The Rev. Sara Warfield
It seems to me that there’s something important about words in our faith. In Isaiah today, God has called God’s people by their names—the word of God protects the people. In the Psalm, the words of the Lord break cedar trees and divide the lightning. In the Acts, John and Peter go to the Samaritans because they accept the word of God. And in the gospel of Luke, words come down from heaven and declare to all of us that Jesus is the way that God comes into the world.
In Genesis, God speaks the world into existence with words. In that same vein, the Gospel of John declares that Jesus is the capital-W Word of God made flesh. Before coming into the world, Jesus was the Word
…and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.
God’s words, according to our scripture, have the power to create and to destroy.
And if God’s words have that power, why wouldn’t ours? After all, we are the only species of God’s creation that uses words. That’s not to say other species don’t communicate. Of course they do. But we humans are the only organisms to assign symbols to the stuff of our world and ponder the meaning of that stuff—things, emotions, actions—by stringing those symbols together into thoughts.
“Give me liberty or give me death” inspired a people to revolution. These words led to what became not only the United States of America but the particular American ethos as we know it today.
“God helps those who help themselves” created the so-called Protestant work ethic despite those words not coming from the Bible but from Benjamin Franklin. These words have helped to form our views around productivity and laziness, for better and for worse.
“Survival of the fittest” forever altered the way we think about how the world was created. The misuse of these words has sought to justify colonialism and racism as scientifically sound.
Words DO create our world. Or at least they shape our perception of the world, and for all intents and purposes, perception is indeed reality—especially if we’re not open to other perspectives, other ways of perceiving.
Words are also SO easy to come by these days. Especially printed words. Up until the 15th century when the printing press was introduced to Europe, the vast majority of people on earth neither read nor wrote. But even once the printing press came along, very few people had access to the press itself, not to mention the quantity of paper and ink needed to set down and widely spread their thoughts and ideas. So those with printing presses were picky about what they published. So words that had been printed tended to have a gravity, a sense of truth, that spoken or even handwritten words did not.
And I think we continue to carry that belief about the printed word with us today, if even subconsciously. And there are printed words EVERYWHERE we look. Billboards, forms, screens. Printed words are easier than ever to come by these days. Even though we KNOW that certain words are trying to convince us to buy something, even though we know that the vast majority of words printed about, say, the Los Angeles fires or transgender kids or opinions on Tesla trucks on Facebook are not written by experts in those topics’ respective fields, we still tend to give them more weight. They still impact our sense of what is true.
Printed words can be most dangerous when interpreted in isolation—just as scripture can be most dangerous when interpreted in isolation. Think the Unabomber interpreting the world by himself in his remote Montana cabin. Think cult leaders who create an entire theology in isolation. Think a person who only gets their news from Facebook, where the algorithm feeds her content that will either confirm her view of the world or outrage her. Yes, the algorithms make getting our information solely on social media a very isolating experience.
This is why the loss of local newspapers has been so devastating to our common and civic life. Maybe those papers had their own agenda, and maybe they didn’t always get the facts right, and even though we read them by ourselves, maybe over our coffee in the morning, we still went out into a world where most everyone had read that same paper, and we could discuss and even debate the headlines and come to some sense of truth together.
When we seek out or are fed news that is customized to what we are already prone to believe, and when we have no information held in common shaping our conversations and our truth, it becomes very easy to condemn and even demonize those who aren’t getting the same information, who are getting news that paints a very different picture of the world.
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There’s a reason we have a Book of Common Prayer—and though we usually don’t use the actual red book, we do use the liturgies, the words from that book. Just so you know, I’ve decided not to use the actual books because it’s easier for people who are new to our tradition to follow our worship in the smaller booklets than flipping back and forth between the red book’s pages.
It is the practice of the Anglican tradition, of which The Episcopal Church is a part, to say and hear the same words together week after week as a way of finding the truth of our faith together. When we all say the Nicene Creed together or, today, the Baptismal Covenant, do you think we all believe exactly the same thing about, say, the virgin birth, or about the resurrection of the body? You even hear murmurs of difference as we’re speaking together—some of us say “creator” instead of “father.” Some of us say “she” when we refer to the Holy Spirit. These all point to different ways of believing, gathered all in the same place, brushing up against each other, quietly nudging us to consider how those differences might open up our own ways of believing, if even just a little bit.
It’s also why we have Bible Study: so that we can each share our thoughts and feelings about the same scripture and allow ourselves to be opened and changed by other interpretations. I often bring to this pulpit how my own interpretation was opened and changed by that conversation.
Of course that doesn’t mean accepting every different belief as your own belief. There are some beliefs that don’t need more believers. It simply means that we open ourselves to how another person may have come to that belief, to understand how that belief may be serving their particular situation, maybe in a healthy way, maybe not. That’s not for us to judge. What’s up to us is how we allow ourselves to see the person behind that belief.
There is no truth to be found in isolation. Yes, you can gather facts and, yes, you can form a very detailed and nuanced perspective on a topic or issue by yourself, but truth only comes when we risk letting our perspective be opened up and changed by other perspectives. It’s why writers have editors and scientific research isn’t considered credible without peer review.
And while it’s possible for our perspective to be opened up online and on social media, it’s not likely. Social media strips perspectives of the human behind that perspective, of the flesh and blood person with feelings and struggles.
It’s much more likely to happen when we are face to face, when we must take in the humanity of the person behind the words.
In a few moments, we will be saying the words of the Baptismal Covenant together. And as we do, I invite you to look around and wonder how others might be taking in those words, how their particular situation and struggles might magnify a different part of the covenant than what is being magnified for you.
And I invite you to notice how the truth of that covenant, the truth of our faith, can only be realized when we allow ourselves to be open to all those different ways of interpreting, all those different ways of believing.
Amen.
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