--Rudyard Kipling.
I use that quote as a signature line that automatically prints at the bottom of my campus e-mail messages. I figure it is one more reinforcement for students of my role in their life at this time, which is to mark up their papers with copious amounts of red ink, to chastise them for choosing weak words, ungrammatical words, imprecise words, words that obfuscate rather than clarify… in the papers they write.
So important are words to humankind that a quick Google-search of the Internet will yield hundreds of “quotes about words.” Here are a few:
One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter.
--James Earle Jones
The two most misused words in the entire English vocabulary are love and friendship.
--Larry Flynt, publisher of sex magazines, who probably contributed to their misuse
One great use of words is to hide our thoughts.
--Voltaire, who surely had politicians in mind when he said it.
Even more famously, Voltaire also said: I do not agree with a word that you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. That one, it seems to me, is on the endangered quotes list in today’s political climate of gross exaggeration and shrill accusation.
And finally, the Chinese proverb, A bad word whispered will echo a hundred miles. Who among us has never spoken that “bad word” we desperately wish we could take back?
Turning to our Old Testament lesson for today, we find Holy Scripture not only affirming the importance of words, but also telling us very clearly that sometimes our words come from God.
The prophet Jeremiah (1:4-10, NRSV) seems to have experienced in some physical way the Lord putting words in his mouth. How incredible! It is hard for me to imagine being able to speak at all… after experiencing so directly the touch of God.
What a powerful story for Christians called to testify to the Good News of Jesus the Christ. We often feel inexperienced and unworthy of the part. But if we take God’s words to Jeremiah seriously, that’s not an excuse. Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’; for you shall go to all to whom I send you. Who can argue with that?
In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus heals, as he often does, first by speaking the words: You are free, he says to the woman (Luke 13:10-17, NRSV). In other stories, his healing words are Your sins are forgiven and Your faith has made you whole.
The letter to the Hebrews often challenges me with the complexity of its words and phrases, and I can’t begin to unpack today’s entire passage. But I will draw your attention to this amazing and powerful word and sound picture of Judgment Day.
The one who is speaking, whom we should not refuse, is surely God. In times past, God spoke on earth through the prophets, and those voices shook the earth. But once again, God will speak and shake not only earth but also heaven, and shake and shake… until all that is of the earth is shaken away and what remains is only God’s kingdom, the kingdom that cannot be shaken. (Hebrews 12:18-29, NRSV)
Those of you who took the Handel’s Messiah class last year during Advent and Lent will recall that stunning passage based on a Psalm in which God’s voice is represented in words as music: shake, shake, shake sings the bass, reinforced by the agitated sound of the entire string section of the orchestra.
These lessons evoke questions that have haunted me most of my adult life:
How do we know which words that we find in our hearts and minds, on our tongues, and in our text messages, e-mail, and so forth, are from God?
How do we know they are not from one of the other powerful and constant influences on our oh-so-human ways of thinking and speaking?
How often, before we speak or write, do we even ask the question, Are these words from God? Or from my own social, cultural and political point of view?
Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann put this very concern into eloquent words. Praying at the beginning of one of his Bible study workshops, he thanks God for the joy of words given us.
But then he acknowledges that we are also subject to other influences: Our own rich imaginations, cowardice, arrogance. We are, on most days, Brueggemann prays, a hard mix of true prophet and wayward voice.
We are a literate people. Our days are filled with words: printed and spoken, in books, newspapers, magazines, online, radio and television, and on our ever-present smart phones, iPads and laptops. Witness the ease with which I located hundreds of quotes about words… from which to pick and choose the ones that served my purposes this morning.
I am especially concerned about the quality of our political discourse today. It seems that no idea or project is worthy of debate on its own terms. Rather, truth and reality must be exaggerated and distorted in order to be worthy of our support or opposition.
And so an Islamic community center that includes prayer space at 51 Park Place in Lower Manhattan becomes “the Ground Zero Mosque” if you’re against it, and if you’re for it, a mere basketball court and culinary school that nevertheless stands for the entire principle of religious freedom in the U.S.
Oh, to know with certainty when the words on our tongues are those of true prophet and not wayward voice!
Of course, Jesus does offer us help with this problem. In another passage in Luke (20:15, NRSV), he promises his disciples, I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand.
We humans are social, cultural and political beings. We cannot and should not check who we are, and the points of view each of us brings to public debate, at the door of our common and communal lives.
But we must, if we are to love God and our neighbor as ourselves, choose our words prayerfully and thoughtfully—not just when we are in church, but in all aspects of our lives. We must use our words, not to bludgeon each other or those we perceive as our enemies, but as the eloquent, precise tools of communication they are intended to be.
Dare I suggest that our words can be the outward and visible sign of that one, ultimate Word spoken by God—namely Jesus the Christ—dwelling within.
Today my prayer is, “Fewer words, Lord, but greater wisdom in discerning which are from you and how we might use them to testify to your most holy name.”
AMEN.
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