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The Rev. Frank Logue
Beyond Words Words fail. It is a self-evident that sometimes mere words can not describe our feelings. Stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon. Feel the wind rising off the canyon walls as it strikes your face. See the light dappling in all the nooks and crannies of the great chasm. Then try to describe this in words. For those who have stood there for themselves, your experience will bring back their own, and your words will carry some weight. But tell of feelings felt so deeply on the edge of the Grand Canyon to someone who has never been outside the confines of the corn fields of Iowa and words alone will fall flat. A mother holds her newborn baby. Those perfect hands touch her own. She counts and recounts the ten tiny toes—flesh of her flesh, that has been taking shape inside her. No words can sum up the experience. We only have the power to evoke the faintest shadow of the mountain of emotion generated by the mother and child. I could go on and on with the indescribable, scenes of such power that words can not begin to convey the full range of feeling. Wittgenstein was a philosopher of language in the 19th century. Having spent his career having thought perhaps a little too long and a touch to hard about language, he found that language did just fall short of the power to describe experiences of intense emotion. The philosopher said that human words are even completely incapable of describing something as mundane as the aroma of coffee. Most of life is conveyed at best by analogy, comparison. One thing is like another. The clouds are like sheep’s wool. The man is as dull as a doorknob. Perhaps this is why I love southern expressions so much as they convey a lot with minimal language. Anyone can be as busy as a one-armed paper hanger. But it takes a southerner to be busy as a stump-tailed cow in fly time or to remind someone that the sun don’t shine on the same dog’s tail all the time. But when you really need the power of words is when you find yourself in high cotton until somebody gives you down the country then you fly off the handle and end up with the short end of the stick. That’s when you decide that it’s time to fish or cut bait, realize you don’t have a dog in that fight so instead of hollerin’ like a stuck pig you just saddle on out of there as slick as snot on a doorknob. Words have great power. They can create tasty sentences that amuse or arouse. But language still fails to convey all we wish to describe. The philosopher Wittgenstein, who wrote of our inability to describe the aroma of coffee did so in writing to say that we should not be surprised when language falls short in the task of describing God. He noted if we can’t describe a cup of coffee, how much more difficult is it to portray God with words. Yet this was the task faced with the authors of the scripture. Inspired by God, they gave us moving passages of great depth of meaning knowing that God is still beyond words. The Gospel writers had a slightly easier task in that they were trying to tell not of the idea of God, but of God made human in Jesus of Nazareth. Each of the Gospels picks a different starting place in order to set the stage for their story. If the altar is Jesus three years of ministry that began with his baptism in the Jordan River, then Mark begins right here at the altar [stand immediately in front of the altar]. Luke begins earlier, even before Jesus birth, in the Temple in Jerusalem with the Angel Gabriel announcing the birth of John the Baptist to his father Zechariah [walk a third of the way back down the aisle of the church]. Matthew begins even earlier [walk nearly to the back row of the church] with Jesus’ genealogy starting with Abraham, the father of the Jews. John begins much much earlier [walk out to the front doors of the church and from just outside the church shout] “In the beginning was the Word [continue shouting and then lower voice while walking back into the church saying]
and the Word was God and the Word was with God and the Word
was God. John takes us back to the beginning. The “In the Beginning” of the Book of Genesis. He reminds us that the story of Jesus started there before the world began, when the spirit of God hovered over the waters in creation as chaos swirled into order. There before the story of humanity was Jesus as divinity, the Word of God creating the world. John opts to begin in the beginning and to do so with words of poetry. Knowing that words fail, that all language falls short of describing the glory of God, John chooses poetry to point to the triune God beyond all language. In doing so, John uses words laden with meaning. We calls Jesus the “Logos,” a word from Greek philosophy which meant much more than Word. Logos is the idea or concept behind the words of language. The Logos is the eternal pattern, the perfect ideal which the word tries to express. So the word “Square” means a shape equal on all sides. Even if we can never draw a perfect square, the word square still refers to that perfection. So Jesus is that perfect Word. John also tells us that this perfect Word pitched his tent in our midst. The Word is tabernacled and it brought up for Jews the image of the tabernacle in the Exodus where God’s glory dwelt with Israel, the same glory of God that tabernacled in the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem. The poetic words saying that “God pitched his tent among us” convey that in the same way that the Shekinah—the very glory of God—was present in the Temple, so that same glory is present in Jesus. But in tenting among us, Jesus is out among the people, not contained within the unvisitable part of the Temple. In this poetic way, John pointed to so much more than he said. For the Temple was the nexus, the meeting place of God and humanity on earth. And for Jesus to be God tabernacled among us means that Jesus is that meeting place of the human and the divine. Jesus becomes that place of mediating between God and humanity. In Jesus the glory of God became visible on earth. This prologue then sets us up for all that follows. For when we see Jesus at the well with the Samaritan woman and he accepts her, showing her the loving care others did not, then we see the very glory of God made manifest. We see the heart of God lived out on earth. Again and again in John’s Gospel we see signs that point to Jesus being God among us. Then he teaches from these signs more about God than we could learn otherwise. I could go on making connections, but John’s Gospel does it so well in two verses. I will let John make the connection. Here in verse 18, the end of our reading for today, he writes, “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” Then at the end of chapter 20, he writes, “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which were not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” John’s Gospel lets us know clearly that all the words in the world could not contain Jesus. Words themselves would fail to describe Jesus who was the Word and beyond the power of mere words to express. The words that were used convey enough about who Jesus was and is, what he was like, that you and I may see and believe. John began with Jesus’ presence in creation and then moved to his ministry, then to his death and resurrection and his ongoing presence with his followers through the power of the Holy Spirit. John knew that writing a Gospel was worthwhile because Jesus was God’s own glory who had pitched his tent among us and then had left the Holy Spirit as his own first gift to those who come to believe in him. The Jesus who was the Word made flesh would still be present with those who heard John’s Gospel. You may never have stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon and so my words will fail to describe that experience. You may never be that mother first laying eyes on the child that has been forming inside her and so my words will never convey her feelings. Yet the same Holy Spirit who inspired John’s Gospel inspires you as you hear the Gospel read and even as you sit through my rambling attempt to explain it in a sermon. Words fail to convey the presence of God in your life, but God’s presence is every bit as real, and even more vital, than all those experiences in your life that are beyond words. The God whose presence dwelt in fullness in Jesus of Nazareth is also fully present in your heart and here in our worship in Word and Sacrament. Amen.
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