Tag: word

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.

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Posted on in Theological English

Theological English (11): Connections – Addition of Letters (1)

In this twelfth video on “Theological English”, Jonathan Dunne continues looking at word connections made by the addition of letters, this time from “i” to “w”. It is curious that “die” contains “be” and “I” (we saw in the previous video that the “world” is a spiritual “womb”, which might explain this). What is even more curious is that “live” also contains “be”, but two “I”s in the first two letters. “Blood” gives “spirit”, as “seed” gives “sleep”. “Word” gives “sword” – our words can become physical, just as God’s words in the beginning created a physical environment. There is a previous video on this theme: “Addition of Letters (0)”.

For the connection between “blood” and “spirit”, see Marcus Plested’s instructive article “‘Give Blood and Receive the Spirit’: The Ascetical Dimension of Mystical Experience” (available online), which looks at the connection between ascetic endeavour and direct experience of God in early Christian literature and how it can be applied today.

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 Word in Language

Word in Language (12): Love

Let us look at the word ‘love’. We have just received a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel puppy, and it is constantly looking for ways to express its love. Its whole attention is focused on this. What a wonder it would be if we were to approach life in the same way.

 

The first thing I see in the word ‘love’ is the progression from I to O, whereby we count down from the ego, I, to God, O, we count down from the number 1 to 0 – the opposite of what we teach our children to do, which is to count up from 1. If you count up from 1, you will constantly amass, what you have will never be enough, and there will be no end. It reminds me of our system of buying and selling, of production (whatever the cost to the environment and to our fellow human beings), whereas if you count down to 0, you have already reached your answer, there is no need to search anymore, you have, in effect, attained peace (and all without any damage to the environment or to your fellow human beings).

 

We saw how it is possible to apply this progression from I to O in pairs of words like LIVE-LOVE, SIN-SON and CHRIST-CROSS. Even Christ, God himself, who came down to earth to translate for us the meaning of life in a form of spiritual writing for the blind called the parable, was prepared to count down from the ego to God (despite being God himself) in order to show us how it was done. In this way, he also acquired a human nature – he became a translator, as well as an author – and in acquiring human nature he exalted it, that we in turn might go the other way and become gods. This process is known in Orthodoxy as theosis and it is the purpose of our existence, to acquire the virtues, to transform the passions, to exercise self-control and to become as we were made: in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:26).

 

After this progression, this humbling of ourselves, we find the two letters ‘ve’, which as I have already pointed out can be connected to ‘be’ by the ‘eighth’ phonetic pair b-v-w. So ‘love’ seems to contain a turning to God in order that we might be. We go from the line to the circle, then we slip down into the valley of the v, in order to reach the e, which as a capital letter (E) is three-pronged, perhaps representing what the I can become when it worships the Holy Trinity.

 

There is a descent, therefore, a lesson in humility, a being brought low, in order to climb again. It is as if we deconstruct ourselves, our false image of what we are meant to be, in order to find our true selves, because if there is one thing I am sure of, it is that if we lose ourselves for Christ’s sake, it is then – and only then – that we will truly find ourselves, in that first and most telling of the paradoxes contained in Christianity (you must lose your life in order to find it).

 

In effect, we evolve. And EVOLVE can be seen to contain LOVE with the repetition of certain letters. If we again apply the pair b-v-w, we might say that EVOLVE reads WE LOVE or LOVE/BE. There is clearly a connection between communion with others – WE – and existence – BE.

 

We have different mathematical shapes, most of them filled out, bulging or with sharp edges – a circle, a square, a rectangle – but the shape I associate with love is not so full of itself as these, it is the oval, a clasping of the hands, a sheltering of the light, a timid prayer. LOVE and OVAL are connected by a slight shift in the vowels, from a to e. As if this weren’t enough, having recourse again to the ‘eighth’ phonetic pair, we see that the first three letters of LOVE give LOW. We do not exalt ourselves, place ourselves first – this is not love – we give way to the other, we make a gesture. This is love.

 

And we already saw how LOVE is connected with OTHER by the phonetic pair l-r, the alphabetical pair t-v, addition of h, in what for me is one of the most remarkable connections. LOVE and OTHER are central words in language. Love implies the other; without the other, there can be no love, or only self-love, which is not really love at all.

 

OTHER is connected to THEOS (alphabetical pair r-s), the Greek word for ‘God’. The other is God. We find (serve) God in the other. Christ says as much in Matthew 25:40: ‘Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’ We are called to practise our love on our neighbour, to go beyond our rational thinking, our thirst for revenge, and bestow love even on our enemies. How wonderfully illogical! How wonderfully nonsensical! Turn the other cheek? You must be joking!

 

And yet there it is. A minus leads to a plus when one I combines with another. The other – my wife, my son, my neighbour – gives me back my life. Isn’t it that simple? Whoever gave life to himself?

 

We also saw that LOVE makes us WHOLE (b-v-w again, addition of h), but it can be misdirected and turned into LOVE for MONEY (l-m-n in the alphabet, physical pair – pair of letters that look alike – v-y) or POWER (phonetic pairs l-r and v-w, addition of p). This is love with a view to the senses, the material world and our place in it.

 

I would like to finish with two astonishing word connections for LOVE.

 

If you remember no other word connection, remember this one: LOVE is connected to WORD by the phonetic pairs l-r and v-w and the alphabetical pair d-e. Now we know that God is love (1 Jn 4:8) and God is the Word, so there is confirmation for you because the two words are intimately connected. I would suggest that the connections LOVE-OTHER-THEOS and LOVE-WORD are central to the Gospel message and to our existence. God spoke the world into being – he did this through love. God sent his only-begotten Son, the Word, to redeem us from our sins, to call us back to the straight path – he did this through love. God can be found all around us when we act with love. You should have seen the look of this puppy when it came into my son’s arms – it was a look of pure love. And they had only just met!

 

Everything else falls away – the structures that we have invented, the scaffolding with which we have surrounded our lives, the lies we have been told ever since we were children. They are not important anymore. The only thing that matters now is love (those two words are surely connected).

 

And then we come to an extraordinary conclusion because, if I apply the ‘eighth’ phonetic pair b-v-w (again!) and the physical pair i-l, I find that ‘I owe’ is replaced by ‘love’. There is no debt. DEBT, as a word, is connected to DEATH (as it should be). Our debt melts away in a tide of love, and the promissory note – the IOU – becomes an exclamation of recognition: I, O You!

 

We recognize ourselves in the other. We caress them. And thank them for giving us back our life – our real life, this time.

 

Jonathan Dunne, http://www.stonesofithaca.com