A
Poem/Reflection for 1st
Sunday after Christmas St. Andrew's Church, Nags Head, N.C.
December 29, 2019 Thomas E Wilson, Supply Clergy
December 29, 2019 Thomas E Wilson, Supply Clergy
Speaking
My WORD.
It is the Sunday
after Christmas, the boxes are put away, the tree is starting to shed
more needles, the leftovers of food are starting to get a little ripe
and the family keeps looking for other things to do. We went to
church and God was there in our prayers and in the music. Then today
we have John's Gospel telling us that we have to back to the
beginning as he starts his poetic prologue:
“In the beginning was the Word, and
the Word was with God, and God was the Word.”
en archē eimi ho logos, kai ho logos
eimi pros ho theos, kai theos eimi ho logos
We begin with what we, for convenience
sake, call God, the indescribable energy before, behind, in, over and
through all of creation. Theologians tell us if we can describe it,
then what we can describe is not God. John says that “ho theos”,
the God, before the beginning, begins with “ho logos”, the
word. John goes back to the opening poem of Genesis where God in the
beginning created the heavens and the earth, where God begins by
saying , “Let light be!”
The word John uses for “the Word”
is the Greek ὁ λόγος (ho logos). But logos means more than a
grammatical construction, something you say. It it rich and can mean
a plan, a promise, a ground, a proposal, an audit, the bond, the
binding, the conversation or more than a few other possibilities. The
community of the Beloved Disciple says that in their experience, the
man, Jesus of Nazareth, was the embodiment of a plan, a promise, a
ground, a proposal, an audit, the bond, the binding, the conversation
or more than a few other possibilities, the Word of God.
Too often we think that the “Word of
God” is the Bible, on the surface of the pages and sentences of a
Book. The Book is not the Word but it contains the Word and we have
to spend time in deep conversation with it to discern the meaning in,
under and through the grammatical constructs. Martin Luther said
that the Bible is the manger in which the baby Jesus is laid and like
in all mangers there is a lot of straw. The Franciscan Richard Rohr
posits: “The first act of divine revelation is creation itself. The
first Bible is the Bible of nature. It was written at least 13.8
billion years ago, at the moment that we call the Big Bang, long
before the Bible of words.”
Frederich
Buechner in the third of his four memoirs, Telling Secrets,
wrote:
WE
BELIEVE IN God—such as it is, we have faith—because certain
things happened to us once and go on happening. We work and goof off,
we love and dream, we have wonderful times and awful times, are
cruelly hurt and hurt others cruelly, get mad and bored and scared
stiff and ache with desire, do all such human things as these, and if
our faith is not mainly just window dressing or a rabbit's foot or
fire insurance, it is because it grows out of precisely this kind of
rich human compost. The God of biblical faith is the God who meets us
at those moments in which for better or worse we are being most
human, most ourselves, and if we lose touch with those moments, if we
don't stop from time to time to notice what is happening to us and
around us and inside us, we run the tragic risk of losing touch with
God too.
If we
are indeed created in the image of the indescribable God then we
engage in having Word in our lives with God and each other. Too often
we use Words of trash we we converse with each other by insult, or
hate. Promises broken and relationships discarded on the basis of
cost benefit analysis.Words used to treat people or derision rather
than subjects created in the image of God. like objects insteadIn our
public discourses of late by notable con men and women we see, and
participate in lies masquerading as truth, falsehoods dressed up in
slogans to be swallowed by the gullible or hidden in the small
print.. We hear excuses over horrible things said like: “That is
just locker room talk.” “He just may have remembered it
differently”. “Tomayto- Tomahto.” “She just got up in the
spirit of the meeting.” We know that when a person says something
like , “Legally speaking . . “ or “Technically speaking”. . .
what will follow will be a smarmy attempt at obfuscation.
I know this list
from reading it in the papers and also by living it as well. How are
you hearing the WORD? How are you speaking the WORD? How are you
living the WORD?
Speaking My Word
If I give my word, it is my promise
that I'll do whatever I've pledged,
to be there, not in any way hedged,
but the fullness of how I'm Thomas.
Yet, I have broken that word once,
and even more times, when my name
could only be remembered in shame
by those who believed like a dunce.
If I am an image of God, Word giving,
is what my holy breath is meant to do;
be trusted, counted on as he who's true
to sacred purpose of why we're living.
Today, forgiven I make the vow again,
that your trust in me will not be in
vain
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