Tag: Genesis 2:19

Posted on in Sermons

Baptism of Christ

Readings: Isaiah 43:1-7; Psalm 29; Acts 8:14-17; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

We all speak. That is, we produce sounds with our mouths. After the service, we will gather around the coffee machine and do this. We will discuss the week’s events and thrash out the finer details of this sermon. We will express opinions and hopes and desires. We will enquire after friends. And we will leave, having shared fellowship.

How strange it would be if we all gathered in the entrance hall and didn’t say anything! If we stood in each other’s company with our mouths closed. We might raise our eyebrows or wiggle our ears, but no further communication would be permitted. Eventually someone would snort or yawn, and the spell would be broken. We would laugh and launch into a discussion.

We worship a God, Jesus Christ, whom we call the Word. This is how John the Evangelist refers to him at the start of his Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” And we read in chapter 1 of the Book of Genesis that the world was spoken into being. Each paragraph begins, “And God said.” “Let there be light.” “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters.” “Let the dry land appear.” Etc.

And yet we pay very little attention to speech. This is unusual since I would say that Christianity is a religion of the Word and its ritual is based on the action of speaking. The first thing we do when we speak is breathe out. It is impossible – I think! – to speak as you are breathing in. So, the first element of speech is BREATH. Breath is represented in the alphabet by my favourite letter, the letter “h”.

Then we add voice to our breath and produce the vowel sounds. Think of a baby. A baby is a student of phonetics. It opens its mouth (hopefully not at three in the morning) and adds voice to its breath, producing vowel sounds that may range from an “oo!” to a long, drawn-out “ah!”. But it will generally not produce consonants because consonants involve blocking the flow of air with the lips or tongue and this is more difficult.

A vowel sound is what the doctor asks you to make when they want to examine your throat: “ah!” “A” is the most open vowel there is, so it involves opening your mouth to its greatest extent. It is what we do when we sing. The longer you hold a vowel sound, the more saliva will collect in your mouth, and you will have to swallow. This is because vowels are like water. It is as if a river was flowing through the canyon of our mouths. So, the second element of speech is WATER.

When we obstruct the flow of air with the lips or the tongue, we produce the consonants. Perhaps the easiest consonant to pronounce is the letter “m”. This involves pressing the lips together. “M”. And this is often the first consonant a baby will produce, when it says, “Mama”.

Since the consonants are produced by blocking the flow of air with our lips or tongue, we might say that the third element of speech is FLESH. So, we have BREATH (the letter “h”), WATER (the vowels), and FLESH (the consonants). The three elements of speech, which we practise unknowingly, as when we change gears in a car.

This is how I would analyze the action of speaking: breath, water, and flesh. In chapter 2 of the Book of Genesis, there is a second creation account, which involves the creation of man. In verses 6-7, it reads as follows:

A stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground – then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.

Gen 2:6-7 (NRSV)

Most of us, I suspect, would regard speech as the agent of creation as a kind of metaphor, but I think this is exactly what happened. Nowhere in the first two chapters of Genesis does it say that God made the world with his hands, like a potter fashioning clay. It says that he spoke. All through the first two chapters, we read that God said. And the three elements of speech – breath, water, and flesh – are clearly present here: God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life”, “a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground”, God “formed man from the dust of the ground”. We read later in Genesis 3:19, “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” This refers to our material body.

We find the same emphasis on the power of speech in Psalm 29: “The voice of the Lord is powerful… The voice of the Lord breaks the cedars… The voice of the Lord strikes with flashes of lightning… The voice of the Lord twists the oaks and strips the forests bare…” That’s pretty impressive – to do all of that only with words. It doesn’t say that God did these things with his hands, and this is a constant in Christian texts and prayers.

We are not able to produce matter with our mouths, but with our words we can have a material effect on our surroundings. We can make someone happy by saying something nice to them. We can make someone cry by saying something hurtful. We can order someone to be killed. Or we can issue a pardon. Our words can be recorded and can influence future generations or even the course of history.

After the creation of man, man – the Hebrew word is “Adam” – is given a task. He is not asked to make the creatures – that is God’s undertaking. He is asked to name them. To apply a word to that particular creature. This occurs in Genesis 2:19-20. Most of us are not in the habit of adding words to the dictionary, of coming up with a name for a horse or a squirrel. But we do name our children, and names are important. They may not fix a child’s destiny, but they do, to some extent, determine their character. There is a Bulgarian name, Milen, which comes from the Bulgarian word for “kind”, mil, and I have noticed that many people called Milen are kind in person. It is as if they live up to their name.

A child is named at their baptism. The priest takes a bundle of flesh and douses their head with water three times, invoking the Holy Spirit. But hang on a minute! Aren’t those the three elements of speech – breath (the Holy Spirit), water (the water of the font), and flesh (the tiny baby)?

In effect, in the sacrament of Holy Baptism, a child is being made into a word of God – not the Word (that is Christ), but they are being called to be Christ-like, to reject the devil.

And what happens in the sacrament of Holy Communion? The priest takes the bread, the fruit of the earth, and the wine, which is a liquid like water, and consecrates them by the invocation of the Holy Spirit. Again, the three elements of breath, water, and flesh are present. We find all three elements in bread, which is made from a dough of flour and water and has air in it.

And what about the first creation account in Genesis, where we read that the waters were separated from the waters and the sky was created, then the waters under the sky were gathered together into one place and the dry land appeared. Aren’t these again the three elements of speech – breath (the sky), water, and flesh (the dry land)?

I would suggest that speech is central to an understanding of the world around us and our place in it. It can effect change, it can bring people to their senses. It can give meaning, as when we take our child and name him or her.

When we are baptized, as Jesus was by John the Baptist in the River Jordan, we have a choice. We can choose what kind of people we want to be. We can decide on the words we will use, on the actions we will take, whether to tell the truth or lie, whether to help others or steal.

We are a word of God. We can choose to be wheat or chaff. We can choose whether to please God or to turn away from him. According to our life, so our definition will be. And this is why we need to cling to the name of Jesus, to think only of him, so that in our earthly pilgrimage we become as much like him as possible. We are made in God’s image, now we must become like him.

Come, Lord Jesus! Amen.

Jonathan Dunne, www.stonesofithaca.com

Photo caption: Letters make good staging posts. Saints Cyril and Methodius, the brothers from Thessaloniki who wrote the Cyrillic alphabet, outside the National Library in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Posted on in Heart of Language

7. AM

A refers to creation. I refers to the Fall (or time). O is the symbol of recognition, repentance. This is the progression of human life, contained in the Greek alphabet: AIO. That is, the Greek alphabet counts down from the Fall (from I to O). The Latin alphabet used in English counts up (from I to Z).

The Greek alphabet makes the progression from A (which represents creation, “In the beginning…”) to I (which represents the Fall, or time) to O (a long o, called omega, the last letter). AIO. We tend to associate Greek culture with drama, philosophy and theology.

We tend to associate Latin culture with making laws and building roads. It’s the Latin alphabet that we use in English, 26 letters. But the Latin alphabet, which might be taken to convey rationalism, thinking, doesn’t make the same progression as the Greek one. It goes from A to I to Z. That is, it counts up: from 1 to 2.

It does exactly what we teach our children to do in school. To amass. To count up from the line that represents the ego, I, without taking into account the source, O (the eternal symbol that represents God). A fatal mistake. This contrast in styles, between a more humble East and a more hegemonic West, with its colonies and empires, is very telling.

Let us start by looking more closely at the A of creation. We have seen that the name of God revealed to Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3:14, perhaps the most important verse in the Old Testament, is AM. This name actually contains the letter A and also the Greek letter omega, w, turned upside down. In God is both the beginning and the end. He is the empty space on which we draw the timeline (there can be no time without eternity).

If we apply the phonetic pair m-n to AM, we get an. This is the indefinite article, the article we use to refer to countable nouns, nouns that can be counted. You can only count if you separate off, if you draw a line around, so God did this – but he didn’t create man in order to trade in him, which is the reason we draw lines around things (barrels, bottles, containers, any kind of packaging, for the purpose of trade). He drew a line around man in order to grant him free will, to make him separate (while, obviously, man’s life is contained in God, without whom he cannot breathe). This is the difference in intention between God and man: one gives freedom, the other thinks about profit.

If we combine the name of God, AM, and the indefinite article, an, we get a man:

AM + an = a man

And the name of that man was Adam. Again, the letter A. But because he is God’s creation, made in his image, he also has the divine spark in him, which is why the letter omega, written o or w, is in his name when written with capital letters: ADAM. His name is a duplicate of God’s in Exodus, AM, using the two ways of writing a long o or omega.

If we read the name Adam in reverse, we find made (I have allowed the second vowel to shift slightly towards the front of the mouth). That is because we are made, not begotten. Only Christ is the Son of God, only he is begotten of the Father before all ages (outside the timeline).

In chapter 2 of Genesis, after the creation of man, God then creates the animals and birds, and asks Adam to name them. Do you see how name is man in reverse, with the addition of final e?

If we shuffle the letters of name, we find mean and amen. By naming the creatures, Adam gave them meaning, and he said amen to God’s will. So, man: name-mean-amen.

God asked Adam what he wanted to call them. What is the primordial question. What is this creature? What will you call it? But, in the Fall, we make the progression from A to I, and instead of what, we ask why. Why should I do this? Why should I believe you? Why signifies distrust (y is the semi-vowel that corresponds to i).

Now that we find ourselves in the time of the Fall (as soon as Adam and Eve are ejected from paradise, the clock starts ticking, this is why the Fall and the ego are represented by a line), we really only have one choice: to go forward. So, we do not attempt a return to paradise, to the world of childish ignorance. We have our knowledge and must use it.

We make the progression of the Greek alphabet, and turn why into who (or how, it’s the same answer). The biggest shift in someone’s thinking is when they make this change from why to who. Pilate, when he asked Christ, “What is truth?” (Jn 18:38), had not made this progression. He had to ask the one by whom all things were made (because he is the Word, and the world was spoken into being) not “What is truth?”, but “Who is truth?” And then Christ might have answered, “I am,” in which is contained the progression of human life: AIO (AIW).

AIO, or AIW (depending on which letter we use for omega, o or w), restores us to ourself. The crucial difference – and the reason we should not want to return to Eden (Garden of Eden spells danger of need) – is that now we have knowledge, knowledge we must put to good use.

Jonathan Dunne

Heart of Language 7/15

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Posted on in Theological English

Theological English (14): The Names of God

In this fifteenth video on “Theological English”, Jonathan Dunne looks at the importance of names. “Name” is “man” in reverse with a final “e”, and we read in Genesis chapter 2 that God brought the creatures to Adam so that he could “name” them – in effect, so that he could translate them and choose the right word. God didn’t ask Adam to make the creatures because he is not an author – he cannot create out of nothing. He, and the rest of humankind, are translators. So “name” is central to man’s role in this world. What can the names of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary tell us about their roles? And what meaning can we find in the names of people like Strauss and Grant Gustin, and countries like Ukraine?

To access all the videos in this course, use the drop-down menu “Theological English (Video Course)” above. The videos can be watched on Vimeo and YouTube.