Tag: Genesis 2:6-7

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

10. IO

If, in the Book of Genesis, the world was spoken into being (and the description of creation in chapters 1 and 2 contains the elements of speech: breath, water and flesh), it means that we ourselves are language, words in the making.

We have seen how the ego in English, I, is a straight line. It resembles the number 1. It could be taken to represent the line that isolates us as individuals, the line that we have used to carve up the earth and divide it into properties, the line that we fight over, the line that needs defending, the line that we use to package the products of the earth and trade in them, the line that we use to build roads and transport them. When we separate ourselves off from others, we lose our shared vision (we can’t see over the fence). We view other people, and the products of the earth, as commodities we can profit from, rather than as God’s creatures for whose spiritual well-being we are responsible. The line – I or 1 – isolates. It creates an illusion of self-dependency.

At some point, this self-reliance crumbles, and we realize that we depend on others. Our spiritual eyes are opened, and we begin to see the world not as “us and them”, but as one shared humanity whose needs (and fears) are more or less the same. We are not so different, our time on earth is limited, but we seem to think that if we keep busy (packaging and transporting goods with the line that alone enables us to count things), we can safely ignore our own mortality, or at least by the time it reaches us, we will be too exhausted to care too much about it.

And so we step onto the line, a moving walkway at the airport that takes us to our gate (which might be 2 or 41, we don’t know). That time (connected with line if we cross out the l and apply the phonetic pair m-n) enables us to safely view the landscape, the runways and planes, with the illusion that it will go on forever and what goes on out there won’t affect us.

But it doesn’t go on forever, which means that our own resources as individuals are limited. Instead of counting up and amassing wealth or memories, we learn to do what the Greek alphabet does and we breathe life into the line, turning it from I to O, omega, a long o, the last letter of the Greek alphabet (compare the Latin alphabet, which counts up from I to Z, or 2).

When the line is opened in this way, it is as if we reach a realization of something deeper at play, we tap into the hidden root system, the root system that was there the whole time, only it was not visible to our eyes, just as there are colours on the spectrum of light – infrared and ultraviolet – that are not visible to our eyes, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

And since, as we have seen, the world was spoken into being – the opening two chapters of the Book of Genesis can be understood as a description of speech, with the three elements of breath (h), water (vowels, voice added to breath) and flesh (consonants, breath obstructed by the lips or tongue, with or without voice) – this means that we are surrounded by language, we ourselves are somehow language, words in the making (I believe that this is what death is – to be spoken into eternity). And language can teach us.

So, count down from I to O, from the limitations of the ego to the eternity of God, and instead of live being read in reverse, being somehow distorted, and giving evil, it gives love – love for the other, love for God.

Perhaps you do not believe me, but love and other are connected, you just need to know where in the mouth consonants are produced, forming seven simple pairs, one of which is l-r. Then take a step in the alphabet (t-v, omitting the intervening vowel) and add breath (h). Love-other. The vowels are the same.

We have seen that if we take another step in the alphabet, r-s, other is connected to the Greek word for “God”, theos, and so the two great commandments Christ gives his disciples in Matthew 22 – to love the Lord our God and to love our neighbour as ourself – which together form the core of Christian teaching, are themselves confirmed by language:

love-other-theos

The ego has been taken out of them.

Similarly, we turn from the sin that may have characterized our youth and, having acquired spiritual knowledge, we become children of God, children of the light – son. Again, we achieve this by making the progression in language from I to O.

Even Christ did this by willingly going to the Cross. He counted down from I to O, even though there was no sin in him. He did it to show us the way, the answer to the questions we should be asking: who and how.

So, we have live (evil)-love, sin-son, Christ-cross, all examples of the path we must follow from the selfish demands of the ego to that wonderful moment of realization (and repentance) when we understand that there is more to life than we can see with our physical eyes. Our physical eyes can be used solely for the purpose of identifying and taking in the (external) objects of our desire. When we are subject to our desires, we become disconnected. Fragmented.

When we make the progression from I to O, we become whole again (in our brokenness), because while love is connected to other and theos (the two great commandments), it is also in whole (v-w, addition of breath). Love-other-theos, love-whole.

There is one other word where you will find love, and not surprisingly it is a word connected with language, because a word spoken in anger can destroy, but a word spoken with love builds up.

Again, we have to apply the pair v-w, the phonetic pair l-r and a step in the alphabet, d-e.

Then love gives word. It makes us whole (addition of breath). We are meant to love the other, who as Christ tells us in the Judgement of Nations is God (theos). This is the meaning of love in the English language. It’s the word itself that tells us. Unfortunately, we see language as a way of getting our message across – as something external (a tool) – and don’t realize it is bursting with meaning, like a bud in spring.

Jonathan Dunne

Heart of Language 10/15

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Posted on in Heart of Language

3. Human

The elements of speech – breath, water and flesh – are the same elements that are present in the act of creation in the Book of Genesis. The world was spoken into being, which means that we, and the world around us, are a form of language.

Language is made up of three elements: breath, water and flesh.

The first element is breath. Breath forms the basis of all speech. Without breath, you are dead. Breath is represented by the letter h, a letter that is dropped in colloquial speech and silent in some languages, but for me the most important letter in the alphabet:

h   (breath)

The second element is water. This is when we add voice to our breath and form the vowels. Hold a vowel sound for long enough, and water will collect in your mouth. The vowels are listed in the alphabet in the following order: a-e-i-o-u. But this is misleading because the vowel sounds are formed, from the back of the mouth (where language originates), in a different order:

u-o-a-e-i   (water)

Since breath on its own doesn’t make a word (it only expresses exasperation), the first word that the human apparatus is capable of producing is the combination of breath, h, and the first vowel sound to emerge from the throat, u: hu. You might think this is unremarkable, but, as we have seen, hu is Sanskrit for “invoke the gods” and the root of our word God.

So the first utterance we can make by our very nature is to call on God, just as when we move away from the ego and produce the symbols A+O, we say another name of God, Alpha and Omega. While the science of etymology stipulates that human derives from the Latin word for “man”, homo, I would suggest that really it is a combination of hu and man. We are spiritual beings.

The third element of language is flesh. We obstruct the passage of breath with our lips or tongue (our flesh) and produce the consonants, which can be voiced or voiceless. The consonants are divided into phonetic pairs according to where they are produced in the mouth. There are seven simple pairs:

b-p   d-t   f-v   g-k   l-r   m-n   s-z   (flesh)

We see all these elements – breath, water and flesh – in chapters 1 and 2 of the Book of Genesis. Take, for example, Genesis 1:1-2:

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

I would suggest that this passage in Genesis is really a description of speech. Or the creation of man in Genesis 2:6-7:

But 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.

Again, all three elements of language are present, which would suggest that the world was literally spoken into being. This would explain the proximity between space and speak (the letter c, a redundant letter in English, can be pronounced k or s), and also the presence in world of word and lord (the reiterative verse “And God said”).

What is also remarkable is the word these three elements have in common: father. We have seen the phonetic pair f-v, but v is also connected to b and w (think of languages such as modern Greek, Spanish, Latin and German), so through the intermediary of v, I can make the connection f-b/w.

In this way, we see that breath and father have the same letters, water is in father with the addition of h, and flesh is in father with the addition of a (phonetic pair l-r, step in the alphabet s-t).

Father contains speech.

Jonathan Dunne

Heart of Language 3/15

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Posted on in Theological English

Theological English (6): Connections – Vowels

In this seventh video on “Theological English”, Jonathan Dunne continues looking at the spiritual content of language. Speech, like creation (Genesis 2:6-7), is made up of three elements: breath (the letter “h”), water (the vowels – hold a vowel sound and water will collect in your mouth) and flesh (the consonants, made by obstructing the passage of breath with the lips or tongue – that is, with the flesh). Here we see examples of word connections made by changing the vowels according to where they are pronounced in the mouth.

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.

Posted on in Theological English

Theological English (3): The Alphabet

In this fourth video on “Theological English”, Jonathan Dunne looks at the twenty-six letters that make up the Latin alphabet as it is used in English – h, five vowels, three semi-vowels, fourteen consonants, and three “redundant” letters (c, q and x) – and sees how these letters are used to represent the three elements of speech which are also the three elements of creation: breath, water, and flesh.

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.