Divine Liturgist

God speaks and light appear. He separates light and darkness, assigns names to each, and judges the whole to be good. Next day, He’s at it again, speaking, separating, assessing, judging. And so it goes throughout the days of creation: With an insistent, incantatory rhythm, God speaks, sees, names, judges. Poetic yes, but more fundamentally, creation unfolds as the enacted poetry of liturgy.

From the first pages of Scripture, before we know much of anything about God, we know He’s a God of repetitive ritual actions and formalized speech. We already know He’s the divine liturgist.

Beginning with Day 3, something else begins to happen. On Day 1, God speaks to nothing, because there is nothing other than God. His speech makes the auditor. Once the seas and land have appeared, though, He addresses them. “Let the earth sprout vegetation” and “Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures.” And when he calls on earth to sprout, fruit trees and grain plants spring up from the land. He calls on the waters to teem with living souls, and living souls swarm the seas.

God the divine liturgist forms creation as a liturgical partner, a respondent who can speak and act in ecstatic obedience to His creative word.

Continued at Patheos.