Use Your Words

8 Pentecost, Cycle A Proper 12, July 26, 2020

1 Kings 3:5-12 Psalm 119:129-136
Romans 8:26-39   Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52

Lectionary Link

Teachers and parents tell their toddlers and preschoolers to "use your words."  This is a diversion technique because kids from sheer instinct use their body language words to hit, bite, scream and show all manner of frustrated chaos.  "Calm down, use your words."   But we know that just using words should not give license to use our words in terrible ways.  We have lots of public figure using their words all of the time, and some in  badly ways meant to hurt other people.

One could say that the coming of the Torah, the law to humanity was God's way of saying to humanity, "Use your words; you cannot just live from impulse to impulse.  You need to have some words that provide the best recommended behaviors to bring order and impulse control.  You need the language of the law to train your body language to do the very best deeds for living."

And just because humanity was given the good words of the law, it did not mean successful behaviors prevailed in the lives of God's people.  They forgot and needed continually to be reminded to "Use their words, God's words in good and right behaviors."

What do we call using good words in political governance?  When Solomon became king of Israel, he asked God for good judgment and wisdom in governing the people and discerning between good and evil.  Certainly this is still what all political leadership needs; wisdom to serve people with profound discernment.  If Israel was supposed to be the kingdom of heaven on earth under their kings, we know that it failed.

In the time of Jesus, One might say that the words of the law, the Torah, were not that successful in the world at large.  In actual practice, they became the way in which an oppressed and occupied nation kept their separate identity.  They became the words which kept Jews living throughout the world of the Roman Empire, maintain a very separate identity.  How could God's best words be shared and given to the entire world, if they were locked within a very small community of people to keep them as separate like perhaps the Amish are in our country today?

God's word came into a different kind of mission in Jesus Christ.  The written words of God of the Torah in their practice were not successful enough to enough people to satisfy a more universal mission.

John's Gospel proclaims that Word was in the beginning of human life as we know it.  And the Word was with God and the Word was God.  And the Word did not just become writing.  The Word became flesh in the person of Jesus.  And Jesus spoke words and he said that his words were spirit and life.

And many of his words came in parables and metaphors about the kingdom of heaven, the nuance of the realm of heaven that can be known in our human and earthly experience.

What do earthly kings and presidents want to do?  They want to make a big flashy show.  They want popularity; they seek popularity for their own legitimacy.  What did Jesus say?  God's heavenly kingdom is accumulatively subtle; it like a tiny mustard seed, insignificant alone and unplanted, but when planted it slowly takes over the landscape.  The kingdom of heaven is the accumulation of each deed of faith and kindness which grows to become a knowable presence of God's uncanny love and goodness.  Don't worry about the big show of your faith; do the small deeds, one by one, kindness upon kindness and know that the survival of this world actually happens because it is supported by the hidden scaffold of all of the deeds of kindness done by people who don't do things for show or politics or money or power.  Believe in the profound preserving effect of this hidden and subtle kingdom of kindness.  

Leaven or yeast is small and tiny but with a little time it can double, triple and quadruple the size of dough.  Why can we still smell the wonderful aroma of fresh yeasty bread out of the oven in the midst of the woes of this world of war, fighting, injustice and pandemic?  Because the aroma of the kingdom of heaven calls out the winsome normalcy of health, of life, liberty, happiness and kindness.  The suffering of the world seems so severe because the aroma of the kingdom of heaven is so wonderful.  And we as people need to follow the wonderful aroma of the kingdom of God.

The kingdom of heaven involves having the wisdom to sort out lives in retrospective.  We haul in the net of the occasions of our experience and we sort out meaning and value.  We retain what is worthy and we discard what is not even as we have to give up some bad things that we've loved too much in our bad habits.  The kingdom of heaven is the promise of the ultimate success of justice and clarity about our human experience.

The kingdom of heaven is like having delicious insider information.  Like finding a gold mine in a garage sale because the seller does not really know what value of what just seems to be ordinary.  The kingdom of heaven is akin to finding supreme value in the middle of what seems to be so natural and ordinary.  It is to find the deep groaning and sighing Holy Spirit within oneself co-existing with our lives surviving everything that can possibly happen to us, and experience the seeming impossible, the experience of feeling loved by Christ through the presence of God's Spirit.

Further the kingdom of heaven is the discovery of the gift of finding something so important that it is worth living and dying for.  For me the value of the Word as God, is the supreme value discovered because it will accompany everything that I ever will do, be, know, speak and write.  A person who knows the kingdom of heaven is the person who has discovered the telling value of one's life, the image of God upon one's life.

And to sum it up, Jesus tells us that the kingdom of heaven is knowing how to "use our words best," by being good scribes.  What is a scribe?  A scribe is a writer.  Writing is the expression of facility in using words in the very best way, not just being literate and able to scribble characters upon the page.  A scribe of the kingdom is one who has learned to use one's words best.  And how does one do that?  Each person seeking to be this scribe of the kingdom of heaven, is one who strives to find one's unique voice, to live, speak, write, and behave the wonderful kind values of the kingdom of God, and do it as it can only be done through each person's unique gifts.

In the Hebrew tradition of the Torah, the Torah was regarded to be a living word tradition, because the Torah travelled through time and had to be interpreted again and again to new situations.  The work of interpretation as scribes of the kingdom of heaven is to bring forth the treasures of the kingdom to the people in our lives.  Christ, as the living Word of God, commissions you and me to be scribes, becoming totally literate in the kingdom of heaven.

You and I have been given the Risen Christ as the Word who is God within us.  We are to be scribes of the kingdom of heaven, learning to use our best words, in saying, teaching and doing the kind deeds of God's love and justice and kindness to all.

May God give us the grace to be wise scribes of the kingdom of heaven as we do the work of interpreting all of the words of our lives so that we can bring forth the goodness of what is both old and new.  And you know what?  Love, justice and kindness are always old and they are always new.  So let these be our best use of our words.  Amen.