Word One

 Meditation for Christmas Lessons and Carols
Thompson Memorial Chapel – Williams College

December 3-4, 2011

            In the beginning: word.

             So says the poet, anyway: the author of the Fourth Gospel – “John,” we’ll call him, though he never identifies himself in the pages he left behind.  A sage, perhaps – an intimate of Jesus, probably – something of a mystic, certainly.  But a poet, too, surely – and for that perhaps we can allow him the bias of the poet in conceiving of God as word.  Of all the gifts this writer could have offered back to the Divine, the holiest one this “John” could find to give was words – and he paid what must have seemed to him the highest possible compliment by envisioning the Eternal Mystery as Word:

 In the beginning was the Word –
            and the word was with God,
and the word was God. 

Word was in the beginning with God.

All things came into being through the Word,
and without Word not one thing came into being.

What has come into being in the Word was life,
and the life was the light of all people.

             Actually, the story we’ve been telling about the beginning of everything, going back far beyond the New Testament and into the mists of time, begins with God uttering the universe into being.  From Word one, the words “Let there be” are as much magic as is needed to create.  And when, in the Genesis story, God lays the words “it was good” on each of the emerging pieces of creation, they stick – not just on the page, but on our retinas, in the living tissue of our hearts, even on the craggy and complicated Velcro of our intellect.

 So we look at the woods, the fields, the sky, the cows, the Chesapeake Bay retrievers, the painting and sculpture, even the technology (most of it) and the pages and pages of prose and poetry, and before almost anything else – before critique, before analysis, before comparison – we can read the word “good” hovering there.  Making things is good.  And in the words we wield as we navigate through this creation – the words we speak, the words we think, the words we sing, the words we pray, the words into which we whisper what we hope – in those words, we discover that we share some small part of the Divine power to bring things into being.  We see the world as we are, each of us: as poets, perhaps; as sages – rarely; as intellectuals, God help us – or not; as struggling humans, always.  We see the world as the characters we each are in the story – and we speak back our gifts of gratitude in the likeness of what we have been given: the poet, words; the student, time; the intellectual, thoughts; the human, love.

 ~

            There are, of course, other ways of using words.  Augustus Caesar used his decree that all the world should be logged into the empire’s ledgers to try to recreate the world in his own image.  And when King Herod took that chummy tone with his three royal visitors, the “word” that he asked them to bring back to him about the whereabouts of the messianic birth was one he planned to sharpen for infanticide.  If we’ve learned anything about words, it’s that they have edges that cut both ways: if they can create, bless, hallow, recognize, they can also distort, dismember, destroy.  The words that come out of our mouths and minds – like the actions that issue from our limbs – have the real power to ruin us, if they are not the words of justice and compassion.  Even the silences that come out of us, that sometimes speak louder, have the real power to distort us beyond recognition, when they are silences rooted in our failures of courage for the telling of hard and costly truths.  To read the writing on the wall is to be sobered about the power of speech.[1]  It matters what we say.  Words are the medium of blessing and curse – the grammar of life and death.

             Part of what people came to revere about the person that the Christmas baby grew up to be was the power to create in the words he spoke to people.  “You are forgiven.”  “Come unto me.”  “Peace I leave with you.”  “Your own faith has made you well.”  “Blessed are you poor.”  “Rise and walk!”  The words he spoke may not have set planets spinning or caused the seas to swell with creatures, but they brought worlds into being nonetheless.  Jesus – the mot juste of God, the right word in the ripe moment.  He spoke blessing, and it stuck.  He forgave, and life began again.  He named the forgotten back into being, and his cries for justice and compassion echo down the corridor of centuries.

             Word became flesh (says the anonymous writer, the gospel poet) and dwelt among us.  So it goes with creation-by-word: we enflesh the truest things we know, the truest things we are.  We enact them; we speak our best selves into being over and over again – and, God help us, we dwell together among the truths we speak with as much grace as we can.

             So tonight, Word is born again – and lands, enfleshed, among us.  In word is life (says the Poet) – and the life is the light of us all.  The power of Word to create travels like light, and tonight we travel again in a moment the light-years between God’s “let there be” to Mary’s “let it be” to our own “let us be.”  Tonight, again, is the feast of embodied word.  As we warm all our words at the glow of its sounds, its colors, its light, comes another opportunity for the hallowing of speech.   Word one, all over again: a new creation.

 So let there be words among us – let them be true, let them be graceful.  Let our words be for creating life – not ever for distorting it, or for the dismembering of the body that we are, together.   Let us seek for the words to change the shape of the world – because words can do that.  We know that now.  Let the words we speak be for new creation: words like “I promise…” or “I will be there” or  “Don’t be afraid…” or “I forgive you…” or “I wonder…”   And let our words tell the hardest truths we ever have to tell when they need to – words like: “This must change” or “I am responsible” or “This is unjust” or “I was mistaken” or “Something is wrong here…”

            For tonight, again, the writing is on the wall for all to read.  Word one.  It says, indelibly, you are a beloved child of God.  It speaks tenderly; it says, Comfort, comfort, O my people.  Staring down the empires of this world, calmly meeting the gaze of Herod, standing up to every power to distort or maim or humiliate, it speaks again.  It says, Love is stronger than death.  It says, the arc of history is bending toward justice.  It says, Let us be the people we need. 

 It says, The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. 

 It says, The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand for ever.

             Alleluia!  Amen.

The Rev. Dr. Richard E. Spalding
Chaplain,Williams College
Williamstown, Massachusetts

Christmas Lessons and Carols
Thompson Memorial Chapel – Williams College

December 3-4, 2011

GREETING

Fear not!  Behold, tidings of great joy which shall be to all people!

Those are the words of angels – now dissolved in the crisp air, now breathing in the songs we sing, now already at work among us as we keep watch over this flock, this community, abiding in our fields.

Arise!  Shine!  For your light has come!

And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all people shall see it together –

            For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

And tonight, if we seek words of our own – words to steer us to the holy place and words to utter there, in gratitude or in wonderment or in perplexity –

Then in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, in the smallest silences between all the words, God will speak again, and bring worlds into being, and make of us a new creation.

So let us draw near – to listen to the words of the story and to the Word speaking, singing, sighing from deep within the story –

And let us begin by speaking prayerfully together, with one voice –

BENEDICTION

So does the Word become flesh and dwell among us, even still.
So does the Word go before us.
So does the Word move among us.

 Let us follow in its light,
and let us live its grace,
and let us embody its truth.

 Let every heart prepare a place,
And may the word of God dwell there,
Abundantly, continually –

 Until that day comes at last
When no one need fear,
When all power to distort or destroy is laid aside,
When peace and good are earth’s common language,

 When the din of war and the cries of injustice cease
And the voice of the world and the voice of angels are as one.