Dear Friends,
This past weekend, the family group chat was chiming non-stop. My mother-in-law was on her way to Burundi, texting us updates as she transferred through Belgium, and our households across New England responded with our own odds and ends. They were ordinary messages – and they also weren’t.
To anyone expecting an ordinary exchange of travel updates, the fact is that these texts would have appeared nearly impenetrable. I married into a family that loves language – and playing with language – as much as I do. Every syllable holds the potential to become a game, a pun, a bit of humor. It can be a cognitive challenge (Brussels is Brew cell, there were bilingual verb games, and even some puzzling emojis), but a delightful one.
Playing word games with my in-laws is a fun piece of that relationship, but really every day is a linguistic adventure, shifting between home language and work language, grown-up language and kid language, and a dozen other tones and vocabularies. I think many people are aware of this – the idea of code switching is mainstream enough that NPR has a podcast by that name – but some of us are more aware of the shifts than others.
Members of the global majority working in white dominated contexts have spoken about code switching as a means of survival, but there are dozens of versions of this practice. We shift between church language and secular language, between language that is meant for strangers and acquaintances and those that are close to us. Those of us in the disability community often have language that we use to interface with medical professionals to ensure that we’re treated as “good patients” or to keep ourselves safe. We translate and reshape and only sometimes stop to think about how and why this works.
(The podcast “And Also With You” from the Revs. Lizzie McManus-Dail & Laura Di Panfilo spends a lot of time exploring how and why we use the language we do and the disorienttation that can come with our “in-group” language and practices.)
Preach The Gospel At All Times…
Whether or not you ascribe the famed quote, “Preach the Gospel at all times; when necessary, use words” to St. Francis of Assissi or not, evangelism is a core tenant of most Christian denominations. I was, however, struck in reading this Sunday’s assigned Epistle from 1 Corinthians, by how Paul describes his life as an Apostle.
Certainly I’ve read this passage from 1 Corinthians 9 before in my life, and Paul absolutely says similar things in other places, but here, as he describes the ways he has reshaped himself based on who he is trying to preach the Gospel to, I was brought back to this idea of code switching.
For though I am free with respect to all, I have made myself a slave to all, so that I might win more of them. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though I myself am not under the law) so that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (though I am not free from God's law but am under Christ's law) so that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, so that I may share in its blessings.
Setting aside that none of us can actually be all things to all people, I wonder where you find yourself exploring the boundaries and practices of our language in the name of communicating more clearly? I certainly noticed moments of this in myself this past Sunday as I sat with my Godly Play circle.
Ehhhh- PIFF! - ahhneee!
It was a Parable lesson this past Sunday in Godly Play, and I was mentally prepared for my older kids to tell me just how many times they’ve heard the Parable introduction and can we just get on with it. Instead, absent my most regular characters, I sat down with a small circle of younger children with just a few Godly Play lessons in their collective pasts. Oh, what a different place to be – but also, oh, let us prepare for this special place and it’s special language. It made it a good time to play a little with the special words -
Epiphany
Parable
What can we do with these words? How do we play with their sounds and meanings? How do we make these words a door for children to enter rather than barriers to the piece of the story that comes next?
What doors are we creating? What languages do we speak in our ministries?
Wordplay is one of those doors. It changes language, makes it lighter and more malleable. And it reveals news sides and facets.
Playing With Prayer
As I think about language and play, I am obviously brought around to one of my favorite things: MadLibs! And oh, the games we can play with MadLibs and prayer and liturgy and theology. Anything can be a MadLib if you’re willing to be a little irreverent in the name of exploration.
MadLibs work well with the upper elementary set and above, but can be a useful teaching object with both youth and adults – and their are a few reasons they work well.
First, when you replace complicated church-y language, it feels safer to explore everything else around it, and creates curiosity around the original content. If we wonder what it looks like for Jesus to ascend to the the 7-11 vs heaven (what did he buy?), it releases the tension around questions like “what is heaven like?”
Play also creates low stakes familiarity. For those of us who are deeply immersed in formal church language, there’s a lot of rhythm to it. Repetition and cadence help us learn these texts. You can learn a lot of that even when some of the words have been swapped around.
MadLibs aren’t a code switching mechanism – or maybe they are. If saying we’re open to playing with serious texts reaches someone (ahem, teens) who otherwise might check out, if it helps us say this matters, but we don’t have to treat it like porcelain to respect it, why not invite that play? Open the door. Jumble the Lord’s Prayer. We’re not using it to worship – we’re using it to preach the Gospel in the silliest possible words.
As we prepare for Lent, as we all become our most focused and serious selves because it feels like we have to, let us stay open to play. Being silly won’t break church, but it might break the ice.
Peace,
Bird