Re-enchanting Worship: Recovering Sacramental Realism
How Alexander Schmemann’s Sacramental Realism Can Transform Our Understanding of Creation and Renew Our Everyday Lives
Introduction
Lately, I've been circling around themes of worship, sacrifice, liturgy, and sacramentalism. There’s a reason for that—I’m deep into preparing a book on Re-enchanting Worship. While there’s no fixed timeline for its release, I’ve got about four chapters’ worth of material and an urgent sense that this topic is essential for our current moment.
Why? Because how a church worships says a lot about what it believes. I've noticed that in churches where worship becomes more modern, evangelical, and seeker-sensitive, the theology often drifts leftward. It’s almost inevitable. A casual approach to worship breeds casual attitudes in the pews. C.S. Lewis captured this perfectly when he described people fooling about with mud pies because they can't imagine what it means to enjoy a holiday at sea.
But let’s dig deeper.
Discovering Alexander Schmemann
Recently, I’ve been reading Alexander Schmemann's For the Life of the World. While I don’t share his Orthodox background—I’m Reformed Presbyterian with some Anglican tendencies—I think Schmemann offers a profound insight for all Christians:
The world is a sacrament, capable of conveying communion with God.
What does this mean? While I haven’t yet delved into the full metaphysical details that Schmemann might explore, the core idea is clear—and it aligns with thinkers like
. The world is not just a backdrop for human life; it actively participates in God. As Scripture says, “In Him we live, move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28), and in Christ, “all things were created, both visible and invisible” (Col. 1:16).Because of this, all of creation has the potential for communion with God. In this sense, the world is sacramental: it is imbued with the capacity to reveal God’s presence. But more than just sacramental, creation is also a gift. God, in His freedom, chose to create a world He didn’t have to, and He placed humanity within it as priests—standing between heaven and earth. Our role is to receive creation as a gift and offer it back to Him eucharistically, with thanksgiving.
Schmemann’s sacramental realism reminds us that everything—from bread and wine to time and space—holds the potential to become a means through which we encounter God.
The World as Gift, Lost and Found
Schmemann emphasizes that creation is fundamentally a gift. God didn’t need to create the world, but He did, and He placed humanity within it as priests—beings meant to stand between heaven and earth. Our role was to receive creation with gratitude and offer it back to God, making our lives a living Eucharist. But there was one thing God withheld from humanity: the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
Now, if you’re a reader of James Jordan, you’ll probably assume along with him that God would have eventually given it, had he passed the temptation in the beginning. I think that’s right.
As I’ve written elsewhere, Genesis 1 presents a macrocosmic vision of God’s act of creation, where He conquers chaos by subduing the forces symbolized by leviathan, parting the waters, and establishing order through naming and differentiating elements of creation. This process transforms the primordial chaos into a structured cosmos. Genesis 2-3, by contrast, is a microcosm of this story, unfolding the same themes at a human scale. In this narrative, God creates a being in His own image—humanity—tasked with a similar role of exercising dominion over creation. Man imitates God’s creative act by naming lands, rivers, and animals, participating in the work of bringing order to the world.
However, when man faces the serpent—the microcosmic counterpart to the leviathan he is meant to subdue—he fails to crush its head as God did in Genesis 1. Instead, he succumbs to the serpent’s temptation, falling short of his calling to mature in glory and wisdom. If he had passed this test, mirroring God’s victory over chaos in the cosmic creation, it is reasonable to think that God would have granted him the tree of knowledge as a gift, symbolizing his growth into a deeper understanding of good and evil.
But he didn’t earn it. It was seized and stolen, like a 12-year-old taking dads keys before he passed the test and was ready.
This act of seizing rather than receiving marked a fundamental shift. Instead of living as priests offering creation back to God, we became consumers, bending the world inward toward ourselves. We traded communion for control, and in doing so, we fractured the world.
The Dualism of the Fall
It’s here, Schmemann argues, that all dualisms take root. The Fall doesn’t just introduce a moral problem—it creates a cosmic rift. The unity between heaven and earth is shattered, and so is the harmony between the natural and supernatural, the secular and the sacred. Earth was meant to be in communion with God, but sin introduced a divided reality where God’s presence is distant, and creation is seen as something to be used rather than cherished.
For those of us from the Reformed tradition, this analysis resonates deeply. We are familiar with the idea that sin distorts everything, including our relationship with the world. Schmemann’s sacramental realism builds on this, emphasizing that the Fall did not just sever our relationship with God but also warped our perception of creation. What was once a seamless expression of God’s goodness became fragmented, and we became blind to its sacred character.
But God didn’t leave us in that state. In the Incarnation, Jesus Christ reunites heaven and earth. He is the God-Man, the place where the divine and the human are perfectly joined. Christ, as the true High Priest, offered creation back to the Father—through His life, His death, His resurrection, and His ascension. And in doing so, He made a way for us to recover our priestly calling.
In Him, heaven and earth are rejoined in the hypostatic union of His divinity and humanity. Christ’s redemptive work doesn’t just promise a future salvation; it initiates a restoration of creation’s sacramental potential right now. It is through Christ that we learn to see the world not as a series of disconnected, secular parts but as a unified whole, where every aspect of life can reflect the glory of God.
Living Eucharistically in a Fractured World
So, what does this mean for us today? How do we participate in this redemption? By embracing the sacramental realism of creation and reclaiming our role as priests.
To live eucharistically is to recognize that all of creation, because it is sustained by God, has the potential to lead us into communion with Him. It means that when we gather around a table and break bread, when we give thanks for our families, when we savor the beauty of a sunset, we are offering creation back to God with gratitude. We are refusing to see the world as divided into sacred and secular spaces; instead, we see every moment and every object as a potential site of God’s presence.
This perspective transforms the ordinary. The simple act of sharing a meal becomes an echo of the Eucharist, where the gifts of creation are received with gratitude and offered back in joy. Our work, whether in an office, a classroom, or a field, becomes an offering, a way of participating in God’s creative work. Our rest and play reflect the Sabbath rhythm, pointing to the rest that God has prepared for His people.
And most importantly, in the Church’s worship, this vision comes to life fully in the Eucharist—the thanksgiving meal. When we come to the Lord’s Table, we aren’t just performing a ritual. We are participating in the renewal of the world, being reminded that all things are meant to be received and offered back to God. From this Table, we learn what it means to carry this eucharistic spirit into the rest of our lives, letting gratitude and thanksgiving shape everything we do.
A Call to Re-enchant the World
Schmemann’s vision offers something sorely lacking in much of modern Christianity: a way to see the world that is filled with joy, beauty, and divine purpose. It’s a call to a life that goes beyond dull moralism or rigid doctrine—a life where gratitude transforms the way we see everything. For Reformed believers like myself, this can lead to what some like
call Chestertonian Calvinism: a faith that is joyful, warm, and grounded in thanksgiving rather than defined by stuffiness or grumpiness.This is a vision that resists the disenchanted mindset of modernity. It invites us to see the world as alive with God’s presence, where the division between sacred and secular is healed through Christ. Instead of retreating into a narrow spiritualism or embracing a hollow materialism, sacramental realism calls us to live as priests, offering creation back to God in gratitude and joy.
In a world that often feels disenchanted and disconnected, Schmemann’s sacramental realism invites us to recover the lost vision of creation as a means of communion with God. It calls us to re-enchant our lives by seeing every moment as an opportunity to offer back to God what He has so generously given. It’s a vision that has the power to heal the rifts of the Fall and restore our place as priests of creation, living for the life of the world.