Justice at the Heart of Liturgy

The connection between liturgy and justice has long been assumed: Faithful celebration of Eucharist would lead to just sharing of ‘the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands’. Baptizing persons of every people and nation would yield societies in which each person treats another as a treasured image of God. Regular faithful engagement with scripture would shape followers of Jesus into living words within the Word. Yet centuries of Christian practice and decades of reflection on the connection between liturgy and justice continue to produce broken human relationships shaped by colonisation, disparities based on colour and culture, and nature broken by a climate crisis worked by human hands.

Nevertheless, essays in this collection seek to engage the unresolved tension between the world in which humanity lives and the one proposed in Christian common prayer. Gerard Moore asks if the ‘law of prayer’ that guides assemblies is tainted by an imperial shape that impairs its witness. Anita Monro laments a lack of honesty in so many Christian gatherings, where confession and lament are absent, not least when assemblies gather on stolen land. Stephen Burns responds to their prompts by proposing patterns that might steer common prayer toward more authentic ‘kingdom scenes’ that signal God’s dominion. Annie Brophy applies such wisdom to her own Uniting Church in Australia, asking whether its resources for prayer measure up to that church’s stated commitment to justice in the matter of gender and reconciliation with Australia’s First Peoples. Jason McFarland and Angela McCarthy report on ecumenical efforts underway to right the relationship between human bodies at prayer and the continuous praise of the rest of creation. Might an ecumenical Feast of Creation be a step in that direction? Like so many questions posed by contributors to this volume, the path to joining liturgy and justice walking hand in hand remains unclear.

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