Liberating Liturgies: A Hymn for Queer Creation

I realized recently that the last blog post I wrote was in July of 2015. I guess it’s been awhile, and for good reason, since I started seminary last August, and have therefore been extremely busy. I would like to get back to work on this blog, because there is so much that I am learning and creating in my classes. Today, I want to share a hymn that I wrote for my intro to worship class this January. 

Inspiration for this hymn came from a couple of sources.

1- Queer Theology’s synchroblog a few years back exploring queer theology, especially A.W. Hooker’s post, “Queering the Image of God,” in which ze reminds us that when God creates humans “male and female” in Genesis 1:

“The ‘and’ is not a binary ‘and.’ Male and female can disclose a spectrum of varied gender identities in the same way that ‘Alpha and Omega’ discloses the whole alphabet, or how ‘from head to toe’ means the length of the whole body.”

2- N.T. Wright’s terrible exegesis of Genesis 1, where he argued that the binaries in Genesis 1 (heaven and earth, land and sea, etc) should serve as a model for gender identities and relationships in the modern world. I responded to Wright on this blog in 2014, and incorporated some of the language from that blog post into this hymn.  

Can you stand with your feet in the muddy sand on the beach, waves crashing around your feet, tide slowly rising or falling, and honestly draw a clear line between sea and dry land?

This hymn was written to be sung especially on Trinity Sunday, and can be sung to the tune of the hymn “Jesus Saves!” or “We have heard the joyful sound…” If you don’t know this hymn, the music can be found at Hymnary.org. 

“It Was Good!”

Words: Sarah Moon, 2016

Music: JESUS SAVES, William J. Kirkpatrick

Earth and heavens, land and sea,                                              

It was good!

It was good!

Muddy spaces in between,

It was good!

It was good!

Stars at night, and shade in day,

Keep us cool, and light our way,                        

Light and darkness interplay

It was good

It was good!

Verse 2:

Birds that swim and fish that fly,

It was good!

It was good!

Creatures of land, sea, and sky,                                  

It was good!   

It was good!

Male to female, head to toe,

Like the diverse flowers that grow,

People of all genders know,

We are good!

We are good!

If you want to read more Liberating Liturgies, I have collected them on this page. Some were written by me, and others by guest bloggers. If you are interested in contributing your own Liberating Liturgies, read more information at this page, and email me at moonsn11@gmail.com. If you are interested in using any of these liturgies in your church services, those written by me may be used without permission. I only ask that you make a donation to the work I do here using my PayPal account (www.PayPal.com/moonsn11). For those liturgies not written by me, please contact the author to ask permission (you may email me if you don’t know how to reach them!). 

[image 1: “Creation – Day 1,” mid-12th century. From Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN.Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial ShareAlike 3.0 License. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=46170]