Liturgy: “It’s Urgent”

What is the King’s Liturgy? King’s Liturgy defines our experience together as a Christian community. It outlines the rhythms we celebrate with the Church at large: Scripture readings, Sabbath habits, and celebration of Holy Days and historical events.

This Week’s Lectionary Readings

Jonah 3:1-5, 10
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Mark 1:14-20
Psalm 62:6-14

This week’s liturgy is contributed by Dr. Mark Hijleh, provost:

Everything today seems urgent. I previously spent many years in a community in which the pace of life was a lot less urgent, but even there the pressure—for action, for accomplishment, for outcomes—crept higher year after year. New York City, of course, embodies urgency. It almost cannot be escaped here, in nearly every walk of life. Sometimes it is exhilarating, sometimes exhausting.

There are our human urgencies and there are God’s holy urgencies. Generally, whatever we value most is most urgent to us, though age and wisdom do teach that deliberation and waiting are often essential as well. God’s holy urgencies are His callings on (to) us, which, if we learn to hear and heed them, give us confidence that our energetic investment will have eternal value. Still, urgency does not preclude waiting on the Lord. One church joke that has always amused me is that we ought to spend three hours at our annual business meetings praying and three minutes discussing—instead of the other way around.

God seems to want us to have that invested sense of urgency in His callings, even as we are sometimes compelled to wait. (The urgency of waiting is another topic for another time). As with many aspects of our lives in Him, we live in that tension. We also hopefully learn to live with the surprises that unfold in the midst of those urgent callings. After his first humbling, Jonah seems eager to preach urgent judgment on Nineveh—you only have 40 days!—but less eager to see repentance and redemption at work. The disciples heard the urgency in Jesus’ calling—enough to drop their nets and walk away from their livelihoods—but could not possibly have predicted what was to come as a result.

So what is the urgency, exactly? It’s not an urgency to implement detailed plans we probably don’t fully understand. It’s not an urgency to work, work, work ourselves to death as if God isn’t in control. And it’s not an excuse to transmogrify God’s callings into our own assessments and our own desires. It’s “merely” an urgency to follow Him. Do it now! Get up tomorrow and keep following! Power and steadfast love belong to God—and that is compelling enough. Jesus is here—let’s go! The urgencies of mourning, rejoicing, buying (and selling)—in short, the urgencies of dealing with this world—cannot reasonably take priority, because they are passing away. Following the Master and telling the stories of our journeys—very complex paths indeed—will resolve those other, lesser urgencies just fine. Our urgently needed—and urgently available—refuge from other, fatal urgencies is the living God.