The Chalice and the Pattern

A Lenten Reflection on the Liturgy as the Architecture of Glory

Introduction

This Sunday, I’m preaching on the liturgy.

We are midway through Lent, that holy season in which the Church walks barefoot through the dust, her eyes cast not down in despair but lifted toward Jerusalem. Each sermon during this season has sought to draw our gaze to the mystery of worship and formation—that strange process by which sinners are made saints and saints made radiant. It has now fallen to me to preach on the liturgy: not on why we worship, nor what we believe, but on how we ascend.

The liturgy, I have come to believe, is not the husk that holds spiritual fruit, but the living vine that bears it. It is not merely functional; it is architectural. It is not arbitrary; it is patterned. As James B. Jordan has often argued, the liturgy is "the way the world works." Peter Leithart echoes this, declaring that the church's worship is not merely symbolic of God's activity in the world, but an actual participation in it. The liturgy is how heaven colonizes the earth. It is how time is sanctified. It is, in the deepest sense, the shape of reality.

We must learn to see the liturgy not as an accidental accretion of pious habits but the architecture of new creation. It is historical in that it repeats the great acts of God; eschatological in that it rehearses the end of all things; objective in that it does what it says; symbolic in that it connects heaven and earth; and Trinitarian in that it originates in the communion of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

But even before Leithart's or Jordan's typologies, this structure lies waiting beneath the surface of the text itself. From the beginning, God has always revealed Himself in form and pattern. The liturgy of the Church is the continuation of a rhythm older than Sinai, older than Eden. It is the echo of God’s own voice in the garden, calling man to walk with Him in the cool of the day. It is creation's reply, shaped into song.

Fiat Lux et Forma Mundi: The Liturgy of the First Dawn

When the world was without form and void, God did not begin by filling it, but by shaping it. His first act was speech: "Let there be light." The entire cosmos unfolded not in chaos, but in a careful cadence. The six days of creation, as Jordan has noted in his Creation in Six Days, are not mere chronology; they are liturgical. They form a pattern of dividing and filling, of distinguishing and glorifying. On Days 1 through 3, God separates: light from darkness, waters above from waters below, land from sea. On Days 4 through 6, He adorns: the heavens with stars, the seas with fish, the land with beasts and man. Day 7 is not the cessation of activity but its climax—the enthronement of God in the temple of time and space.

So it is in the liturgy. When the Church gathers to worship, we are walking back through the days of creation—not in nostalgia, but in re-creation. The Call to Worship is our "Let there be light": a divine initiative breaking into the void. Confession is the separation of the waters, the great divide between sin and righteousness, darkness and light. The reading and preaching of Scripture is the illumination of sun and moon, by which the times and seasons of our lives are ordered. The prayers of the people are the teeming things of sea and sky—songs rising, petitions multiplying, praises echoing. And when we come to the Table, we come on the sixth day, as those made in the image, invited to dine with the Creator in His temple. The Benediction is Sabbath—the voice of God resting upon us, sending us not away but into rest.

To worship, then, is to be re-created. It is to move in harmony with the grain of the universe. And when we resist the liturgy or flatten it into mere practicality, we saw against the grain of creation itself.

Lex Foederis: The Covenant Shape of the World

The world was not only created—it was covenanted. God is not a mere artisan; He is a Father-King, and all His dealings with creation are covenantal. As Meredith Kline and others have shown, the covenants of Scripture follow a recognizable pattern, much like the Suzerain-Vassal treaties of the ancient Near East. These treaties had five parts: a preamble declaring the sovereign (transcendence), a historical prologue recounting his deeds (hierarchy), stipulations (ethics), blessings and curses (sanctions), and a succession plan (succession). Ray Sutton (Now Bishop in the Anglican communion) created the THEOS acronym as a tool to memorize this pattern.

This pattern is not an incidental detail. It is the form in which God binds Himself to man.

And so the liturgy, too, takes on this covenantal structure. We begin with the preamble: the Call to Worship, where God declares who He is. We move to the prologue: Confession and Assurance, where our story is retold in light of His mercy. The reading and preaching of Scripture is the giving of stipulations—law and gospel, command and promise. The Table is the oath-sign, the meal that both blesses (those who eat and drink worthily) and curses (those who eat and drink unworthily). And the Benediction is the succession clause: we are sent out as heirs, as sons, bearing the Name.

Worship, in this sense, is covenant renewal. It is not an emotional experience we seek, nor a didactic moment we endure, but a re-binding of the people to their God. This is why worship must be shaped, structured, ordered. To ignore the form is to distort the bond.

Lewis understood this intuitively. In That Hideous Strength, the villainous forces seek to unmake the world by unmaking its order. The chaos they unleash is not random; it is anti-covenantal. The heroes, by contrast, recover truth not through spontaneity but through the embrace of the created and moral order. The liturgy is that order made flesh

Via Exodica: The Journey of Worship as Exodus

The story of salvation is not a static doctrine but a dramatic movement. It begins in bondage, moves through deliverance, passes into covenant, and ends in inheritance. This is the Exodus shape—the journey from Egypt to Sinai to Canaan. And the liturgy is a map of that same terrain.

Every Lord's Day, the people of God are called out of Egypt. They are summoned from the land of forgetfulness and idols. Confession is the crossing of the Red Sea. The old man drowns, the new man emerges. The reading of the Law and the Gospel at the mountain is Sinai. The covenant is given again. The Table is both manna and Promised Land—bread for the journey, and a foretaste of rest. The Benediction is the commissioning of Joshua's people: "Go in peace. Be strong and of a good courage." It is conquest.

Worship is not merely patterned like Exodus. It is Exodus. Christ is the new Moses, the greater Passover, the pillar of fire, the Rock that gives water. And in the liturgy, we follow Him. As Leithart writes, the Church "recapitulates the history of Israel in her worship," not to dwell in the past but to be drawn into Christ.

This is why liturgy cannot be reduced to preference. It is not about musical style or ambiance. It is about the shape of salvation.

Sacramentum Caeli: The Architecture of Heaven

Moses was shown a pattern on the mountain. The tabernacle he built was not designed by committee, nor born of cultural whim. It was a ln earthly replica of the heavenly throne room. Every piece of furniture, every curtain and candlestick, was symbolic of cosmic reality.

And in the liturgy, we move through that architecture. The altar of confession, the laver of baptismal remembrance, the lampstand of praise, the Table of Presence, the veil of intercession, the Ark of Communion—these are not relics. They are realities.

To enter worship is to enter heaven by faith. Not metaphorically, but actually. As the author of Hebrews tells us, we "are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem." And Tolkien, in his way, gestures toward this mystery when he writes of Lothlórien: "Time did not seem to pass here: it just is." The sanctuary is a kind of Lothlórien, a still point in the turning world, where the veil grows thin.

The world outside may be governed by clock and calendar, but within the liturgy, time is suspended. Heaven and earth meet. The veil is parted.

Finis et Initium: The End That Is the Beginning

The liturgy, in all its grandeur, is not a retreat from the world but its true center. It is the place where the world is re-formed each week, where time is re-sanctified, where the people of God are refashioned into a royal priesthood. It is the axis mundi, the still point from which the whole wheel turns.

Worship is not a prelude to the Christian life. It is the furnace in which the Christian is forged. It is not entertainment, nor therapy, nor even instruction—though it may sometimes do all these things. It is the cosmos transfigured. It is the old world passing away, and the new world breaking in.

To neglect this, or to treat the liturgy as a shell to be discarded, is to misunderstand not only worship, but the world itself.

So let us ascend. Let us go up to Zion, singing as we go. Let us confess and be cleansed, hear and be shaped, eat and be filled, receive and be sent. For in this pattern, heaven comes down, and earth is lifted up.

And perhaps, in that high mountain worship, we shall find again what we had forgotten: that we were made not for chaos, but for glory.