Dionysus on a Bike

Leviticus 9:1-11, 22-24 – 5/18/2026

Before I left the life of the church during my university years, the church I went to was about as low church as is possible. This church taught that prior to Jesus and according to the Old Covenant certain rituals, most notably animal sacrifice, were required to bring the sinful human being into right relationship with God. According to this understanding, Jesus’s death was a once for all time sacrifice that undid the need for periodic sacrifices and other purification rituals commanded in the Torah. For this church and also for me at the time, worship of God was a purely spiritual matter concerned with cultivating and entering into the correct “relationship” with God, one of faith, praise, and submission. Gone entirely along with the entire temple sacrificial system was the need for embodied ritual practices following traditional rubrics.

Of course, the orthodox Christian who accepts Scripture as authoritative cannot completely avoid embodied ritual practices. Jesus, in the Gospels, commands specifically two (or three) physical actions as ordained rituals that the church will name Sacraments, baptism and the celebration of the last supper. For churches that do not see frequent influxes of new members coming to the faith of the church for the first time, baptism is peripheral from the everyday life of the church. It may be important in abstraction since it is commanded by Christ in a way that is connected to salvation, but since baptism is a once in a lifetime event, a mature congregation, especially one with few families with children, will have baptisms infrequently. This prevents baptism, as an embodied ritual practice, from having a tangible impact on the life of congregation. Holy Communion, the celebration of the Last Supper, however, is a repeatable commanded ritual that virtually all orthodox Christians participate in. For the church I attended while in university, communion was celebrated infrequently, it was not something I remember participating in at all, and it figured little, if at all, in that church’s understanding of the life faith or the means of grace. Communion in that congregation was a ritual done only because it was commanded and not because it imparted any particular grace, power, or presence to the people celebrating it. It was a ritual without a reason and without a basis in the church’s own self-understanding.

I left that church for many reasons and so left the life of the church altogether. Having returned to the life of the church over twenty years later as a Lutheran, I am struck by how differently Lutherans treat embodied ritual. The difference in the place of ritual in these two churches goes back even to a difference in understanding the rituals commanded in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian relationship to them. Lutherans, taking a historical-critical approach to their conception of the New Testament Church, understand that Christians did not see themselves as part of a distinct religion from Judaism for the first decades after Christ’s death. Christianity was continuous with Judaism with the only addition the teachings of Jesus, as the Son of God. The commands of the Hebrew Bible, including the ritual sacrificial worship in the Temple, remained in effect, modified only by the teachings of Christ who explicitly claimed that he came to uphold the law. Two things moved Christian worship away from a Jewish practice that including Temple worship. First, the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem meant that no one got to participate in temple worship, Christ following and non-Christ following people alike. Even as Christians had to reinterpret their worship in light of the Temple’s destruction, so to do all Jews. The move toward a specifically Christian form of worship was paralleled by the development of the post-Temple Rabbinic, synagogue-based Judaism that gave rise to the varieties of Judaism we are familiar with today. Secondly, as more non-Jewish pagans began to follow Jesus, a separate set of rules was developed to accommodate their inclusion among Jesus followers. Gentiles were not required to fully follow all the Torah commands that Jewish followers of Jesus continued to keep, especially circumcision and some of the dietary restrictions. As Gentiles began to seriously outnumber self-identified Jews in assemblies throughout the Empire, Gentile-style Christian worship replaced Jewish-style worship, leading to a shift in the meaning of and significance in various rituals.

Since Lutheranism sees this continuity in Jewish and Christian religious practice, distinctively Christian practice does not replace Jewish practice, it is God’s relationship to the world as a whole, the nations as opposed to the Covenant with one particular people. As universal instead of directed toward a particular people, the required rituals were limited to the ones commanded by Jesus, even as all rituals, required and adiaphora, retained the influence of their Jewish origins.

One of the most striking differences between the Lutheranism of my return to faith and the low church, anti-ritualism of the church I left, is just how central embodied, codified ritual, both the Sacraments commanded by Christ and the adiaphora of high(er) church liturgy, are to the life and self-understanding of this church. Jesus’s body and blood are truly eaten and drank. Baptism truly washes away sins. Touching the baptismal waters and kneeling before the cross are actions with consequences, meaning, and spiritual reality that is intimately tied up with the physical reality of the ritual action. God is not only present in our belief, our faith, and our emotional-spiritual connection to Jesus. God is also present in the flesh, in our bodies and in the material reality of the elements of ritual.

As I said, I left the life of the church for many reasons. At the time, lack of ritual was not one of those reasons. My return to the life of the church has seen Sacramental, embodied, ritual worship as central to my journey of faith and search for meaning. As I seek to re-imagine the spiritual side of my life in Christ, through the rituals of a Sacramental understanding of Christian worship, I understand that spiritual aspect of the Christian life to be intimately and essentially tied to the physical and the embodied, undoing the distinction between spiritual and corporeal. The Christian faith is an embodied faith, and the healing it offers is as much through physical as through spiritual means. This is in keeping with the radical idea of the incarnation that God became man, undoing the metaphysical distinction between God and the human and undermining the opposition between the body and the spirit.

Reflections of a Dionysian Lutheran, comments on the daily readings of the Revised Common Lectionary.