Word and Spirit

Propers: Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 24), AD 2021 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Bible takes quite seriously the creative power of words. In Genesis 1 the Creator speaks Creation into being. “Let there be light,” He says, and there is light.

It is an act of Word and of Spirit. The Word, or Λόγος, is the reason, the rationality, the mind and plan and thoughts of God, His intention to create and to give order. And Spirit literally means the breath or life through which God speaks His Word, sends it out, manifests His will through His Word in this world.

“It’s no coincidence,” writes science-fiction author Ted Chiang, “that ‘aspiration’ means both hope and the act of breathing. When we speak, we use the breath in our lungs to give our thoughts a physical form. The sounds we make are simultaneously our intentions and our life force.” Now, I’m told that Mr Chiang is an atheist, but that’s a very Christian understanding of Word and of Spirit.

Of course, the thoughts of God, the life of God—what are these but God Himself? And so we can say of the Word and of the Spirit that they are both God and from God. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … All things came into being through Him,” through the Word, “and without Him not one thing came into being.” Sound familiar?

Like Muslims and Jews, Christians are People of the Book. Words to us are sacred. They have great power when spoken; or when printed or posted. Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase “hocus pocus.” This comes from the Latin words of the Mass: “Hoc est corpus meum,” Jesus said. “This is My Body.” And the speaking makes it so! The promise of God, the Word of God, makes it so. The bread is Jesus’ Body.

Or perhaps you’ve heard the term “abracadabra.” This is from the Aramaic, “avra kehdabra,” meaning, “I will create as I speak.” That is, the speaking makes it so. Aramaic, incidentally, was the language of Jesus and of most of the rest of first century Jewry. My point here is not to encourage magical thinking, necessarily, but to emphasize the divine power contained within the expression of thought, giving voice to our intentions, the mystic union of Word and of Spirit calling forth reality.

To create is to be like unto God; to be His stewards, His sub-creators. And the most primal form of creation is to call our words into being. Sometimes that’s done with a pen. Sometimes it’s done with a keyboard. But most often it’s done with the tongue.

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Wrong! Words build up and words break down. Words kill, and words make alive. Words call things into being, make them real, give them form, shape the world. Words are the most powerful things that we have. They take an ape and make a man.

“Not many of you should become teachers,” writes St James, the Brother of Jesus, in his epistle for us this morning, “for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.” Keep in mind that “teaching” here is the word often used for Jesus’ ministry, His teaching and preaching and healing the sick. Teachers lead the Church.

We all make mistakes, James continues, but to be truly perfect we would be able to keep our whole bodies in check, if—and only if—we could keep our tongues in check. In the same way that a mighty horse can be led by a simple bridle, or a great ship steered with a small rudder, so our whole lives are shaped and directed by the ways in which we use our tongues, by the very words we breathe into being.

“How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire,” James writes, “and the tongue is a fire!”

No-one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, it ought not be so. Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water? Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs? No more can salt water yield fresh—[than a wicked tongue proclaim the graciousness of God.]

Here it is easy to imagine that James is responding to the letters of St Paul. A man of great learning and great faith, Paul was also a man of great passions, great zeal. And when he works himself up into a lather, Paul can be downright belligerent. He does not readily suffer fools, nor quickly forgive offenses. And part of his volatility, much of it, is surely rhetorical. Like many charismatic intellectuals—Martin Luther, for instance, or David Bentley Hart—Paul’s pen has a wicked sting.

And one can see the utility of this, perhaps even the necessity. Paul shocks his hearers into a new paradigm of grace, the inbreaking of the Kingdom to our world. But charismatic intellectuals tend to have less gifted disciples, immature imitators of their master’s style with none of his substance.

Paul’s whip-crack excoriation of his opponents comes across as a defiant hope and life-giving faith when Paul is writing from prison, when he’s beaten and in chains. But later generations of Christians, in positions of power, will take to persecuting heretics and pronouncing anathemas with alarming regularity. And they look to the Epistles of St Paul to be their guide.

Curb your tongue, James writes. And this is metonymy, including your pen, your writings, your postings. Watch whatever it is that you say in however it is that you say it. Words are not ephemeral things lightly falling and drifting about. They are hammer-blows upon the surface of reality, sending out waves to the farthest shore. We don’t know what our words can do, who will hear them down the line. We don’t understand the conflagrations ignited by our little tongues of flame.

Practice self-restraint, James says, especially if you are a teacher, especially if you are in a position of authority or power. Do not underestimate the healing depths of holy silence. Do not underestimate the grace it takes to listen. And of course James is not here endorsing quietism, an impotent, sinful silence in the face of injustice or oppression. Far from it! James gets plenty worked up when the rich exploit the poor. But God is found in silence; in humility, listening, and quiet. That’s why it’s so damn hard for us to hear Him these days.

We are bombarded, every waking moment, by noise, are we not? Bombarded with entertainment, advertisement, media, communications. And in the midst of this, we are trained to think that if we’re not shouting, we won’t be heard. Because we’re always in competition, aren’t we, with other voices, other demands on people’s attention? It’s exhausting. No wonder we’re all on anxiety medications.

We have to have an opinion on everything, don’t we? God forbid we admit that we just don’t know or care enough to take a strong position on every single outrage. I want to pull out my beard in tufts whenever some YouTuber shouts at a camera for 20 minutes at a stretch, mesmerizing my children and hawking them wares.

(Sigh.)

Take a breath. Take a moment. Say a prayer. Listen to the still, small voice of God whispering in the quiet of your soul; in the need of your neighbor; in the love of Jesus Christ. You don’t always need to speak.  You don’t always need an opinion.

Listen. Learn. Ponder and pray. And then, when you do open your mouth, breathe in the Spirit, and shape your tongue to send forth a word, know that you are entrusted to speak the grace of God to everyone He loves: His comfort, His healing, His justice, His truth, and most of all His promise of forgiveness and new life.

You are given this responsibility, this great and holy trust, because you have His Spirit, breathed into you in your Baptism, and you have His Word, which you consume by your listening at this pulpit and partaking at this Table. Word and Spirit create the world. They sustain it, and remake it. They are nothing less for us than the Life and the Mind of God.

So use them wisely, little tongue. And should you light some fire within, make sure it burns always and only for Him.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.