January 2, 2011 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Sermon

Adam H. Fronczek
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 147:1–11
Matthew 2:1–12
John 1:1–18

O star of wonder, star of night,
Star with royal beauty bright;
Westward leading, still proceeding,
Guide us to thy perfect light.

John Henry Hopkins

The first Sunday of a new year always follows a rather unusual week. For many of us, there’s a sort of let down after Christmas Day, presents unwrapped, holiday parties over, families departed for home, leftovers crowding the refrigerator. Routines are not so routine in the last week of the year, even though sometimes that means some of us are busy or caught by surprise. While everyone else is getting ready for New Year’s Eve, some of you might have found yourselves closing that last deal of 2010 or looking after a relative who has fallen ill or mourning a loved one who passed away. In the midst of all of this, there is a reflective quality to the week. Even if you don’t believe in resolutions, it is hard not to consider what they might be. It’s a different kind of a week. It can be a lazy week. (I must admit it was tempting to take the magazine and radio route and preach a sermon called something like “The Top 100 Preaching Moments at Fourth Church 2010.” Then I decided I would like to keep my job.)

On this morning when we are confronted with maybe just a little bit of laziness, the church calendar presents a challenge for the day. Today’s passage is one of the most familiar in the Bible, and familiarity almost always invites us to laziness, but in the midst of its familiarity, this passage is quite difficult to understand. Forget Noah’s flood or David and Goliath or the Good Samaritan; no, this familiar passage is full of philosophical language that I don’t find to be very accessible. We read about the Word becoming flesh and about light and darkness and receiving power to become children of God, all without much definition as to what any of that means. So I found myself asking this week, “Why is this passage so familiar?”

Biblical scholars understand the passage as a prologue to the Gospel of John, suggesting that it is helpful to read the whole book if you want to figure out more about what the prologue means. Some scholars have pointed out the passage’s likeness to the Greek philosophy of the day, with its dualistic contrasts between light and darkness. Other experts discuss the merit of parallels between this passage and passages in other ancient religious traditions: in places as distant from Jerusalem as the temples of Mesopotamia and African tribal hymns, there are many ancient writings that talk about God in reference to some kind of special “word” (Craig Keener, The Gospel of John, p. 348). All of that being the case, to fully understand today’s passage, it might be helpful not only to know what happens in the rest of the book, but you might want to be able to read it in Greek, and you might want to know about the peoples to whom it was written, and you might also want to know something about ancient philosophy and religion.

There is so much in this passage that any and all of these approaches might be important, but this week I found myself thinking about something else, something much more mysterious that caught my attention again as it does every year. What catches my attention is that, complex and obtuse as the text may be, every year at Christmastime, I sit here in the chancel looking out at the congregation and I see everyday people caught up in these mysterious words. I see twenty-first-century residents of Chicago—teachers and attorneys and bankers, mothers and fathers, rich and poor, young and old—and I see them transported somehow to a common place where we are all swept up in the same mystery.

I have a theory about why we are swept up in these words. There is something that ties all of us together and ties us to all those ancient Jews and Greeks and Africans. All of our texts share something: they speak about the power of words. And no matter what time or place or circumstance we come from, the argument I would like to make to you this morning is this: words have the power to create and destroy, and part of living life well means understanding that truth about words and taking responsibility for it in your life. I am convinced that, with or without volumes of background information, we are struck by this passage from John because we understand the importance of words. This morning I want to talk about words and how we use them because our choices about words have great meaning for our relationship with God and our relationships with one another.

In order to get there, first, a few comments about the power of words in the passage before us and in other places in the Bible. The passage begins, “In the beginning was the Word . . .” and continues with the idea that “all things were made” through the Word, and “without the Word” nothing was made. This passage is about creation. It is John’s deliberate link back to the first chapter of Genesis where we read that “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” and did so with words. God said, “Let there be light, and there was light.” The world itself is created by words; it is spoken into being.

This idea isn’t isolated in Genesis and John; it’s actually found in many places in Scripture. The psalm writers sang that “by the word of the Lord the heavens were made. . . . God spoke and the earth came to be, God commanded, and it stood firm” (Psalm 33).

Obviously there is something special about the creative force of words when God speaks, but what does that have to do with us? The fact is that the creative force of words is not isolated to the Bible at all. People change and grow politically, socially, and relationally because of words. It is not hard to come up with words that change the world. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” (Thomas Jefferson). “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” (Franklin Roosevelt). “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” (Martin Luther King Jr.). Words can change things.
Words create reality. We write things down and talk about things out loud because if we don’t, we’ll never really learn what they mean. Think about the difference between holding a belief or opinion inside and sharing it with another person or a group. Once we put our thoughts into words, they can be tested and refined. Putting your thoughts into words means you might have to find out that what you once thought was actually wrong; you might have to change your mind. Words written down or spoken out loud have that power. We ask you to recite the Apostles’ Creed in church every Sunday not because we believe that you have figured out exactly what all of those words mean, but with the expectation that if you do say them out loud week after week, you may be forced to think about what the words mean. You’ll have to ask what it means for your life that you believe in things like the presence of the Holy Spirit and the forgiveness of sins.

Preaching professor Tom Long explains in a book called Testimony the importance of speaking our beliefs out loud. “When we speak our faith,” Long says, “we intuitively think that what we are doing is finding the language to say what we already believe. . . . But things are actually more complex than this. We don’t just say things we already believe. To the contrary, saying things out loud is how we come to believe. We talk our way toward belief, talk our way toward believing more fully, more clearly, more deeply.” “For example,” Long continues, “when two people love each other, they naturally speak to each other of their love. But as they whisper love’s words to each other deep into the night, they are not simply expressing their love, they are discovering their love, even creating their love, its power, its prospects, its limits. Putting their love for each other into words gives it a content, a shape, a definition, a depth, and a future it did not have when it was just a formless emotion surging wildly in their hearts” (Testimony, p. 6).

So is the power of words. Words create. And there are countless circumstances where words are creative, but words can be equally destructive. For every inspiring and creative political speech of the World War II era, there was one by Hitler that inspired people to hate. For every good sermon that teaches people to love one another as Christ loved us, there is a bad one that teaches congregations to discriminate and to oppress. Facebook connects us to old friends and helps us remember birthdays, but a Facebook post from an angry classmate can make adolescence even more emotionally difficult than it already is for a child. For every relationship in which the most important words are “Well done” or “I love you” or “You can count on me,” there is a relationship where the conversation sounds more like, “I hate you,” “You’re fired,” or “I will never forgive what you have done.”

Words do create, but they also destroy. Words are powerful. And we are responsible for their use—how we speak and write but also how we hear and receive words. And this may be the most daunting part of that challenge: words often have the potential to mean more than one thing, and we don’t always hear words the way they are intended.

Sometimes the thing that matters most about words is how we as the listeners hear and respond to them. Let me give you an example: There’s a Mary Oliver poem that begins with these words:

When it’s over, it’s over, and we don’t know
any of us, what happens then.

(Mary Oliver, “When,” Swan, p. 35)

You can see that if something in your life has come to an end and you wanted it to end and you’re looking forward to what is next, this may be the introduction to an uplifting poem. But if something in your life has ended and you wanted it not to end, it’s the start to a poem of lament.

Listen again:

When it’s over, it’s over, and we don’t know
any of us, what happens then.

Most of the time we hear words in the way we are ready and willing and able to hear them, and knowing that is a vital part of taking words seriously. Public figures deal with this all the time, fearing that their words will be butchered by an opponent or the media. Every preacher fears misunderstandings. We are scared by the idea that you might take from a sermon something different or even opposite from what we hoped you would hear. Couples know all about the dangerous interpretation of words. We get angry at one another because of words that were heard in a way they were not intended. We spend vast amounts of time and money on therapy and books to do a better job of saying what we really mean and listening carefully. In all these instances we hear from a word what we want to hear, what we need to hear, what we choose to hear.

The first lesson we heard this morning, the journey of the wise men, can be a powerful example of hearing what we want to hear in a story. If you open the Gospel of Matthew and read it carefully, you see that there is incredibly little detail in the text, and most of what we know about the wise men comes not from the Bible itself but from traditions that Christians have built up to support what is missing from the Bible. There is a tremendous amount that is missing or mysterious. For starters, it is unclear who these people are: they are called magoi in the Greek, which we have variously translated as magi or wise men, assuming them to be magicians or astronomers. But the tradition has also called them kings, perhaps because of a prophecy from Isaiah 60 saying that when the Messiah comes, “kings” will come in the brightness of the dawn. They also may have been called kings because of the fine gifts they bring, but those gifts present another mystery: the only evidence we have that there might have been three of these kings or wise men or magi is that they brought three gifts; outside of that, there might have been any number of them; the text doesn’t actually say. The text also neglects to tell us where they are from, other than “the east,” so we don’t know much about their culture, religion, or any of the rest of their context. Perhaps most importantly, the text doesn’t tell us how they knew to follow this particular star or how they knew that it revealed the birth of the king of the Jews.

There is a recently rediscovered text that tries to fill in some of these gaps. It’s actually one of the oldest and most complete accounts of who these men might have been. It’s an old Syriac text called the Revelation of the Magi, and it dates back to the late second century. The translator, Brent Landau, says that in this, one of the earliest and most thorough portrayals, we find that these magi might not have been kings or magicians or astronomers at all. They were mystics, spiritual men who had dedicated themselves to a life of prayer. As this tradition goes, generations before, these mystics were given a promise, a prophecy they were to guard and protect. One day, they were told, “a star of indescribable brightness will . . . appear, heralding the birth of God in human form. . . . Every month of the year, for thousands of years, the order of the Magi . . . carried out its ancient rituals in expectation of the star’s arrival. They ascended their country’s most sacred mountain, . . . prayed in silence at the mouth of a cave where they kept their prophetic books. Whenever one of the magi died, his son or a close relative took his place, and their order continued through the ages” (paraphrase of Landau, Revelation of the Magi, p. 8).

All of this detail is filled into the story from outside of the Bible. And still a great mystery is left: how did the magi know to follow the star they finally chose? One of the few things the biblical story does tell us is that they follow the star to Jesus because it reminds them of words they have heard: “And you, O Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel” (Matthew 2). It’s not a clear or precise prophesy. But the magi, whoever they were, were not only ready; they were hungry for a word that would guide them where they needed to go. They had sat at the mouth of that cave their whole lives, gazing upwards at the night sky, looking at each bright star and asking a question, “Star of wonder in the heavens, are you just a shining star, or should I follow you tonight?” Something new is created in their lives because they are ready, and they hear the words, and they follow. They arrive at the manger, probably with as many questions as answers. They ask, “What child is this?” and bravely, but probably with a little fear, they conclude that yes, this is the one they’ve been looking for, they did follow the right star, and this is the Word they have been seeking. They find the Christ child because they find a light in the darkness and they trust and follow a word.

On Christmas Eve, I sat here in the chancel and saw many of you, crowded into the pews, children on your laps, candles in hands, eyes looking up, as the magi might have looked, and listening to a promise: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . All things came into being through him. . . . The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, . . . full of grace and truth.” Just as we are ready to receive the words on Christmas Eve, we must be ready to receive God and to receive others throughout the year.

It is a new year. Some things in your life are past and gone, and others are new before you, and some will linger from the year that is past and will continue to require your attention and your care. If you want to make a change in your life in 2011, think about the words you use. How can your words change a life? How do they create and destroy? How do you receive the words of others: is it with expectation or hope or suspicion? Are the words in your life words that give life, or are they words that snatch life away?

In this is love: that God gives us words, to create and destroy, to listen carefully and to find within them light in the darkness.

“Go into the world in faith, trusting God to lead you, trusting people to receive you. Go in to the world with hope, with God’s presence before you and human dreams to carry you. Go into the world with love, serving those in whom Christ lives, and laboring for those for whom Jesus died” (anonymous).

Amen.