The Writing Work of the People

Liturgical Writing as Spiritual, Theological, and Prophetic Work

Jill Y. Crainshaw

• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781640654020
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

Invites readers to use their own voices to enliven personal and collective worship.

What ideas, hopes, dreams, and laments do the words of worship stir in our hearts and minds? What images of God swirl up out of our communal prayers and hymns to shape what we believe and who we are as people of faith? We know that words can heal and draw us together, or words can hurt and divide. Christian communities proclaim and embody this wisdom each time we celebrate God's Word made flesh in Jesus.

Words for worship that arise from worshiping communities themselves, that give voice to their particular laments and joys, hold an oft-overlooked power. These communal words are both shaped by and spiral out to speak to global concerns.

Leaders and worshipers in differing contexts write and speak in a wide variety of ways. As such, this book is for pastoral leaders, chaplains, and other ministers who imagine, craft, and offer worship words for each Sunday—and in the diversity of everyday moments.

Interlude

Dust

I am dust; to dust I shall always return.
But don’t assume as you disturb my rest

with your omnipotent kitchen broom that
I am mere debris to be swept up and away.

Remember. We are interfused, you
and I, suspended in each other,

vestigial particles of endless galaxies,
diminishing and becoming, deposited

but for a moment amid yesterday’s dinner
crumbs and dog hair. Tomorrow?

I am cyclonic, demanding skeletal trees
to dance with me through dry valleys;

or I am breathed out by destructive
detonating demons only to settle, leaden,

on a sandal-sheathed foot severed
from the child who sat at grandma’s

table while she cooked the evening meal.
But I am also the cadence of the soil, eternity

dug up in a spade and sown with ordinary
mystery. Still, don’t assume I am magic either,

or that you are, except when in a distant
sun-soaked garden we tango with the departing

light and time’s muted colors bend onto our
backs and we carry life across ancient seas

to fertilize the future. Remember. You are
dust; to dust you shall forever return

Dust was all over the news during the 2017 Lenten season when I wrote this poem. Popular Science magazine reported that dust from Asia might be fertilizing sequoias in California.⁹ In stark contrast, another headline from the week read: “Inside Mosul, a huge blast, then screams, dust and horror.”¹⁰ Bombs flattened houses on a street in Mosul during that first week of Lent, and citizens were buried beneath the rubble.

Across the globe from Mosul, in Las Vegas a dust storm uprooted trees, stopped traffic, and interfered with visibility.¹¹ A Washington Post editorial headline used a dusty metaphor to tout a political perspective: “Another Trump Promise Bites the Dust.”¹²

The Christian season of Lent reminds human beings of their dustiness: “You are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19). The lectionary readings for the week when I wrote the poem remembered a valley of dry bones raised to life (Ezekiel 37) and Jesus’s resurrecting Lazarus (John 11).

The dusty headlines, the lectionary readings, and Lent’s themes, taken together, reminded me. Dust-birthed humanity is complex and ordinary, fragile and resilient, sometimes life-giving and sometimes life-destroying. The headlines also reminded me that we are connected across complex geographies to each other and creation.

We are dust; to dust we shall return. Until we return to the dust, God calls us to carry in our bones the light of gospel justice and hope.

9. Kendra Pierre-Louis, “Asian Dust Might Be the Secret to Keeping California’s Sequoias Alive,” Popular Science, March 28, 2017, https://www.popsci.com/asian-dust-california-sequoias/, accessed March 3, 2021.

10. John Davison and Ahmed Rasheed, “Inside Mosul, a Huge Blast, Then Screams, Dust and Horror,” Reuters, March 29, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-iraq-mosul-strike/inside-mosul-a-huge-blast-thenscreams-dust-and-horror-idUSKBN1702NR, accessed March 3, 2021.

11. Chris Perez, “Insane Dust Storm Wreaks Havoc on Las Vegas,” New York Post, March 31, 2017, https://nypost.com/2017/03/31/insane-dust-stormwreaks-havoc-on-las-vegas/, accessed March 3, 2021.

12. Paul Waldman, “Opinion: Another Trump Promise Bites the Dust,” The Washington Post, March 31, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plumline/wp/2017/03/31/another-trump-promise-bites-the-dust/, accessed March 3, 2021.

CHAPTER 5

Sing Them Over
Again to Me

. . . out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.
—Matthew 12:34b

How do worship words speak to human agonies and ecstasies without becoming so loud themselves that truth, grace, and justice get lost in the roar?

She has heard the old, old story over and over again.

She felt the rhythm of the story when her daddy cradled her in his arms on the back pew of their Lutheran church. When she was a toddler, the story inched up close to her. It sat and waited nearby for her ears to learn to translate the sounds into words with meanings.

She heard the story of God’s love for God’s people in church Sunday after Sunday. The liturgy told the story when she was a droopy-eyed toddler sleeping through a long sermon and when she was curious five year old scribbling with dark-penciled fury an indecipherable rendering of the day’s scripture.

Yes, the story was there in her church’s Lutheran liturgy. The story was present in the lighting of the altar candles and in hymn singing. It was even present in the shuffling of restless feet in the row just in front of her and her dad. Sermons, Sunday School aphorisms, and post-worship parking lot conversations voiced the story.

That is why she has heard the story countless times. Before she could speak or read, her ears absorbed the story’s sounds, tones, and pitches. She also recognizes what the story looks like. She has seen the story in the liturgists’ gestures, the choir leader’s facial expressions, and the minister’s breaking of the communion bread.

My childhood looked a lot like hers, but that didn’t keep me from being surprised when the memory took on new meaning for me because of her. The little girl in the pew in front of me that Sunday in worship had two Barbie dolls with her. Throughout worship, the girl made those dolls dance. To my annoyed ears? Those dolls sounded like a herd of horses walking up and down the pew.

So, God’s Spirit caught me off guard when, without missing a word, the girl recited the Nicene Creed in unison with the congregation.

Did she understand the words she spoke? Do any of us really understand?

A medieval Latin poet penned the lyrics to the hymn “O Sacred Head Now Wounded.” In this hymn, the poet underscores how difficult it is to find words for faith’s gifts and mysteries: “What language shall we borrow to thank you, dearest Friend, for this, your dying sorrow, your mercy without end?”

What language indeed of the thousands of languages spoken around the globe? Language is at best a “borrowed” way to tell the story of God with God’s people. Words are not our first language. As infants, we first “speak” with our eyes and faces, with gestures, with coos and cries.

Also, words are not every person’s preferred language:

Some people are most fluent in numbers, in musical sounds, in movement, or in creating visual expressions. Singing texts like “What language shall I borrow” and “O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing” ought to remind us that we are all enriched by the variety of languages God’s people use—including visual and kinetic as well as English, Urdu, or Afrikaans.¹

People communicate about God and faith using an array of expressions.

What does this mean for the writing work of the people?

Words are vital to worship, but they alone do not draw aching hearts near to God’s love. They also do not on their own express the depth of our lament or the breadth of our gratitude for God’s care.

Yes, God’s Word and human words are central to our worship. At the same time, human words are inadequate. We write liturgical words within this tension. We want to speak about God’s love and grace, even as we know God’s love and grace are beyond human understanding.

Poetry teacher Gabrielle Calvocoressi puts it this way:

How are poems able to be universal and speak to the anguish of the everyday, the joy of the everyday, the injustice of the everyday, without turning ordinary peoples’ lives into an opera that makes it so loud that we can’t even hear it anymore? This is a question of tone, this is a question of choices like repetition, and it’s also a question of are you, as a writer, willing to get out of the way of the poem a little bit and not have the poem be about you, and your ability to make sense of a situation, or draw attention to a situation, but just let that situation bloom and speak for itself.²

We can ask a similar question of our worship words. How do worship words speak to human agonies and ecstasies without becoming so loud themselves that truth, grace, and justice get lost in the roar?

The young girl in the Lutheran church comes to mind again here. She learned, almost by osmosis, her worshiping community’s rituals. Writer Anne Lamott calls such fami...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prelude: Words Made Flesh
• Interlude: wrinkling time
• Interlude: Dust
• Interlude: sacramental seasons
• Conclusion