Liturgy for a House Raising
MORNING
LEADER: The carpenter stretches a line; he marks it out with a pencil. He shapes it with planes and marks it with a compass. Isaiah 44:13
ALL: Every house is built by someone,
LEADER: but the builder of all things is God! Hebrews 3:4
ALL: He made the earth by his power, he established the world by his wisdom, and by his understanding stretched out the heavens. Jeremiah 10:12
COLLECT
Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day. You are the God who sends the rain to satiate creation and the sunshine to warm it. We thank you for the work before us today, and we pray that you would strengthen our hands and our backs for it. Protect us from harm, divert us from error, and deliver us from sin. We thank you for those who have helped us restore this home, especially Nevan, and John, and Will. We pray that this day would be a blessing to all who are joining us, and that Jesus Christ would be honored in us today.
ALL: O LORD, we pray, give us success! Psalm 118:25
LEADER: Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
and establish the work of our hands upon us;
ALL: yes, establish the work of our hands! Psalm 90:17
DOXOLOGY
Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
Praise him, all creatures here below.
Praise him above, ye heav’nly hosts.
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.
Saturday, June 3rd, 2023 is a day I will never forget. After seven years of preparation and intensive labor, my wife and I and our three sons brought back to life an old New England house with two centuries of stories to tell. On that fateful day, with the help of 20 adventurous friends, we hoisted the axe-hewn timbers into the air and joined them together with mortise-and-tenon joints and 1"-diameter wooden pins. As the work progressed throughout the day – beam after beam, wall after wall, rafter after rafter – the form of our home began to take shape.
This momentous event consummated years of discussion about how we’d aim to raise our kids – rurally, homeschooled, making ample room for a “hands-on” and “minds-on” life integration. We wanted our little ones to grow up building our family home from the ground up. We wanted them to taste for themselves the satisfaction of working with their own hands. Our oldest two watched us spend months carefully document, label, disassemble, and transport an entire 1821 house 20 miles back to our property. Years later, they helped us chop mortises in the new sill timbers. They observed us make conscientious repairs on 200-year-old posts. They heard our friendly worksite banter. They felt our moments of stress and shared in our moments of exhilaration. And we can finally say that we’ve raised our house with our own hands.
There are easier ways to build a house, of course, but the richness of these connections and the infinite opportunities for our family to learn and grow together were too good to pass up. As a woodworker, I’ve learned lessons I never would have otherwise. My wife and sons too have gotten a lot more comfortable wielding edge tools and learning to shape their corner of the world. We’ve even brought in a few friends along the way – people who already had experience with some of the more complex repairs we were facing. Bringing others in to share in our family’s journey added yet another layer of memories and significance for us.
And although it would have been a simple matter to book a small crane to stand the whole thing back up, we have learned over the years that something this significant is best done by community participation. My wife and I decided to invite a handful of friends and family to spend a day bringing this place back to life. We spent several hours hauling, heaving, and hoisting together. There was home-cooked food and coffee in the midst of overcast and biting weather. After so many months of manhandling those big timbers at the repair stage, I could not believe how easy the work was with that many hands involved. Someone should write a proverb about that or something.
MEMBERS FITLY JOINED
Seeing it all finally standing, I was struck at how the frame itself embodies this principle of communal coordination. The integrity of the overall structure is only as good as the soundness of the individual members and the solidity of their bonds. Each timber must unite to the others with joinery (mortise-and-tenon joinery being the most common) that is stout and without gaps. Tight joints are vital for durability, but shaping them accurately is complicated by the irregularities of the hand-hewn timber processing. Rather than run whole trees through an industrial-scale sawmill, the craftsman snapped a chalk-infused string down the length of the tree and hewed the waste material away with his axe. This handwrought process, completed on all four faces, yielded a framing member that looks perfectly straight and square only to the untrained eye. In reality, the undulating surfaces and inconsistent dimensions of these beams would be a nightmare to a modern carpenter who depends on the consistency of his lumber for accuracy. So, how does one make two irregular pieces fit together resolutely and without gaps? There is only one way: where they meet, each timber must be traced and cut (a process called “scribing”) to match the irregularities of the mating member.
Without getting into the weeds of pre-industrial timber-framing methodology, a brief overview of the process will allow me to elucidate a few lessons that I believe are ripe for the picking.
Because the carpenter cannot rely on each timber being industrially flat or straight, he must find a true reference outside of the members themselves (i.e., plumb/level). Gravity is the carpenter’s constant. Whether he stands in Australia, Namibia, or Midcoast Maine, the plumb bob always points to the center of the earth. This means, if the timbers are leveled, that the hanging of a plumb bob gives a perfectly perpendicular axis. Now we have a constant we can work fro
To figure out where to mark the joinery locations, the hewn timbers are stacked on top of one another level in the orientation they will join, then the plumbline is used to mark the intersections of the joinery. If a timber’s surface is not perfectly plumb (they rarely are), then the mating part of the neighboring timber must be cut with a corresponding mirror-image “out-of-plumbness.” Despite the fact that the joints look askew when disassembled, they must be formed this way in order to compensate for their neighbors’ irregularities when joined together. When this careful scribing and custom fitting is done at each individual joint in the structure (with the plumbline as the constant “truth” reference), the whole will be able to rise plumb and strong at the final day.
Ruminating on the ins and outs of this process, I’ve found correspondences of this construction approach to the way that the Lord builds his church (Eph 4:16). Jesus Christ delights in building his house from crooked sticks. In his wisdom, he joins member to member, not by running them through the mechanization of homogeneity, but through scribing and carefully fitting each member into the context of a particular place in the whole. No member is interchangeable. Christ ensures that our irregularities are compensated for by the brothers and sisters to which we are joined Lord’s Day by Lord’s Day, and his shaping and sanctifying work in us is designed to address and support the irregularities in them. When we can begin to see our personal sanctification fitting into a broader, communal formation, we will recognize the Spirit’s work of endurance and integrity. There is a unity-in-diversity in all that the Triune God has made: his cosmos, his world, and his church. We are the body of Christ and individually members of it (1 Cor 12:27). We are hewn, irregular, and no doubt a bit distorted, but it is the glory of the Lord to fit us together in the context of a local assembly made up of other “peculiar”¹ people such as ourselves.
The day our family raised our home standing side-by-side with friends and loved ones, we got a small taste of heaven. Oliver O’Donovan has reminded us, “Community alone can tell us of the universal order yet to arrive.”² There is communion in a fellowship of good work. And in the context of this communion, there is freedom. Joined to one another, we can truly be who we were made to be and who we will one day become more fully. We are – and ever will be – socially embedded creatures.
This form of intentionally participatory work is something that the efficiency of industrial pragmatism does not understand. It has no room for children, or novices, or amateurs. It only has room for the experts and their machinery. But we are building a home, and home is a place of belonging – of communion, and fellowship, and rest. And there is no place I’d rather live than one that has been carefully repaired and raised alongside the people I love and admire. The day was a glorious success, and we couldn’t have been more pleased with the way things turned out.
EVENING
PRAYER
O LORD, there is no god like you, keeping covenant and showing steadfast love to your people. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we thank you for the success we have seen today. You are the builder of all things, and like a master workman, you rejoice in the inhabited world you have made. You love the world, because you are good, and you do good. We thank you for all those here who have joined together to help us see this house stand again. We pray that you would bless their households with peace. May we all grow in gratitude to you, the Giver of all good things. Let our hearts be filled with joy tonight as we celebrate your goodness and mercy to us. We pray these things in Jesus’ name.
ALL: AMEN!
1 Kings 8:23, Hebrews 3:4, John 3:16, Psalm 119:68, Proverbs 8:30-31
LEADER: Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the work with which one labors under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him,
ALL: for this is his lot.
LEADER: Everyone also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and ability to enjoy them, and to accept his lot and rejoice in his work—
ALL: this is the gift of God!
Ecclesiastes 5:18–19
DOXOLOGY
Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
Praise him, all creatures here below.
Praise him above, ye heav’nly hosts.
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.
LEADER: If the iron is blunt, and one does not sharpen the edge, he must use more strength,
ALL: but wisdom helps one to succeed. Ecclesiastes 10:10
LEADER: Wisdom has built her house; she has hewn her seven pillars.
ALL: She has slaughtered her beasts; she has mixed her wine; she has also set her table. Proverbs 9:1–6
A BLESSING FOR OUR FRIENDS
May your grain always run straight,
and your edges remain sharp.
May your pins ever draw tight,
and your walls always stand plumb.
May your home be a sanctuary and a place of love,
and your table overflow with good things. AMEN!
After dinner, we sang together a song I wrote for the occasion, the words of which were adapted from John Grigg’s 1829 “The Raising” found in Grigg’s Southern and Western Songster. The words are set to the tune of “Dives and Lazarus,” a traditional folk melody.
“A Sedgwick Raising”
Come muster, my lads, your mechanical tools,
Your saws and your axes, your hammers and rules.
Bring your mallets and planes, your levels and lines,
And plenty of pins of American pine:
For the roof we will raise, and our song shall be,
A community firm makes a people free.
The posts are our friends, upright they stand,
Supporting the braces, the bonds of the land;
The bonds of the land which make us at home,
And strengthen our bonds with the friends our own:
For our roof we will raise, and our song shall be,
A community’s made of a people that’s free.
Come, up with the ties, lay them firm on the wall,
Like our neighbors around, they connect one to all;
Examine them well to be sure that they’re sound,
Let no rotten parts in our building be found;
For our roof we will raise, and our song shall be,
Our community firm for a people free.
Now hand up the plates, lay each in his place,
Between ties they will rest and divide up the space;
Like a true friend, these should lie level along,
Our plates will prove stout, and loyal, and strong:
For our roof we will raise, and our song shall be,
A community firm made of people free.
The joints should be tight without any spaces –
Drive the pins home to keep all in their places;
Let wisdom and strength in the fabric combine,
And your pins be all made of American pine:
For the roof we will raise, and our song shall be,
A community firm full of people free.
Lo! up with the ridges – each overhangs!
How noble they rise! Their span so great!
From beginning to end, o’er the whole they extend,
And watch o’er the walls, while the walls they defend!
For our roof we will raise, and our song shall be,
Combined in strength makes a people free.
Now enter the rafters, and drive pins thro’,
And see that your joints draw tight and true;
The rafters will hold the roof all together,
The strength of the whole shall defy wind and weather.
For our roof we will raise, and our song shall be,
United in heart as a people free.
Come, pin up the bush, our glory and pride:
At the peak it should stand, o’er the whole to preside;
Our kith and our kin shall view with delight
The timbers and joints in their towering height:
Our roof is now raised, and our song shall be,
The work of the hands makes a people free.
Huzza! brave boys, our work is complete,
The world should admire its integrity:
Its strength against tempest and time shall be proof,
And make good memories under our Roof.
While we drain our cups, our toast shall be,
Our community firm makes a people free!
Notes:
I mean this, of course, primarily in the sense of particularity, although anyone who’s been around the church for any length of time knows that Christians are not exempt from justifiable accusations of eccentricity. Present company excepted, of course.
Oliver O’Donovan, Entering into Rest (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2017), 5.