Freethinking on Words

(Much of this made its way into last Sunday's message. The link is coming as soon as our new website goes live. Right now LittletonChristian.com has slipped into the void...)

Freethinking on Words:

We are all of us moved by words.  The power of words and thoughts is, when you consider it for but a moment, astounding.  Many people have done extraordinary work to narrow the gap between the human species and other animals, but quick observation will reveal the most clever of all animals simply learning to respond to human words.  No doubt, they may have an intelligence of their own, but the prowess of concepts and ideas rests in the human mind alone.  And we share those ideas not through scent, or intimidation, or mere survival, but through words.  Words are our connection to the unseen, to the intangible.  When I have an interior experience, or an experience with an invisible being – be it the non-created, Personal God of Christianity or a created but non-physical thing commonly referred to as an angel or a demon – my only outlet for sharing that experience is words. 

Words as mere symbols for things – and I’m talking about every type of word, including numbers, though numbers is in many ways a separate and equally astounding category – are the vehicle by which anything is communicable from one of us to the other.  While I thought Erin was beautiful from afar in college, and realized it even more so when she visited this church from California, it wasn’t her striking appearance that caused me to fall in love with her.  That happened while she was 1200 miles away, but was writing a  long wonderful email to me nearly every day, engaging the emails and letters I had written her, and thereby “showing” me who she was.  Truly, the words revealed so much more than anything my eyes could see.  Even when the first few dates we had were difficult, the words that we had shared had already formed an intimate bond that caused us to battle through the embarrassment of now knowing how to “be” around each other.  Words did that. 

And isn’t that the case with the billions of people you don’t know on this earth?  You see them, and may be able to make a few guesses about who they are based on – what do we call them? Non-verbals – but each person has so much hiding inside their mind and heart, the only way into it is words.  Each culture will use words differently (not to mention different words all together, given the manifold languages of this globe, both past and present), and yet the words are how people come to know one another.  They are the tangible window to the invisible world all over the world.  “The words of the mouth are deep waters; the fountain of wisdom is a gushing stream.”

Flying way under the radar for most of us is the most provocative format for words: poetry.  Of course, poetry has continued to hold preeminence in our society, though most of us are unaware, in the form of song. 

“Poetry is an effort to share a moving experience by using language that is chosen and structured differently than ordinary prose.”  To say it differently: poetry opens the window into the unseen and removes the screen of grammatical rules (which are important).  It exposes words for all their power, in many different ways.  Words that we would otherwise not expect to be paired together are paired together.  The Proverbs, which in many ways are simply a collection of poems expressing wisdom, regularly employ shock value to express ideas.  “Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout,” they say “is a beautiful woman without good sense.”  Poetry connects ideas together.  And, as I said, song employs poetry regularly, but the poetic power of metaphor has perhaps been so normalized for us that we miss it.  We have been so inundated with provocative language that it no longer provokes us.  As we discussed last week: the abundance of noise around us teaches us not to listen.  There are so many words around us that we’ve forgotten how to take them in, to understand their power.  When we drive down the street we see thousands of words, we register hundreds of them, and the rest simply pass by.  Would the words of Jesus infuriate us the way they infuriated the Jewish leaders?  Or have we been “shock-valued” so many times that we can no longer hear when a true shock arrives?

What tragedy, that so many masses are being sedated with images which do not engage nearly as much of their minds!  I am among them – by the grace of God, I have a deep enjoyment, and even a sort of deep confidence, in words – and yet I surely have traded 90 or more percent of the time I could have been engaging words in my lifetime watching fruitless images in television, video games, movies, etc. 

Before I go too far in blaming our culture for ruining the power of words (and ruining so much, as I am often inclined to do), I should allow the words which I claim to value above all other words instruct my perspective.  If the repeated warnings of Proverbs are correct, words driven by greed or another form of wickedness, as opposed to knowledge, seemed to be rampant 3000 years ago as they are now.  2000 years ago, the Apostle Paul rings his hands at the ease by which persuasive words derailed his ministry (“You foolish Galatians,” he sighs, “who has bewitched you?”).  And in perhaps the most famous discussion of speech in all of scripture, James laments that that “no one can tame the tongue.”  In so many forms, words have been misused. 

That fact, however, is not an excuse.  It is a recognition of our need for redemption and renewal.  When Paul calls forth the fundamental self-surrender of the Christian, he instructs us to “be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”  It is the Spirit who transforms, and the transformation happens at the core level: the mind.  The result is that our thought processes, the invisible worlds in between our ears and beating in our chest, will be different. Which means that eventually, the way in and the way out will be different.  James laments you cannot bring fresh water from a source made up of salt-water, and that is true – yet, many of us who have had our source replaced by giving our lives to Christ continue to spew saltwater.  Why, if the source within is one of Fresh?  I propose that it is possible because we continue to take saltwater in.  Similar to the common adage, “what goes up must come down,” we might say “what goes in must come out.” 

If words are as powerful as I am here suggesting, if they bring the invisible and intangible into the visible and tangible, then there is no doubt that believers who want fresh water to come forth – blessing and not cursing, as James says – must be incredibly critical about the words we choose to bring in.  In a world where countless words are available to every one of us with the click of a button, this is hugely significant.  I would include here all the images we see – every television show or movie you’ve ever watched is the signifier of a set of signifiers; it started with words, either spoken, thought, or (most commonly) written.  The most powerful movies started with the most powerful words.  Be incredibly careful what you let in.  This has a limit, of course.  Jesus offers a crucial corrective in a discussion about clean and unclean food - some of what goes into us (mostly food) ends up in the sewer.  It may be the case that the words out of your mouth are much more disgusting than the objects in your toilet (Matt. 15:10-20).