Today’s post is by Deacon Mitzi J. Budde, Head Librarian and Professor at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia.

Imagine yourself suddenly, unexpectedly arrested and put in jail. You find yourself locked in a cell, perhaps with multiple strangers or perhaps all alone, staring at cracks in the concrete block, wondering what has just happened and what’s going to happen next. Whether you broke a law or whether it was all just a terrible mistake doesn’t really matter at this particular moment. You are at a crisis point in your life, and your family is probably in crisis as well.

Whether actually incarcerated or just imprisoned by life’s circumstances, we all find ourselves trapped in a desperate situation at one time or another, pinned in by the unforeseen and unavoidable. This is the stuff of nightmares, the dark night of the soul. These are the very moments in life when we want most desperately to pray, yet words often fail us precisely at these times of deepest need.

The church wants to stand beside you and to pray with you and for you in that dark night, whatever it may be. Hear My Voice: A Prison Prayer Book (available here) has been written for anyone who is incarcerated or imprisoned in any form. It is a resource for reflection, Bible study, and prayer. The primary focus is on those in jails, prisons, detention centers, and half-way houses, those facing arrest and sentencing, those serving time. The book is also intended to offer prayer support for families and friends of those who are incarcerated. And the book could be a prayer guide for each of us, to help us draw from the deep well of Scripture, song, meditations, prayers, and witness of the church in our times of trial.

Hear My Voice was developed in collaboration between the ELCA and Augsburg Fortress, and it will be officially launched at the Churchwide Assembly in Milwaukee this August. It was developed as part of the implementing resolutions of the ELCA Social Statement, The Church and Criminal Justice: Hearing the Cries. The team of writers includes currently and formerly incarcerated persons and those involved in various prison and re-entry ministries. The images that accompany this blog are original artwork for the book by artist Robyn Sand Anderson.

As the church we are called to accompany those in prison and their families. Jesus says that whenever we visit someone in prison, we’re visiting Jesus himself (Matthew 25:40). Local congregations may want to purchase the prayer book and get it into the hands of prisoners, either directly or via prison chaplains. We hope this book will help to connect those inside prison with those outside, and those outside with those inside, to offer words of grace, hope, forgiveness, and new life, in Jesus’ name. As we witness together: God can make all things new.

Today’s post is by Jennifer Shimota Krushas, Pastor at Emmanuel Lutheran Church in High Point, North Carolina.

During the Sunday school hour each Easter morning, our “kids” (tiny toddlers to young adults home from college) gather in the prayer chapel to bring the pulpit Bible and paschal candle back to their rightful places in the chancel area of our worship space. They had both been moved to the prayer chapel on Good Friday evening, lying there, entombed in that small room, until Easter morning when we gather there to tell the story of Jesus’ resurrection. We light the candle and one young acolyte leads our procession while a young Bible bearer carries the pulpit Bible.

Our shouts of “Alleluia!” fill the nave as we make our way to where the Bible and candle belong. I hold my breath each year as the child bearing the lit paschal candle carefully leads us. Visions of them tripping or tilting the candle seem to overcome me for those thirty incredibly long seconds. And every single year, the young acolyte is laser-focused on the task, honored to be leading the way, and nothing bad ever happens (besides my worrying distracting me from the beauty). Part of the reason nothing bad ever happens is because the bigger kids stay close, encouraging and guiding our little leader.

This year, after our procession was over, I gathered them around to talk about the three short statements we call the mystery of faith: Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. I wanted them to know why we use these words in the eucharistic prayer and to be ready to shout them when we got to that part of the prayer in worship that day.

Since it wasn’t printed in the worship booklet, I asked our kids to help me teach it during worship at our “Time with the Children.” During the singing of the Sanctus (Holy, Holy, Holy) the nine children who had held the signs while we had taught it came silently to stand in their places. When I said, “…we proclaim the mystery of our faith,” they held their signs high and the whole room erupted in the proclamation louder than I had ever heard it! The children stayed in their places as I finished the eucharistic prayer and we all prayed the Lord’s Prayer. Then, they returned to their seats and I invited the assembly to the table.

I worried because the Easter eucharist is the highest height of our holiest day of the church year. I didn’t want it to come across as though we were play-acting or being silly in the midst of the Eucharist. As it turned out, the Spirit was blowing and raised our voices to proclaim the mystery of our faith with a unity and beauty that out-shined our usual practice.

Today’s post is by Linda Witte Henke, an artist specializing in liturgically purposed art for congregation, synod, and churchwide settings (See three new collections of print-on-demand banner fabrics at www.lindahenke.com). This is Linda’s third post offering designs and templates for using visuals to enrich worship.

In anticipation of this post, I spent time during a recent 1,500-mile train trip ruminating on what visual might best convey the essence of the Holy Spirit’s appearance at Pentecost.

I recalled some of the biblical stories about fire and how those might inform our appreciation of the Holy Spirit’s appearance at Pentecost in fire and flame—Moses’ encounter with God in the fiery bush (Exodus 3), God’s guiding presence made known to the Hebrew people in the pillars of cloud and fire (Exodus 13), the voice of God coming out of the fire (Deuteronomy 5), Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego miraculously surviving the furnace of blazing fire (Daniel 1-3), and John the Baptizer’s warnings about the unquenchable fire (Matthew 3).

I also pondered human experiences of fire, both in ancient days and in our own. I reflected on how the Holy Spirit provides light for God’s people, generates warmth among God’s people, refines the visions and ministries of God’s people, and, yes, sometimes consumes or leaves a path of destruction among God’s people.

At some point, I was prompted to ask: In the Prayer of the Day for Pentecost, when we implore God to “by your Holy Spirit, kindle in us the fire of your love, empowering our lives for service and our tongues for praise,” for what are we praying? I suspect that, in many cases, we are praying that God’s Spirit would support and sustain whatever visions and ministries have already been conceived and put into place within our faith communities.

But what if we lifted our prayers with hearts wide open to receiving the fire of God’s Holy Spirit in whatever powerfully expressive ways the Spirit chooses to be made known?

• Fire that illuminates paths in bold new directions
• Fire that so warms our insular faith communities that we are compelled to convey God’s love and care to those beyond our doors and our neighborhoods
• Fire that inflames our hearts, unleashes our imaginations, and sends us out to love and serve in ways that stretch our boundaries and challenge our comfort zones
• Fire that opens our eyes to the possibility that some cherished programs, long-held practices, entrenched attitudes, and/or life-limiting perspectives may need to die in order for the Spirit to bring to life the “new thing” that God longs to cultivate within and among us

Here are some possibilities for using the fire visual as kindling for the Holy Spirit’s presence in your Day of Pentecost observances: (See the DropBox link below to access the underlined images)

• Facilitate a gathering of staff members and key ministry leaders. Distribute 8-inch by 10-inch prints of the visual. Pray together the Prayer of the Day for Pentecost (ELW 36, Year C). Invite reflection around how the visual speaks to each person’s understanding of the Holy Spirit’s work within and beyond your faith community.  Where might the Holy Spirit be encouraging us to embrace new perspectives or explore new directions? Where might the Holy Spirit be counseling us to let go of programs or initiatives that have outlived their effectiveness?
• Create a three-sided, free-standing, three-dimensional sculpture out of fabric printed with the visual and custom-sized to your worship context. Install the sculpture in a place central to the assembly. Explore safe ways to introduce a light source (battery-powered light, rope lights, etc.) to illuminate the sculpture. Or, if your space is conducive and you have local engineering expertise, create your sculpture to hang over the assembly as a mobile that responds to the air currents.
• Create multiple long, “skinny” banners from fabrics or paper printed with the visual and custom-sized to your space. Display the banners so that they surround the assembly.
• Customize for your use the projected graphic for worship. Explore the feasibility of using the visual as the background for all projection slides on this date.
• Adapt one of the two bulletin-cover formats for your congregation’s use.
• Adapt the social media visual for use in inviting broad participation in Pentecost worship.
• Adapt the post card design for use in inviting broad participation in Pentecost worship. If the effort and/or cost of mailing postcards is prohibitive, invite members to use the printed postcards to personally invite neighbors, friends, classmates, co-workers, or extended family members to worship with them on Pentecost. Encourage members to share the social media visual on their Facebook pages or post it to appropriate community Facebook pages. Or consider doing all of the above.

We are mindful that we celebrate the Day of Pentecost 2019 in the aftermath of fire’s devastation – at Notre Dame Cathedral, in historic Louisiana churches, and through wildfires that have consumed millions of acres and thousands of residences. We are freshly aware that fire is fraught with danger.

So it is with the fire of the Holy Spirit. Acts 2 is a dangerous text to read and to hear. “Come, Oh Holy Spirit, Come,” is a dangerous hymn to sing. “By your Holy Spirit, kindle in us the fire of your love,” is a dangerous prayer to pray.  God wills that we submit ourselves to be shaped, formed, reformed, transformed, and empowered by the Holy Spirit in order that the fire of God’s love may be made known.

May the Day of Pentecost 2019 open our hearts to God’s Holy Spirit unleashed in our worship and in our lives!

DropBox direct link:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/33jdq8xwv173wj5/AABIEMuyAZNhmZYZvK4wv7_Ta?dl=0

Today’s post is by Virginia Cover, Senior Pastor at Grace Lutheran Church in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania.

Have you ever noticed that attendance of families with young children tends to be sparse on Good Friday? As a pastor, I have certainly noticed this, especially in our congregation where these same families readily attend worship. I have a few guesses for this absence. For starters, the Three Days has only recently been recovered and has not been talked about frequently where I serve. But there was more. I asked a few young parents why they stayed away from Good Friday in particular. They told me about services with loud crashing sounds, extended periods of silence (at 7:30p.m. with an over-tired child), and detailed and gory depictions of the crucifixion. One of them told me how they tried to read the story of Jesus’ death from the children’s bible to their young son and he wouldn’t let Dad finish. He physically retreated from the book—the book he normally longs to read from. No parent wants nightmare-central on Easter weekend, and no worshipping community avoids confronting death either. What to do?

As a parent of two young children myself, I began to consider a Good Friday service especially for kids. Another congregation in town was doing a “footsteps of Jesus” kid-friendly event on Good Friday, so why couldn’t we? But the more I planned a Good Friday for kids, the more I rediscovered that nothing is as powerful as the church’s own ancient way of enacting the Three Days: washing feet, eating the meal, stripping the altar, adoring the cross, praying for others, lighting a fire, inscribing a candle, sprinkling water, singing psalms, reading from scripture.

There’s power in the Three Days when we hold them together. Children cannot hold the empty tomb in their minds while singing “how pale thou art in anguish/in sore abuse and scorn” in complete darkness. The adults weren’t holding it together either because the Three Days were so new, and they didn’t yet realize that missing one service meant leaving a hole in the story fabric.

We now have a service every year on Good Friday designed especially for children, yet it involves adults, too, and holds the Three Days together. We lay out a “highway” story map with items representing the high points of the church’s liturgy around the Three Days, telling the biblical story and the liturgical story together as we place each piece on the roadway. Then we spend some time floating through stations that go deeper into each day’s elements: a play dough mat connects the Last Supper to other special meals, a Good Friday sad touch and feel table (nails, rough hewn cross, crown of thorns) with a reflection sheet and coloring page of the Inside Out(Pixar, 2015) character Sad, an art project that when finished reveals a surprise (like the women discovered when they came to the tomb), and so on. One station is dedicated to putting the story in sequence to take home and tell again, either in the form of “story eggs” or watercolor paintings. We close with a taste of Easter in song, scripture and food—we eat “resurrection rolls” put together earlier at one of the stations—a sweet, Alleluia ending to our Three Day exploration. You can read more about the service here.

What I have loved the most about this experience is how the children teach us the important things. To date, the most popular stations are not play dough or art projects but the foot washing. The children know what to do by heart: hold the heel, pour the water, wipe the feet—and they wash and are washed with eagerness and joy every year.

This Maundy Thursday our congregation will be getting out the tubs and towels for the first time together in our main sanctuary. Someone asked if I was nervous about how it would go, since we have never had foot washing in the service before. “Nope!” I replied, “Because the children know what to do. They can teach us!”

Photo above from the Spark Story Bible (Augsburg Fortress: Minneapolis, 2009), 476-477. Illustrations by Peter Grosshauser and Ed Temple

Today’s post is by Miriam Schmidt, pastor/priest of All Saints in Big Sky, a shared ministry of the Episcopal and Lutheran (ELCA) Churches in Big Sky, Montana. 

Children know about death. More than we give them credit for. Many kids by the age of 5 or 7 have experienced at least the death of a beloved pet, or even a family member or friend. They know what it is like one day to be able to burrow their face in a cat’s fur, hold their grandfather’s hand, hear the voice of an auntie calling their name, smell the vanilla scent of Nana; then the next day, to feel the sudden wretched absence that comes with death. There is no longer any way to touch or smell or hear or see the physical body of the one who has died.

Children know about death, the aching hole it leaves behind; and if they do not know about it yet, they will soon enough.

So it is important for us, as adults, to find ways to include our children in Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday is a gift of the church to us all. The day’s simple and stark ritual of ashes speaks honestly of death. We take dirt, ashes of palms, and press them onto each other’s foreheads. We say the old words: Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

This act might be straight-up depressing, did we not mark the ashes in the shape of a cross. The same cross is marked on the foreheads of the newly baptized. The same cross is inscribed on every Christian forever. With Ash Wednesday’s cross of ashes, we are saying that even in the face of death, our loving God is as close as our skin. Jesus is smudged on us, rubbed into our flesh, so that when we weep with all our hearts for those who have died, we are not alone. God is this close – a cross on our foreheads. So we can live in hope that a God so close will carry us through every death, even our own.

How does your congregation do at involving children in Ash Wednesday? Many children – not to mention their parents – will benefit from some preparation. Perhaps the children can help burn last year’s palms into Ash Wednesday’s ashes after worship on Transfiguration Sunday. On the day itself, maybe children can be invited forward before the Imposition of Ashes to see and touch the ashes for themselves? Can they be allowed to mark their own cross? Or cross another child? Afterwards, on the first Sunday in Lent, can Ash Wednesday’s leftover ashes be brought out again and shown to those who forgot it even was Ash Wednesday, so they can see for themselves.

 This is what we did a few days ago: We traced ashes on foreheads in the shape of the cross. God is as close as the skin on our foreheads. Even in the face of death.

Today’s post is by Linda Witte Henke, an artist specializing in liturgically purposed art for congregation, synod, and churchwide settings (www.lindahenke.com). This is Linda’s second quarterly post providing suggestions and templates for use of visuals to enhance worship.

A mystery of the Revised Common Lectionary is how the texts speak in fresh ways with each repetition of the cycle.  The Year C texts for Lent once again touched my heart and sparked my imagination.  I was especially inspired by how the prayers of the day in Evangelical Lutheran Worship speak eloquently in pointing to the very heart of the gospel and engaging our reflection on the gospel’s significance for our life/faith journeys:

• Lent I – Sunday, March 10-  Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness [Luke 4:1-13]

O Lord God, you led your people through the wilderness and brought them to the promised land. Guide us now, so that, following your Son, we may walk safely through the wilderness of this world toward the life you alone can give, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.  Amen.

• Lent II – Sunday, March 17 – Jesus longs to gather his brood [Luke 13:31-35]

God of the covenant, in the mystery of the cross you promise everlasting life to the world. Gather all peoples into your arms, and shelter us with your mercy, that we may rejoice in the life we share in your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.  Amen.

• Lent III – Sunday, March 24 –  Parable of the unproductive fig tree [Luke 13:1-9]

Eternal God, your kingdom has broken into our troubled world through the life, death, and resurrection of your Son. Help us to hear your word and obey it, and bring your saving love to fruition in our lives, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.  Amen.

• Lent IV – Sunday March 31-  Parable of the prodigal father [Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32]

God of compassion, you welcome the wayward, and you embrace us all with your mercy. By our baptism clothe us with garments of your grace, and feed us at the table of your love, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.  Amen.

• Lent V – Sunday, April 7-  A woman anoints Jesus [John 12:1-8]

Creator God, you prepare a new way in the wilderness, and your grace waters our desert. Open our hearts to be transformed by the new thing you are doing, that our lives may proclaim the extravagance of your love given to all through your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.  Amen.

These pairings of gospel texts and prayers of the day inspired creation of the visuals I offer for your consideration in planning Lenten worship.  This overview introduces the theme, visuals, and possible applications (to view, select “Open with -> MS Power Point Online,” then select “View -> from the beginning”).  As you begin to envision possibilities for your ministry setting, explore these specific resources:

• Full-color graphics suited for use on bulletin covers, as projected worship images, for incorporation in print and/or electronic communications, for developing printed fabric-or-paper banners, etc.
• Simple line drawings for use as coloring pages to engage children with each week’s gospel or as enlarged as posters used for an intergenerational coloring project that could provide Children’s Message illustrations or be mounted and displayed in worship.
• Sample worship bulletin covers incorporating the visuals in two standard bulletin sizes.
• Sample worship projection graphics linking the visuals with the prayers of the day.
• Sample postcard design to encourage participation in Lenten worship by those within and beyond the congregation.
• Sample electronic design to promote Lenten worship on your website and/or social media platforms and to provide members with a tool for inviting family and friends to participate with them in Lenten worship.
• Suggested reflection prompts on the links between the gospel texts and the Prayers of the Day.

I often use my home congregation to field test my work. They were inspired to use the “Prayers for the Journey” theme for both Sunday worship and mid-week services. On Sundays, we’ll use the visuals and prayers of the day to focus on the gospel texts; for midweek worship, we’ll use the “journey prayer” (ELW p. 317) as a lens for deeper exploration of how our personal journeys intersect with Jesus’ journey to the cross.  May your congregation’s worship planning be similarly inspired!