Third Sunday of Advent, December 14, 2014 | 8:00 a.m.

Speaking into Being

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 126
Isaiah 61:1–4, 8–11
Luke 1:46–55

All our lips are bound. . . . I am not able to speak, because you too are not able. . . . O, our closed up lips! Who can finally open them for us!

Karl Barth, “Watch for the Light”

Did you know that the Oxford English Dictionary adds new words, phrases, and meanings to the English language four times a year? Just this December 4, it added 500 new words and phrases. Scanning web content according to automated search criteria, a special research program collects, on average, 150 million words in current English use each month. If we were to compare year to year the number of new words being added to the English language, I wonder what the rate of increase would be? I would guess that, given how rapidly technology is changing and how people from around the world are communicating with one another like never before, the rate at which new words have been added to the English language has dramatically accelerated in recent years.

In addition to adding new words to the dictionary every year, the dictionary teams of the United States and the United Kingdom, with the help of expert consultants, select a Word of the Year. In 2013, the Word of the Year was selfie, and, as you may know, the word already selected for 2014 is vape. Not until now have I myself used the word. The verb vape, in case you don’t know, means “to puff on an electronic cigarette.” If you vape, you are a vaper, and the act of doing so is vaping (“Vape Is the New Selfie,” The Guardian, 25 November 2014). Evidently Katy Perry, Lindsay Lohan, and other celebrities have helped to put this word in vogue.

Apparently, in order to be selected as the Word of the Year, a word has to be deemed by judges as meeting two criteria: first, “to reflect the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of that particular year” and second, “to have lasting potential as a word of cultural significance” (“Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year: Frequently Asked Questions,” www.blog.oxfordictionaries.com). That’s why, when well chosen, these words of the year tell us something about our ever-changing reality. They tell us about new phenomena that we never needed to name before. Evolving along with the reality in which we live, our vocabulary captures innovations and new relationships. In some cases, words that have been in use, circulating for years, may take some time to land, and once they land in the dictionary, it is as though the phenomena or realities to which they refer somehow take on greater legitimacy.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that during the season of Advent, when the church is preparing for the coming of Christ to usher in a radically new reality, the church conceives of Christ as the Word of God. What do we mean when we say that Christ is the Word of God? Why not just say that he is the Lord of lords, King of kings, Messiah, and Prince of Peace? Wouldn’t these political titles of Christ capture and convey the political, economic, and social vision prophesied by Isaiah and sung by Mary?

In the Bible we discover an ancient insight into what is an absolutely necessary, foundational condition for the possibility of true liberation, true emancipation—the kind that Isaiah hopes for and Mary sings about. Only when everyone has been equipped with and empowered by the use of words—reading writing, speaking, and being heard—will we be able to repair and rebuild a city from ruins, free the oppressed, and emancipate the captives. In the Bible and throughout history, language plays an indispensable, foundational role in liberation.

As I was growing up, from time to time I would hear stories from my parents about the years when Koreans were under the thumb of Japanese occupation and rule. I heard about how the economy, natural resources, and labor of Korea were all put to use by and for Japan. More than these offenses, however, I heard about what it was like not to be permitted to speak, read, and write in Korean at school and in public. Books in the Korean language were confiscated. A whole generation of Korean children learned how to read and write only in Japanese, and the adults, who had never learned Japanese, became voiceless and powerless. Compared to all the other deprivations and coercions under Japanese occupation, it seems that this was the worst, because taking away one’s language is the most fundamental way for a people to be treated always as objects and never as subjects.

When Korea was liberated from Japanese rule, my father was in the fifth grade. He remembers how quickly the new Korean government reinstated the Korean language in the schools, but unfortunately, because under Russia’s influence communism was already taking a stronghold in what would soon become North Korea, the language they were taught was rife with communist political ideology. The ideologically oriented curriculum and pedagogy would not allow the North Korean people to experience the liberation that could have been possible.

Throughout history, whenever major political, social, and economic change takes place, language becomes one of the first arenas of reform. Brazilian-born educator and philosopher Paulo Freire understood this. He knew that language plays a crucial role in constructing our understandings of reality. Dedicating his life to literacy education in countries that bore centuries of European domination, Freire became known for building a social, political, and cultural revolution made of “words that shape the world” (Paulo Freire, Pedagogy in Process, p. 1). In 1974, when the Portuguese withdrew from Guinea-Bissau, a country on the west African coast, 90 percent of the adult population was illiterate. During its 500 years under colonial rule, Guinea-Bissau had only fourteen university graduates. Facing the enormous task of educating a newly liberated citizenry, the new government invited Paulo Freire to collaborate with its educators. Freire’s book Pedagogy in Process lays out the philosophical and pedagogical commitments undergirding his work. One of those philosophical commitments was that language is more than mechanical; it is political, social, economic, religious, and cultural. He wrote, “We have never understood literacy education of adults as a thing in itself, as simply learning the mechanics of reading and writing, but, rather, as a political act, directly related to production, to health, to the regular system of instruction, to the overall plan for the society still to be realized” (Pedagogy in Progress, p. 13). Freire conceived of language through a lens of liberation, and through the lens of liberation, he understood that language is related to citizenship in its totality.

In our own history and on our own soil, we too have undergone social revolutions driven by ideals of liberation. Professor of English and American Studies Christopher Hager has written a profoundly moving book entitled Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing. Drawing upon the primary sources of letters and other records written by former slaves in the United States, Dr. Hager explores the period of emancipation in American history, which, he points out, has received too little attention. While these written sources do give us some insight into how former slaves experienced emancipation, Dr. Hager wants to make a further point: that “the countless accumulated hours former slaves spent seated at tables composing their thoughts, setting pens to paper . . . constituted a central part” of the process of emancipation (Christopher Hager, Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing, p. 5). Learning to write was no less central than the time they spent migrating from plantations to cities, looking for work, looking for family members, and building religious and political communities (Word by Word, p. 5). For these newly emancipated slaves, the American Constitution and the Bible often served as primers. Sometimes copying and sometimes commenting on their contents, these African Americans engaged in more than a mechanical act of writing; they engaged in acts of learning, acts of protest, acts of inventing, and, above all, acts of re-constituting themselves and our country (pp. 1–2).

In its wisdom, ancient Israel and the early church knew that true liberation—the kind of liberation that involves the reconstitution of ourselves and our cities, overhauls of politics and economics, and reversals of privilege and power—necessarily requires the equipment and empowerment of liberating words. Not just the same old words spoken by the same old people. Rather, words spoken by people who haven’t spoken before or whose voices have not been heard before. True liberation requires treating each other always as subjects and never as objects. It requires learning old words with evolving meanings and creating new words that speak of new phenomena and new possibilities.

I think it is true that the new words we use tell us something about ourselves and the things that preoccupy us. The Words of the Year selected by the Oxford English Dictionary last year and this year were selfie and vape. Hmm . . . Perhaps it’s time for us to be more discriminating about which words and whose words we privilege. What are the words and whose words are they that we need to hear if we want to realize the kind of city that Isaiah envisions and about which Mary sings? Like them, we hope for things that are not yet realized. We hope for cities to be rebuilt and ruins to be raised up. We hope for captives to be released and the oppressed to be freed. We hope for a world that will know true liberation. It’s because Christ comes to us as the Word of God, in and through whom all things come into being, that the world can hope for a King of kings, Lord of lords, Messiah, and Prince of Peace.