Where the Word Is

Romans 10:8b-13

First Sunday in Lent

25 February 2007

Stacey Simpson Duke

 

One of the things I am learning from living with two two year-olds is how early we humans begin internalizing certain words and concepts, and using them as our prime resources in time of need.  For instance, the word “milk.”  Surely one of our most primal concepts, associated with comfort, nurture, and the deep and complete response to need.  It begins from our earliest days, this profound association of food with security and well-being.  These days, if one of our boys is sick or hurting, if he can’t sleep or if he is just trying to wake up, this is still often the first word on his lips: Milk.

 

As our boys got a little older, they learned an equally powerful word: Mine.  This became their trump in any argument about possession, and their plea to whatever higher authorities might arbitrate.  Mine! they would shout at each other.  Mine! they would whine to whichever adult was in earshot.

 

And as they have gotten older, they have added nuance to that word and its implied power, turning it into their very favorite phrase, and the one I dislike the most: I had it first.  If you haven’t been around young children in awhile, let me assure you that they believe this is the card that truly trumps all others.  It can be half a day since they last played with that puzzle or looked at that book, but if another child picks it up, sure enough you will hear those plaintive words, I had it first.   It appears to them to be the most reasonable, persuasive concept of ownership in the world.  And its power is lodged very deep.

 

One night recently, I heard Rob crying in his sleep.  The crying intensified, got louder, and I went to check on him.  I rubbed his back and tried to soothe him, but he did not calm down.  Instead he opened his eyes, looked at me and cried out, in a half-awake state, “I had it first!  Pooh Bear book.  I had it first!”

 

Less obnoxiously, but still persistently and powerfully, another concept has recently taken hold of their little psyches: Look at me, mommy!  I did it!   Whether it’s finishing a puzzle, or jumping off a table, or finding a lost toy, this is the first impulse that comes with accomplishment:  Look at me!  I did it!   If we are lucky, we grew up with willing adults, who were happy to give us the recognition and admiration we so desperately sought.

 

These are some of the earliest, most significant concepts we learned – words that we clung to, words we came back to again and again to express our needs – for security and comfort – milk! – for possession or power – mine! I had it first! – for affection, admiration, love – look at me! I did it!   Whatever more sophisticated words we have learned since those early days, whatever more subtle ways we have found of getting what we want or need, these words and these concepts lie very close to the core of our being.

 

Part of what it means to become an adult, and certainly part of what it means to grow into maturity as a person of faith, is to move beyond enslavement to these desires.  If we are given appropriate psychological, emotional, and social resources as we grow up, then along the way we learn important things like impulse control and deferred gratification, or at least how not to be so blatant with our neediness, our power plays, our possessiveness and territorialism. 

 

Still, those needs and wants persist, and whatever challenges and temptations we face are usually fought on these battlegrounds – security, comfort possession, power, affection.  These lie at the root of our deep longings; these are the grounds of our struggles and our fears, our conflicts and our temptations.

 

Think about it.  Every bad choice you’ve made had, as its impetus, some desire for something good you felt you really, deeply needed.  Is this not true?  Every bad choice represented a promise, an illusion that you could somehow get the security, or the power, or the affection, that would finally make you happy and make you whole.  Even the littler choices, the small and daily struggles we face, usually have at their base some greater longing – the decisions we make about how to spend our time, our money, our love; about what and how much to eat; about where we let our thoughts go; about what we say about other people.  Most of these things do not feel like epic struggles for our soul, they are just the stuff of daily living.  But you and I both know that over time these little choices shape our souls and make us who we are. 

 

What are your resources when faced with choices big and small that seem to promise to fill some deep need?  What do you do, in time of need or struggle, in time of conflict or fear or loneliness?  What words rise up in you?  What words are in your heart and on your lips?  Are your words simply more sophisticated versions of the old childish ones? – milk! mine! look at me!  Or have you found other resources?

 

Our culture is certainly happy to supply a steady stream of words for us – slogans and jingles that tell us what we need to buy or do or be.  To this day, when I am vaguely hungry and restless but am not sure what I need, the words I hear in my head are: “Snickers really satisfies!”  But there are plenty of others out there – from commercials or magazine ads, TV shows and movies.  Don’t worry, be happy.  Hakuna matata.  Where’s the beef?  Obey your thirst.  Have a Coke and a smile.  Is that your final answer?  You’ve come a long way, baby.  There are hundreds more, each one as useless as the next.  But we let them fill our heads, and  that’s what tends to get lodged in our hearts as well.  It’s what comes out of our mouths, too. 

We start this Lent the way we do every year, with a story.  A particular story about an event that seems very far away to us, and not particularly relevant to our lives – the temptation of Jesus.  A forty day showdown with the devil, during which time Jesus spent his days in solitude and prayer and fasting.  Then the devil put him to the test with very specific temptations that most of us probably can’t relate to.  Turn a rock into bread.  Bow down to the devil.  Throw himself off the top of a tall building.  None of those sound all that tempting to me, how ‘bout you?

 

But beneath those offers there are the same old illusions that beckon to you and me.  On the surface, the offers may sound blatantly ridiculous, but the temptations are the same as for any of us – security, power, rescuing love.  The tempter here is offering some of the most basic things we all want, and what makes them tempting is that they are easy, they are cheap, they are shortcuts. Perhaps most temptations are like this – offering an end that is reasonable and desirable and maybe even good but through a means that is cheap and compromising.

 

What words were on Jesus’ lips and in his heart during this difficult time? What rises to his lips is what he has stored in his heart. Not empty slogans or childish whining.  To every temptation, he responds with some word from Scripture.  He can do this because those words are in him, they are a part of him.

 

These days, the very idea of committing Scripture to memory, of course, is passé. (In fact, why ever memorize anything at all, when we can just google it?)  We dismiss such exercises as simplistic and irrelevant, something we did as schoolchildren to win prizes from our Sunday School teachers.  But if you yourself have ever committed a piece of Scripture to memory and have kept it there into your adulthood, then perhaps you know its value.  If you have learned the words of Scripture, and prayed the words of Scripture, what grows in you is the living word of Scripture.  It is what comes to you in times of trouble.  Your back against the wall, and suddenly there it is: “What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee.”  You are raw with grief, and there it is: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.”  You are trying to sort out what to do with your life, your time, your energy, and there it is: “Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your God.”  You are alone, despairing, life falling apart, and there it is: “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.  When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.  For I am the Lord your God….  (Y)ou are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you.”

 

What are the words that come to you when you need help, when you face a hard choice, when you’re under fire?

 

It matters what we store inside ourselves.  It matters what we gaze upon, what we meditate on, what we read, what we watch, what we listen to.  When we’re put to the test, our soul dips into the reservoir of our memory, and draws up what is there.  If we want to face both our daily decisions and our great challenges with something more than childish demands and meaningless mottos, then we have to have something more than that in our hearts.

 

In his letter to the Romans, Paul quotes from Deuteronomy: “the word is very near to you, on your lips and in your heart.”  The original passage from Deuteronomy went on: “It is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach.  It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask: ‘Who will ascend into heaven for us to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?’”  It is a revolutionary and liberating proclamation – that we do not have to rely on some intermediary to tell us what we need and what to do, that we do not have to go great heights or unreasonable lengths to get some clue about how to live our lives, as individuals or as a people.  The word is very near us, in our hearts, on our lips. 

 

Is that actually the case, for us?  I would venture to guess that most of us have, at best, an uneasy relationship with this book.  Some of us simply feel uncertain of how to read it, we feel daunted and ignorant.  Others of us are suspicious and unconvinced of its value.  Still others of us are downright hostile.  Some of us have been hurt by people wielding this book as a weapon.

 

Whatever your stance, what could it hurt, to try engaging it yourself, and with an open mind?  Not as a little book of rules, or a little book of promises; not as a little god or a good luck charm; not as a collection of moralisms or a theological treatise.  It is not any of those things; it speaks the living Word of the living God to the real needs of the lives we are living.  Kafka once wrote, “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? … A book must be like an ice-axe to break the frozen sea within us.”[i]   Of all books, this book has that power – the problem is, we do not read it as if that were the case.  We do not trust that this is the case – that there is power here, not the kind that will hurt us, or box us in, or chain us to ridiculous old dogmas, or suffocate us under a pile of rules, but the power to set us free, the power to give us a vision of another kind of life, the power to break the frozen sea within us. 

 

It’s okay if you can’t believe this.  It’s okay if you’re quite skeptical about both its power and its relevance.  Its power and relevance don’t come through objective analysis and discussion; we cannot learn it from the outside.  “The word is very near you,” Paul reminds us – on your lips and in your heart.  This is not a head trip.  We do not get convinced first, and then engage it.  The only way it makes sense is in the engagement.  We take it up and live it, and then perhaps we understand.

 

In the book of Revelation, St. John writes: “I went to the angel and told him to give me the little scroll; and he said to me, ‘Take it, and eat; it will be bitter to your stomach, but sweet as honey in your mouth.’  And I took the little scroll from the hand of the angel and ate it; it was sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it my stomach was made bitter.” (Rev. 10:9-10).  

 

Not a bad metaphor, in this season that has typically had such focus on eating – giving up certain foods, fasting on certain days.  What if we spent Lent eating this book, taking it into ourselves, chewed it, savored it, swallowed and digested it – lived it.

 

Of course, the living Word is more than just these words, in this book.  This book leads us where we need to go, to the Word.  The Word made flesh, God in Christ, drawn near.  To take these words into ourselves is to begin to take that Word into our lives, to learn Christ, to put on Christ.

 

Christ is the Word, and our calling at Lent is to take this Word – Christ – inside our lives, to live more and more with him among us and inside us.  The word is very near you, on your lips and in your hearts.  What if we let this living Word – Christ - supplant all those other false or hollow or distorted words in our lives?  What if we let this Word – Christ - nurture and nourish us, so that when times of testing come, when times of temptation or fear or doubt or despair come, we find this strong Word rising in our hearts and on our lips.  A word that resists the dark forces that press on us, a word that makes us free to say No to bad choices and old habits – and makes us free to say Yes to a new kind of life. 

 

When Paul reminded us that the word is very near us, on our lips and in our hearts, this is ultimately what he meant – Christ.  Christ, who lived in the desert, and who, when faced with the worst life could deal him, called up the old words of Scripture. Our lives are pretty much lived in what feels like a desert too, and we sometimes find ourselves pressed, seduced, under fire, pushed against a wall, tested in ways we cannot manage, and we find ourselves wishing that old words of power would rise from our memories, but they simply aren’t there. We don’t know these words the way he did.    But if Christ is the Word, and Christ knows all the words we wish we’d learned, or that we once learned and later lost, then to take him in is to find the source of all the Word we’ll ever need.