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Sermon, The Rev. Joe Britton, Feb. 28

2/29/2016

III. In search of wonder

“Then Moses said, ‘I must turn aside and look at this great sight.’” (Ex. 3)

It is a truism nowadays that the art museum has become a surrogate for religious institutions. Rather than finding the sacred in overtly religious buildings such as churches, mosques, or synagogues—many people now retreat to the art museum in search of an experience of peace, of beauty, and of repose.
I was reminded of this phenomenon last weekend when I took the train up to Santa Fe to spend the day. Going into the Georgia O’Keefe museum, I was immediately aware of the museum’s implied intention to offer the visitor a kind of spiritual retreat. The gallery space is hushed, and speaks of a great reverence for the artist’s aesthetic vision: pictures are hung with a kind of iconic reverence; plaques offer biographical details to express the artist’s inspiringly creative approach to painting; and quotations posted around the walls offer a kind of sacral message for the visitor to ponder—quotations such as:

“If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for a moment.” Or, “Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing—and keeping the unknown always beyond you.”

As most of the other museum visitors seemed to do, I enjoyed myself thoroughly, and came away stimulated and with a renewed spirit. Turning aside from the normal routines of life to appreciate something of beauty had, as advertised, been a positive spiritual experience.
In today’s reading from Exodus, Moses himself turns aside from his daily routine when his eye catches something of wonder and beauty. This is the Moses who was born a Hebrew slave in Egypt; adopted as one of pharaoh’s own; sent into exile for killing a slave-driving Egyptian; and now earns his way in life as a quiet sheepherder in the land of Midian. While tending his flocks, he comes upon a strange sight indeed: a bush that is blazing with fire, yet is not consumed. Seeing such a wonder, he stops to gaze—and it is then that the voice of God speaks to him out of the fire, calling him to become the liberator of the Hebrew slaves of Egypt.
Now, perhaps it is the frame of mind into which I was put by my visit to the O’Keefe museum, but what struck me in returning to this passage today is that the call Moses receives comes to him not just out of the blue, but from a very particular experience of something wonderful. There is nothing threatening about this theophany, nothing foreboding or overpowering—but rather a wondrous sight that attracts Moses to it for its sheer beauty.
In the last two weeks, we have—as part of this preaching series on “Livin’ in these (troubled) times”—focused first on avoiding the temptation to sell ourselves short, and then in the second week on the importance of reaching beyond the cynicism of a cynical age. Today, I want to point toward a rather different type of response to these troubled times, which is to seek out and cleave to experiences of beauty, like Moses at the burning bush.
Our psalmist suggests why this might be important: invoking the image of a barren, dry desert, he compares the thirst of his soul for God to the physical thirst one feels under the hot dry sun where there is no water. One symptom of these troubled times may be that like the psalmist, our spirits become dry and cracked by the day in and day out experience of such things as the shrillness of public discourse, or the aesthetic void of having to shop in the placelessness of big box stores, or the barrage of violence in our streets and corruption in our institutions. We need something that can water our souls—and like my visit to the museum suggests, perhaps it is beauty and wonder.
Now of all people, we New Mexicans ought to be keenly aware of the important place beauty has in daily life, surrounded as we are by cultural treasures such as the traditional Spanish colonial arts; the dances, pottery, and weavings of the Indian pueblos and other tribes; and even the drama of the landscape itself. These magnificent reminders of the place that beauty has in ordinary life should encourage each of us to seek out, in our own way, encounters with beauty that draw us into closer proximity with the experience of wonder. It was Abraham Heschel who once said, “We will not perish for want of information; but only for want of appreciation.”1 How prescient he was, back in the 1960s (the “Dark Ages,” as my teenage son calls them), to perceive even before the advent of the computer and smartphone that our human spirit can simply be overcome by an unrelenting deluge of information and images—losing in the process the sense of wonder and amazement that waters our souls.
The trouble is, not only are our spirits overwhelmed by the objects and images that are constantly pressed upon us—we also seem to be hardwired with an instinct toward the negative that only reinforces the effects of this barrage. Several of us were at a retreat this weekend with the Brotherhood of St. Andrew, where we heard Fr. Richard Rohr speak. One thing he talked about is the fact that our psyche seems to be put together in such a way that negative thoughts, images and sensations are like Velcro: we are immediately attracted to them, and they stick. Think about how eagerly we gawk at accidents on the freeway, or how much we have been fascinated by the shouting and name-calling of the recent so-called presidential debates (face it—don’t you find it all rather entertaining, at some level?). Positive thoughts, images, and sensations, on the other hand, are like Teflon: they slide quickly aware from our awareness, if we make room for them at all.
Perhaps we need, in these troubled times, to cultivate a renewed desire to savor the good and the beautiful—and to turn away from the ugly and demeaning. Like our bodies need water, our souls need beauty. We need to irrigate and nurture, for example, the sense of wonder and amazement that comes from taking time just to consider that there is life, rather than nothing at all. We need to give enough attention to the present moment, to savor the sheer existence of something as simple as a bush, a tree, or a spring flower—and to see intimations therein of transcendence that beckon to us. Maybe, we even need to go to an art museum—or concert hall, or nature center, or honky-tonk … wherever you find beauty for yourself.
And then like Moses gazing at the burning bush, we need to sense that something—or someone—calls to us by name out of that sense of wonder, inviting us to become something more than we are, to be more confident and courageous, and to be more present in the present moment. Moses, having turned aside to contemplate what he saw, was called through that awareness to become nothing less than the liberator of his people. What might we each hear out of the fire of our own wonder, if when we too take time to turn aside, we truly contemplate the wonder that is before us? Amen.

© Joseph Britton, 2016

1 Abraham Heschel, Man is Not Alone (1951), 37.

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Sermon, The Rev. Joe Britton, Feb. 21

2/22/2016

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“Livin’ in these (troubled) times”

II. Beyond Cynicism
Jesus said, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
how often I have desired to gather your children.” (Luke 13)
Cynicism is defined by the dictionary as the belief that people are entirely motivated by self-interest. In that sense, we could be said to be living in a very cynical age: it is widely accepted that banks seek only maximum profits; that politicians look only for power and political advantage; that religion is used as a defense against cultural difference; and that even education is primarily about getting ahead in a material and competitive world, rather than seeking understanding and wisdom.
Last week, under the theme of “livin’ in these (troubled) times,” we talked about the anger, fear and impatience of the current political environment as temptations of the spirit that are symptomatic of these days. We pointed to the temptation that we sell ourselves short by giving in to lower aspirations and narrower visions of what life in community might be. Like Jesus tempted by the devil in the wilderness, we too are tempted to settle for too little when God calls us to lives of mercy, compassion, solidarity, and fraternity.
Today I’d like to take up a related problem, which is the prevalence of cynicism, and the gospel once again provides the context to do so. The setting is this: as Jesus gains more and more of a following by working various signs of healing among the people, the authorities grow increasingly suspicious. Jesus is warned that King Herod is threatening to have him killed, with the implication that he should avoid Jerusalem. Jesus, however, knows that his mission must inevitably take him to the capital city to confront those very powers that threaten him, and so he sets his face toward Jerusalem, knowing that it is most likely leading him toward his death.
The episode reminds me of a scene in the movie Romero, which tells the story of Oscar Romero, the martyred archbishop of El Salvador. At one point, as Romero visits the site of the murder of one of his closest colleagues in resisting the armed oppression of the poor by the Salvadoran regime, he realizes that he too is on a path toward his own murder—and yet one from which he cannot turn aside without being untrue to himself and the sense of the mission that he has been given by God. It is, he realizes, only a matter of time until he will be eliminated, and indeed he is gunned down at the altar while saying mass soon thereafter.
In either case—Jesus’ turning toward Jerusalem, or Romero’s solidarity with the poor—one might have expected that at some point they would lose heart with such a bleak future before them; that they would give in to the cynical attitude that the powers that be are, after all, selfishly motivated and will never change, especially not just by being confronted with the injustice of their actions by a single man. Both Jesus and Romero had ample reason to lapse into cynicism and abandon their struggle.
But in our gospel passage today, Jesus has something more to say that helps to explain why neither he, nor Romero, did choose to quit: his lament over the city Jerusalem. “O, Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” he says, “the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” At one level, this is a statement of blinding reality: Jerusalem is indeed a place where God’s prophets have historically been ignored at best and silenced at worst. But a lament is something more than just a statement of despairing realism: it also contains within it a measure of hope, precisely because it is so aware of the gap between what is, and what should be.
Think of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, that prophet of dark despair because of Israel’s apostasy before the Lord. “How lonely sits the city,” his book of Lamentations begins, “that was full of people! … She weeps bitterly in the night, tears on her cheeks.” Yet Jeremiah’s woeful outpouring of lamentation over the city ends with a plea that what God still holds in promise for it may be realized: “Thou, O Lord, dost reign for ever. … Restore us to thyself, O Lord, that we may be restored. Renew our days as of old!”
Lamentation, in other words, expresses both regret—and hope. It expresses the deepest despair, but it does so only in the context of holding on to the expectation that something better is still possible. It releases anguish, but offers consolation.
So Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem is likewise both of those things at once: despair and hope. Despair at the defensive motivations of power and control manifested by King Herod and his court, and yet hope in the continuing promises of God that his kingdom shall prevail in the end.
And herein lies the lesson for us: these troubled times in which we live also give us ample reason to lapse into cynicism, to read the signs of the times as indicative of a society that has become entirely motivated by greed, fear, anger, and bigotry. And while we may lament these signs, our lament must contain within it that longer and larger confidence that these forces are ultimately no match for the holiness and justice of God.
But this motivation to stay beyond cynicism is not just true at a societal level: it is also true in the life that it is ours personally to live. We must guard against letting set backs freeze our spiritual and emotional life into the unproductive stance of the cynic. A bitter breakup of a relationship, for instance, could poison our view of human relationships in general, if we allow an unrelenting sense of regret to set in. Or the loss of a job could hold us captive in a resentful bitterness. Or the sudden violent death of a loved one could stifle our sense of the still open possibilities of life.
Such cynicism, you see, is an emotional and spiritual dead-end, as no less a philosopher than Stephen Colbert has pointed out. “Cynicism,” he said recently, “masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying ‘yes’ begins things. Saying ‘yes’ is how things grow. … So for as long as you have the strength to, say ‘yes’.”
Now, I don’t know whether Colbert was aware of it or not—but his statement noticeably echoes what Paul wrote to the Corinthians, that in Christ, all of God’s promises find their “yes” (II Cor.1). Our life in Christ therefore means remaining open, hopeful, expectant—not closed, despondent, and cynical.
Think of Abram in today’s Old Testament. There he is, having been promised by God that he would be the father of a great nation, but as an old man he is still without an heir. He has every reason to become cynical—even the God who promised him great things seems to be toying with him. But God reiterates the promise, and so Abram checks his temptation to cynicism, opening himself to a renewed confidence in God. And, as the scripture says, “The Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” What God required of Abram, in other words, was to remain open to possibility, to hold onto the expectation of dreams fulfilled, to avoid the spiritual closure that would come from an all-too justifiable yet nevertheless inappropriate lapse into cynicism.
So the response to which we are called in the midst of the these cynical times is a renewal of the confidence and perseverance toward which our faith encourages us. We will be on this Godward side of life, if when we cynically feel like turning inward and shutting out the challenges which face us, we instead open ourselves toward engaging with life as it presents itself to us. We will be on the Godward side of life if when our thoughts are prone to bitterness or regret or resentment, we instead let it all go, and face life openly and expectantly.
As Crystal Gayle sings in that old country-western song that serves as the inspiration for this preaching series, “It takes all the faith that’s in you, takes your heart and it takes min, livin’ in these troubled times.” Isn’t that the call the Pope issued to the people of Mexico this past week as he faced down the death-purveying drug cartels and corrupted civic leaders—that one cannot give in to cynicism. That is true death, for it robs us of hope. Rather, Francis showed us this week how one can lament the evils of the world and yet not lapse into cynicism and vitriol; indeed, his strategy seemed to be to appeal to our highest instincts of mercy and compassion, as the counterpart to our basest emotional reactions of anger and resentment.
So beware of cynicism, both in yourself and in others. Because it knows only the language of “no,” it stifles progress; it blocks relationship; it prohibits partnership; it seeks to tear down rather than build up; it demonizes rather than valuing the other; and worst of all, cynicism robs us of hope, which is what we need most, “livin’ in these (troubled) times.” Amen.

© Joseph Britton, 2016

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Sermon, The Rev. Joe Britton, Feb. 14

2/16/2016

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“Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days
he was tempted by the devil.” (Luke 4)

Certain seasons lend themselves to dwelling for a bit longer than usual on some train of thought. Lent is one such season: for forty days, we have the opportunity to fix our attention on some problem or issue that we want to get our minds around, in order to gain a perspective that will help us to move forward with our lives. And so, I propose that for the five Sundays of Lent, we follow as a train of thought this question, How can our Christian faith give us some guidance and inspiration for living in these troubled times?
I take as inspiration for this theme an old country western song by Crystal Gayle, “Livin’ in these troubled times,” which dates from her 1982 album, “Hollywood Tennessee.” There is, you know, a great deal of wisdom in country music: think of some of those great song titles like “makin’ love don’t make it love,” or “not all the glitters is gold.” So when Crystal Gayle sings that “It takes all the faith that’s in you, take your heart and it takes mine; it takes love to be forgiven, livin’ in these troubled times,” perhaps she’s really on to something important: troubled times do indeed require faith, and there’s no better time than Lent to inquire into what the shape of that faith might be.
So, let’s begin by asking in what sense might these times in which we live be troubled? Well, you have only to pay attention to the rhetoric of the current political campaigns to have a pretty clear idea. People, we are told, are angry because of inequality and corruption. They are fearful because of perceived threats from terrorism and immigration. They are impatient because of governmental gridlock and partisan division. They are resentful of the impact that solutions to the health care crisis, climate change, and violence may have on their lives. They are defensive because of an emerging world order that raises up new centers of power and influence. All that we know only too well already.
But underneath the anger, the fear, the impatience—is there something more going on? If we could answer that question, it might help us to understand better what it means to be “livin’ in these troubled times.”
Today’s gospel asks us to spend some time thinking about the role of temptation in our lives. Jesus, you remember, is led into the wilderness to be tempted, and at the end of the forty days he is faced with three specific temptations. First, the temptation to satisfy his hunger by turning stones into bread; second, to acquire power over all the kingdoms of the earth by worshipping the devil; and finally, to demonstrate his own importance by casting himself down from the top of the temple, counting on the angels to bear him up.
The significance of these temptations is that in each case, Jesus is being asked to sell himself short in order to acquire temporary gain. The purpose of the Spirit in leading him into the wilderness in the first place was that it was where he would begin to discover his life’s mission: to preach the kingdom of God, and to bring it into being through his own obedience to God’s will. Now, as he emerges from that intense period of self-examination and discernment, the devil decides to test his resolve.
Yes, he has discovered the direction for his life’s purpose: but is he willing to wager that against his need for something to eat? And yes, he has become aware of the call to submit his life to the power of God for the sake of the world, but would he consider substituting the power of all the kingdoms of the world held in his own hands? And yes, he perceives that the orientation of his life will be as one who serves, but wouldn’t he rather demonstrate his own importance by forcing God’s hand to save him?
These are all what we might call temptations of the spirit: temptations to let one’s immediate desire for physical well-being, power and importance overtake one’s larger commitment to a life’s purpose. It was Will Rogers who said that the road to success is lined with tempting parking spaces: and isn’t that just what the devil is tempting Jesus with? Rather than taking the long road of building the kingdom of God, why not just turn into a comfortable cul-de-sac of self-indulgence.
Perhaps the lesson for us is that like Jesus’s forty days, such temptations of the spirit are also a constant presence in our own lives. At some level, we all have a vision of what we would like to accomplish in life, of the kind of person we would like to become. But then along the way, we gradually give in to the temptation to settle for something less—and I don’t just mean the tempering of youthful idealism that comes with age and experience, but the more burdensome loss of a sense of purpose and value. And perhaps that is the larger issue behind the anger and fear of the current day: we as a nation are in the midst of a collective diminishment of the visions of equality and inclusion which originally united us, having turned off that road into a cul-de-sac of defensive anger.
There’s an old story about a life-saving station that illustrates the point: perhaps you know it. The story goes like this:

On a dangerous sea coast where shipwrecks often occur, there was once a crude little life-saving station. The building was just a hut, and there was only one boat, but the few devoted members kept a constant watch over the sea and with no thought for themselves went out day and night tirelessly searching for the lost. In time, the little lifesaving station grew as new members joined. But some members of the lifesaving station grew unhappy that the building was so crude and poorly equipped. They felt that a more comfortable place should be provided as the first refuge of those saved from the sea. They replaced the emergency cots with beds and put better furniture in the enlarged building. Now, however, the lifesaving station became a popular gathering place for its members, and they decorated it beautifully and furnished it exquisitely, because they used it as sort of a club. And so, fewer members were now interested in going to sea on lifesaving missions. But a
bout this time a large ship was wrecked off the coast, and the remaining crews brought in boatloads of cold, wet, and half-drowned people, many of whom were dirty and sick. The beautiful new club was in chaos.
At the next meeting, there was a split in the club membership. Most of the members wanted to stop the club’s lifesaving activities, since they were unpleasant and a hindrance to the normal social life of the club. Some members insisted upon lifesaving as their primary purpose and pointed out that they were still called a lifesaving station. But they were finally voted down and told that if they wanted to save the lives of all the various kinds of people who were shipwrecked in those waters, they could begin their own lifesaving station further down the coast.

In these troubled times, when we as a people seem to be prone to losing sight of the founding purposes for which we stand—perhaps the response we as people of faith have to make is raise the bar by pointing once again to that longer trajectory of aspiration toward justice and equality that underlies our common life. Like the Old Testament prophets, perhaps ours has to be a voice recalling our community to its originary vision. As Pope Francis is doing this week in Mexico, perhaps we have to bear the responsibility of speaking the language of mercy, compassion, integrity, inclusion, and fraternity, when there is no one else to do so. The temptation—as we learn from today’s gospel—is to turn away, to become focused on ourselves, and to seek the reassurance of material security, power, and importance.
But as Jesus reminds us in his refusal of the devil’s temptations, God’s call is always to turn in the other direction: to turn outward to God and our neighbor, to remain true to that larger sense of our life’s purpose where the kingdom is not only imagined, but made manifest in the life we live together. Amen.

© Joseph Britton, 2016

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Ash Wednesday Sermon, The Rev. Joe Britton, Feb. 10

2/10/2016

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“Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” (Joel 2)

The season of Lent always elicits lots of jokes, especially about what we choose to give up. The priest I grew up with, for instance, was always reminding us that he didn’t want to hear anyone say in the middle of February that they were giving up watermelon for Lent. Or I heard someone say this week that their plan is to give up their New Year’s resolutions for Lent. And so it goes …
But humor is often a sign of dis-ease, isn’t it? We joke about what we don’t feel comfortable with, as a way of managing our discomfort. So what do you suppose makes us uncomfortable with Lent?
Perhaps it is simply the fact that Lent asks us to take responsibility for ourselves. To become accountable. To own who we are. And of course, at some level, none of us likes that kind of scrutiny—and so we mask our discomfort by joking about it.
But perhaps the problem is that we get the idea of Lent all wrong in the first place. The associations we most strongly have with it tend, after all, toward the negative: guilt, mortality, austerity, aridity, restraint.
Yet to my mind, these caricatures of Lent obscure what authentically lies at its heart: an invitation to go deeper into our relationship with God, and to find there layers of meaning and love that we have as yet only begun to imagine.
More than a season of denying ourselves of something we desire, perhaps Lent is really about discovering that which we most truly desire, which is to be touched by God’s love in a way that opens us to the deeper mysteries of life. That, at least, seems to be the implication of the prophet Joel’s reminder to the people of Israel, when he calls them in our Old Testament lesson to their own season of repentance: above all, he insists, God is abounding in steadfast love, slow to anger and of great kindness. So he encourages us turn to God not out of guilt, but out of longing—wanting to be caught up in our own personal encounter with that kind of love.
Perhaps, then, Lent is really about mindfulness, of becoming more truly aware of the divine reality that surrounds us at all times, but which we largely overlook in the rush and anxiety of daily life. Perhaps Lent is about seeking a peace of mind that will allow us to become aware that we are—even in this very moment—held in the loving gaze of God, a God who looks on us lovingly, longingly, and patiently, wanting only to be fully known and then to have that love returned in a reciprocal circle of wonder and delight.
Think of it this way: imagine yourself to be sitting in some very public place where there are lots of anonymous people going about their business—something like an airport departure gate, say. And then imagine what it would be like, if in the middle of all that activity among total strangers, you became aware of yourself, and everyone around you, as held in this wholly loving gaze of God?1

What difference would it make, if in that moment, you truly believed yourself subject to a gaze which saw all your surface accidents and arrangements, all your inner habits and inheritances, all your anxieties and arrogances, all your history—and yet a gaze which nevertheless loved that whole tangled bundle which makes you the self that you are, with an utterly free, utterly selfless love?
And what difference would it make in that moment, if you were to see each face around you as equally held in that same over-whelming, loving gaze? What difference would it make if you believed each person around you to be loved with the same focus, by a love which saw each person’s unique history, unique problems, unique capacities, unique gifts, and cherished them for what they are?

Such unfettered acceptance would be utterly disarming; to believe such good news, such a Gospel [of love], would be very, very [challenging].

And that, I think, is the challenge of Lent: for if you think of Lent as a time when we try to become much more aware than we otherwise are, of being held in just such a loving gaze, you might say that at root Lent is about focusing our attention, learning to see ourselves and our fellow human beings, as God sees us. Lent is therefore less about giving something up, than it is about seeing something more, and seeing it more clearly: not only that we are loved and accepted for who we are, but we are also responsible for and accountable to others, for who they are.
So Lent is no joke. It is about attentiveness—attentiveness to how God is present, in the present moment. During these forty days, then, try to take time to let yourself become aware of that loving gaze in which you, and those around you, are held—at work, at school, in a coffee shop, at the store. See it all as God sees it: worthy of being loved, worthy of your commitment, worthy even of your compassion. For in the end, Lent is about nothing less, than learning to see the world around us as it really is, caught in the unending, inexhaustible, loving gaze of God.

© Joseph Britton, 2016

1 I am indebted for this image to Mike Higton, Difficult Gospel: The Theology of Rowan Williams (SCM Press, 2004).

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Sermon, Justin Remer-Thamert, Coalition for Immigrant Justice, Feb. 7

2/8/2016

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Sermon, The Rev. Joe Britton, Jan. 31

2/1/2016

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“Ah, Lord God, truly I do not know how to speak …” (Jer. 1)

Speech is a thread that runs through all three of our lessons today. In the first reading, the young Jeremiah, summoned by God to be a prophet, resists the call saying that he is too young, and does not know how to speak. Then Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, reminds them that words without love are like a noisy gong or clanging cymbal. And finally Jesus, back in his hometown of Nazareth, observes that what a prophet has to say is seldom heard in his home town.
As we begin to move toward Lent (now only ten days away), we are today starting to pass out of that long liturgical cycle in which we have heard over and over again about the importance of the Word: the word spoken to Mary by the angel Gabriel; the word made flesh, Jesus, her son; the word spread abroad in Jesus’ preaching ministry.
And at the same time, in our nation’s political cycle, we are about to move into the voting phase of the primary season. Leading up to tomorrow’s first caucuses, we have been drowning in a tide of speech: candidate debates, TV attack ads, endless analyses by pundits, op-ed pieces in the paper … Words have been in no short supply, and the flood is not likely to let up for a very long time! And yet the sheer abundance of words assaulting our ears may leave us a bit numb, perhaps with a sense that beneath them all there is a lack of real substance and leadership, such that they seem not to ring true.
So on this Sunday next before Lent, and a day before the first votes are cast, we might ask the question of whether we have anything to learn from our scripture lessons today about language itself, and how to use it?
One approach to engaging that question would be to go back in our mind to the very beginning, “in the beginning,” when God created heaven and earth. Do you remember how it is that God brings creation into existence? It is through speech: “God said, ‘Let there be light; let there be firmament; let there be the waters, and let there be the dry land.’” The account of creation in Genesis is insistent upon the idea that everything that is, came into being through an act of speech—God’s own speech.
So when the Genesis story culminates in describing humankind as being made in God’s own image, the implication is that we (like God), have the creative power of speech woven into the nature of who we are as human beings. The biblical vision of humanity is that speech—and its interior corollary, thought—is the way in which we know ourselves by expressing our selves. And through language, we have the power to create—to create community, to create relationship, to create meaning. Such speech is what most distinguishes us from the other creatures—whether it is in the form of the spoken word, or communication through sign, symbol, or sound. No wonder that Jeremiah is so overwhelmed when God calls him to speak the word of the Lord: what greater dignity, but also what greater responsibility, could there be?
So let’s take this biblical emphasis upon the creative power of speech, and reflect for a moment on how speech is used in our own experience of it. I don’t think I need to convince you of how speech has come to be used as a method of division and accusation in popular and political discourse. In this election season, we are all too aware of that already.
But the larger point, I think, is that the acrimony and hostility of the discourse going into this election are really only symptomatic of a creeping cultural diminishment in our use of language. It is astounding to read some of the vitriol that people feel entitled to post on the internet, about most anyone or any subject—religious websites such as The Episcopal Café not being excepted. We seem as a culture to have become habituated to the idea that we are entitled to say whatever we wish, whenever and however we choose to do so.
The question, though, is what are the consequences of such unbridled speech? If we remember that the biblical concept of speech is that it is a creative act, that would suggest that we need to pay close attention to the fact that what we say, we also create. When we express anger, we create anger. When we express hate, we create hate. Or on the other hand, when we express concern, we create concern. When we express love, we create love. Speech is productive, and as a result, the Bible consistently cautions us about how we use it, urging upon us a restraint and reticence in what we choose to say. As the epistle of James warns, “the tongue is a fire … setting on fire the whole of nature.”
So could it be, that the truest Christian witness in these days of rhetorical excess and unrestrained contention, would be to insure that our own speech is always measured, thoughtful, attentive, and controlled? There are, of course, times when the prophetic voice has to ring out clear and strong: but perhaps in these peculiarly volatile days, the words that God will give us, as God gave them to Jeremiah, are more likely to be the words of restraint and self-possession that come from truly loving our neighbor, rather than the anger and resentment that come from a self-preoccupied fear and suspicion of our neighbor. Perhaps that is what we as a church community are called to model: a discourse of justice and mercy that is more quietly put, and with more compassionate intent, than the current stridency of the political arena.
That, at least, is the message from Paul in that famous 13th chapter of I Corinthians, for as he reminds us, words without love are noisy distractions at best, empty platitudes at worse. For love is patient, and kind, not arrogant or rude. Words spoken in love are not irritable or resentful, but rejoice in truth. So speech worthy of being God’s children is never the language of bitterness and bile, but rather the language of respect and concern. As we shall sing in a few moments in our sermon hymn,

Lord speak to me, that I may speak
in living echoes of thy tone. …
O fill me with Thy fullness, Lord,
until my very heart o’erflow
in kindling thought and glowing word,
Thy love to tell, Thy praise to show.

(Frances Havergal, 1836-1879)

© Joseph Britton, 2016

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