed and burdened us at the same time. We love Jesus, but His people can be downright mean, even when they’re trying to help. It could just be that the suffering of life outpaced the strength of our faith and we’ve yet to reconcile our scar tissue with the Savior’s. We need to heal, rest, and process our trauma without pressure, hype, or formulas.

Most of all, many want to be faithful to Jesus in our generation, even as we witness growing suspicion and hostility to Jesus, the gospel, and the local church. We don’t want to be reactionary, yet we are aware that the cultural forces often pose a temptation and a threat that call for a faithful, Spirit-filled response.

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest (Matt. 11:28). That was Jesus’ promise to His earliest followers, and He’s still ready to make good on His offer.

What would it look like for us to deepen our roots and tap into an underground, ancient spring of our life in Him?

What would it look like for our faith to flourish in the harsher conditions, offering shelter to spiritual pilgrims looking for shade?

What would it look like for the church to not escape the culture, but be fruitful within it?

What would it look like to not abandon the grace of God, but to drink more deeply from it?

I am reminded of a promise God gave to His people in exile:

Blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD,

whose trust is the LORD.

He is like a tree planted by water,

that sends out its roots by the stream,

and does not fear when heat comes,

for its leaves remain green,

and is not anxious in the year of drought,

for it does not cease to bear fruit. (Jer. 17:7–8)

Maybe when the people of God heard these verses, they remembered the date palm tree, clustered as it was around water sources in the desert. Don’t be afraid, the Lord said, if you are rooted in My life, you can be fruitful and bear fruit in a time of drought. Though their world was being turned upside down and all sacred spaces were profaned, their roots would draw nourishment from the life of God.

The secular age has left us with growing chaos, loneliness, boredom, anonymity, hopelessness, and polarization. It has eroded core commitments, broken bonds of trust, and left us with too many options and too little meaning. As we practice the sacramental life in the spirit of Jesus, we find that chaos gives way to meaning, loneliness gives way to family, and polarization gives way to peace. When secular life has eroded our humanity, practicing the sacramental life helps us recover it.

When we see the world as created and redeemed by God, we see it sacramentally. Our world, fallen and broken though it may be, is crammed with the glory of God. Even in the darkest corners, a hidden lamp shines.

As we learn to rest under that deeply rooted tree, we pray for that day when the storm clouds of revival roll in, for the day when the desert becomes a garden once again, when the earth is covered with the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

At one of the darkest times in my life, it was the sacramental life that helped me see Jesus again.

I

MY STORY

THE WEARY AND THE HEAVY-LADEN

Strange as it sounds, it was Christianity that almost killed my Christian faith—not because it was so bad, but because it was so good. It excited me, taught me, challenged me, encouraged me, and put me to work for the gospel—until I collapsed.

I ran up all nineteen floors to reach my dorm room on my first day of Bible college.

As an eighteen-year-old freshman at Moody Bible Institute, I was thrilled to expand my horizons. For years I had been a frustrated extrovert in a small Ohio town, subsisting on a Bible church youth group and Christian radio. Now that I was in the big city, among peers who shared my faith and level of earnest desire to serve the Lord, I didn’t mind the nineteen floors—not at first.

Whatever the evangelical college program was, I was there for it: the new friends, the daily chapel sessions featuring sermons from notable pastors, the Christian concerts, the Bible and theology classes, the Christian-themed improv group, the late-night conversations in the dorm lounge, the city evangelism and justice initiatives, the Cubs games and Chicago hot dogs, even the accountability partners.

For a while, everything worked. My professors deepened my appreciation for the Bible and awakened me intellectually. My devotional life only got better as a result. My peers provided the iron-sharpening-iron spiritual community. The worship and prayer nights stoked my passion for God. My head and my heart soaked all of it up like water and sunshine. I was growing. This was the Christian life, and I didn’t want it to end.

For someone who came to faith in Christ at the age of five and grew up in a Christian home, this was perhaps the closest I came to a conversion experience. I give thanks to God for it. The joy and discovery of that season cut a deeper channel in my soul that remains to this day.

As the year drew to a close, my dorm leader took me under his wing and encouraged me to get involved in student leadership. There was a shortage of applicants for the leadership vacancies, he said, and I was mature enough to step in to fill the gap. I would learn later in life that there is usually a shortage of mature, capable leaders where they are most needed—and that need does not constitute a call. But at the time, I was deeply honored by the invitation. Who better to come to the rescue than me, the one who had the enthusiasm to run up all nineteen floors on my first day?

After being put into leadership, I poured everything I had into this opportunity. I prayed for God to give me vision. I made an elaborate, knock-’em-dead mural out of construction paper and colored tissue to communicate the vision. I spent time working the vision into a discipleship cohort of moldable freshman. I hoped to replicate in them the joyful experience I’d enjoyed the previous year.

And then it happened. I’ll never forget the phone call from my close friend at the time: Aaron, my dad took his own life. I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t seen this coming at all. My friend’s family had seemed so happy and healthy to me. They were committed Christians, involved in their own church. I had never heard much about Christians committing suicide. The reality of this death was like an intruder in my otherwise happy existence.

At the time, my friends and I had been attending a new, large, growing Bible church. The worship was upbeat, the architecture was innovative (church in a former warehouse? Cool at the time!), and our pastor had the it factor. He mesmerized us for nearly an hour each Sunday with his bold, in-your-face expository preaching. The services were like a roller coaster ride at an amusement park: they left us feeling thrilled, special, angry, tender, guilty, and loved—sometimes in the same service. We didn’t always know what Sunday would hold, but it was bound to be interesting. Given how fast the church was growing, we carried this sense that our pastor would eventually get big and discovered, and then our church would get big and discovered, which would be even more exciting and special. We filled the huge parking lot with cars and the huge warehouse with people every Sunday, several times over.

Yet after the suicide, we didn’t so much need space to park the car as much as we needed a space to grieve the loss. We needed a space to be still before God, free of unnecessary noise and provocative personalities. We needed space from the happy and produced experiences so that our messy and human experiences could run their course. We needed space not to have to feel anything at all—but simply to be welcomed into the presence of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Meanwhile, my coursework changed to a minor key. As I learned how the Bible was written, collected, and held together, I grew disenchanted with it. I began to stand over God’s living Word, analyzing it from new angles, less and less interested in its power to refresh and convict. Even the tamest of exposures to postmodernism and critiques of the Christian faith—from believing, faithful professors—left me questioning all I had trusted. The more I learned, the less I believed. I felt like a bad Christian for entertaining these doubts and didn’t share those concerns with many people.

And that’s when the criticisms started from the ministry I was leading. I didn’t have a healthy way to process the negative feedback. I could only feel the raw shame, fear, and hurt of getting dinged as a leader. He’s not investing in us enough… We don’t like his vision… He’s made some bad decisions. These words stung. After all I’ve done to help and lead them! I fumed to myself.

It seemed that the entire world I had flourished in was turning against me. Instead of changing course, I doubled down into more of the same: more quiet times, more worship music, more sermons, more ministry initiatives, more theology—more learning, feeling, and trying. My friend David, a former Christian college chaplain, calls this the learn-more-do-more treadmill. Struggling in your faith? Learn more. In a relational crisis? Do more. It’s worked before; it should work again. It was like attempting those nineteen flights of steps, except this time I collapsed before I reached the top.

With my emotions fried, my thoughts confused, my energy for Christian service depleted, I was hitting a wall and experiencing a true crisis of faith. I couldn’t feel my way to God anymore—not in my old way of doing that, at least. I couldn’t think and learn my way to God through quiet times or theology books, and I couldn’t serve and lead my way to God. Yet I longed for God.

Around that time my friend Phil invited me to a church called Covenant Presbyterian, a reformed congregation in Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood. Covenant met in a converted century-old Polish Catholic church building. It was austere—no statues of saints remained—with cracked walls and unreasonably stiff pew benches. Yet the architecture was beautiful and sturdy, and it lifted my gaze heavenward.

Within these old stone walls and old stained glass, I was given old prayers to pray. This is maybe the moment I learned that the church could be like a mother. Mothers tend to know what their kids need the moment they walk through the door: Come on in. Here’s a chair for your tired body. You must be famished; here’s a plate of dinner. I’ve got your bed ready, but first, a hug. Bring it in.

I arrived at Covenant’s front steps weary and heavy-laden. My mind, heart, and energies were