1 Christmas B December 31, 2023
Is.61:10-62:3 Ps. 147:13-21
Gal. 3:23-25,4:4-7 John 1:1-18
We can try to imagine a world without words and language, but we can only do so by using language.
We can observe babies and animals not conversing with us and try to imagine their "unlanguaged" states, but we have to use language to do so.
As adults we can try to remember what it was like to be in the womb or to be babies without language, but we only do so by retrospectively imposing a language upon our natal state and pretend to translate what we must have felt like or how we might have described our state of infancy when we did not have language ability.
We might even describe the state of not having language as as state of unformed seeming random void.
Imagine the frustrated void of the very young Helen Keller before she was initiated into the world of language. Her caretakers could only observe her struggles and her frustrations and anger and they could only make her a passive person of their own linguistic projections, even with profound empathy.
The beginning or birth of her life in a poignant way was when her tutor, Anne Sullivan, initiated her into the world of language. When her naming ability was released, she became a language user and she became the co-creator of her world to be known by her in only the way in which she could know it. Ms. Sullivan has been called the "miracle worker" for her midwifery of the young Helen into words, language, and achieving naming ability.
If we can appreciate the event of Helen Keller being initiated into her native language ability, then we can understand perhaps some of the most profound words in the Bible: "In the beginning was the Word...." The book of beginning, the book of Genesis, assumes that everything began with words authored by a Supreme Language User. And God said, "Let there be light.....and there was light." So the creation story is told about God as a speaker, and the Spirit who makes flesh the words of the Creator, makes externally existent the vast order of creation. And between Creating God as Word Speaker and the Spirit as the Ultimate 3-D printer of the world, the Word was the source of all words, and this Word was confessed by the early Christians as Christ the eternal Word from the Beginning.
Rather than reducing sublime poetry about Christ to a crassly linear history of a world with a vastness that will ever leave us mystified, even as we think that we know more and better our little patch of that world, we can appreciate the poetry of the Christ-nature of all things. In Pauline poetry, Christ is confessed as all and in all. That is a poetically possibility if Christ is understood to be the Word from the beginning.
The Greek word for beginning is "arche." This word can also refer to in Greek philosophy as the first principle. Modern science in the effort to find a unified answer for everything, always, all at once, posits a big bang beginning as a way of articulating a basement starting point, but even then rhetorically we must confess that it is still "turtles all the way down," even under the basement of a theoretical big bang.
As people of faith, we are more interested in the art of living and such an art involves integrating the wonderful insights of science, while maintaining our side of wonder based upon the experience of sheer Plenitude which mixes the simple and the complex in an infinite number of ways.
As people of faith, we can appreciate the First Principle of humanity is that we have language; that we are constituted by the language of our lives. We are language users in a way that makes us different among the other creatures and entities of life. Other creatures and entities have their own modes of interrelation and communication which we can observe and speculate about from our own language perspective; but we know that we have being and knowable relationship by virtue of being people with language. Language creates human life as we know it and knowing this should help us appreciate the insight of The Great Word being equivalent with God. Or as the Gospel of John declares in John's Christmas Story: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
In this great insight, we can appreciate That Word or Language is co-extensive with what is none greater than can be conceived, as in the ontological definition of God expounded by St. Anselm.
Word is how the Everything, Always, All at Once, gets parsed into the limitations placed upon us by Time. An reservoir of infinite words is worthless unless those words can have instantiations within the times of actual language users.
And so we have the poetic and philosophical Bethlehem in the Gospel of John: And the Word, (that is the Word that is God), was made, became manifest, was funneled into a fleshly person, and lived dwelled with us. This is another expression of the emptying of the Plenitude into parseable human portions and simultaneously human experience is elevated as a valid way to come to know the horizon event of humanity whom we can come to confess God to be.
The Word was made flesh....Word constitutes our inward life because we name the geography of what is happening within us; Word also constitute the world of our landscape and our interactions with it. Through Him (the Word), everything was created and has being. This is profound first principle, to have the insight that our life as being human is founded in a unique way by virtue of us having language.
And if we are constituted by language, the art of living has to do with each person finding the very best voice of their lives, the voice to love God, to love one's neighbor and to love oneself.
The very best of Word, is still attempting to lure us to use and be guided by the very best words of our lives. We are hindered in this because we have learned some losing scripts which keep us trapped into acting out in less than ideal ways.
We believe in Spirit because we believe that the invisible world of words within us needs to be re-ordered and constituted or constantly relearned to be made better flesh in us in the body language deeds of our lives, even the deeds of love and justice.
On this last day of the year, let us commit ourselves to the process of the Word being made flesh again within our speech acts, our writing, and within the body language of our lives. When we as a group of people commit ourselves to finding the Voice of the words of love and justice inundating our lives, we will arise to be co-creators in the tremendous work of love and justice which needs to be done in our world.
Let us commit ourselves in the new year to the best words of our lives, following Jesus who was exemplary word made flesh. Amen.
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