Sunday
January 16
A Famine of the Word?
By Marsh Chapel
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Introduction
One shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. (2 Kings 1:8, Matt. 4:4). You shall not live by bread alone.
Not by bread, alone, but by the word…
We do not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.
A long time ago, now, an Irishman wrote his first best seller. Frank McCourt’s lovely bildungsroman, his coming of age novel, Angela’s Ashes, ends with the young boy escaping his past, escaping his family of origin, escaping the biology that threatens always to become full destiny, and feeding himself. He is so hungry that he finds trashed newspapers in which the daily fish and chips have been wrapped, and he licks the papers clean of scraps and bits and crumbs and oil, until the words on the paper fill his mouth. His whole book is about his deliverance, how he learned to live by reading, how he learned to love through words… how he learned to live by reading, how he learned to love through words.
Not by bread alone…
The ancients knew this. An education is in part the freedom to travel beyond the confines of the 21st century. Our Holy Scripture, read Sunday by Sunday at Marsh Chapel, is a part of that liberation, that freedom, that freeing of the mind. The books of the prophets, from Hosea to Malachi, and from Isaiah to Daniel, are part of the spiritual road map, the religious diet for the long journey of, toward, in, by and through faith. Amos fiercely predicts that all manner of calamity will befall his 8th century BC countrymen. He saves the most horrific for last. There will come a time, he forecasts, given human wayward habits, given that so many so often are willing to live a lie (this is sin, living a lie), even A BIG LIE, when there will be…no word. After which, as Jesus so often said, it is too late. There does come a time sometimes in time when it is too late. Famine was the great scourge of antiquity, feared as today we fear nuclear holocaust. Said Amos, famine is terrible, but…there is something worse. A holocaust of the word, a famine of the word. When there is no word, no truth, no communication, no consort, no connection.
Are we living in such a time? Today? Has a famine of the word befallen us? A fit question for the memory of Martin Luther King, is it not?
A Time of Famine Today?
Has a famine of the word overtaken us? A few hours spent exploring the cyber space might make you think so. And yet, it must be added, there are treasures too there too.
Has a famine of the word overtaken us? The great hopes with which television writing began, in the 1950’s, has given way to waste, a beautifully bedazzling wasteland. And yet, there are exceptions, children of Rod Serling we might say, still found in the magic box. You enter a new dimension, not of sight or of sound, but of mind and imagination.
Has a famine of the word overtaken us? Look out at the internet, a sprawling universe of chat, governed by e-mail, and its second cousins. E-mail: immediate, global, indelible, irretrievable, reactive. One medium of choice today. And yet there are exceptions. A carefully composed, thoughtful e-letter, kind and honest, personal and self-disclosive, sent over the waves after attentive editing. A joyful e-note from Europe or Texas or Canada. Or Dublin.
Has a famine of the word overtaken us? I found cleaning out my wallet the other day that my public library card was still there. The human being, to be human, needs space and time for being. Otherwise, we become human doings, not human beings. For this reason, God made deep winter. For this reason, of the making of books there is no end.
Has a famine of the word overtaken us? Listen to our political and cultural discourse. Twenty years ago, nearly, we were led to war on the argument that prudence dictated immediate action. So, we could act preemptively–though this was not our custom, unilaterally—though this was not our desire, imperially—though this was not our heritage, unforeseeably–though this was not our preference. A Christian country could be led to prosecute a post-Christian war, in 2003. This, because of the fear of weapons of mass destruction. But…where were they? People know about mistakes, and thus about contrition, compunction, apology, learning. But correction takes compunction. He now of blessed memory, Bishop Desmond Tutu, could teach us about truth and about reconciliation. But truth needs saying, doesn’t it? Or are we beyond telling the truth?
Has a famine of the word overtaken us? Someone should right a diary of our daily talk, like Victor Klemperer did in Germany from 1933—1945. What would such a diary record? What is the character of our daily conversation, to the extent we have time for it? How well do we listen? How carefully do we remember? How insightfully do we respond? How lovingly do we visit? Do we visit?
Has a famine of the word, that prospect in Holy Writ, in ancient Scripture, in the dusty book of the prophet, has it come upon us? Think back one year and one week.
There are some weeks when good news seems hard to come by, and (that) week (was) one such.
Coming into (that) week already we faced challenges aplenty. A climate reeling out of control. A pandemic claiming (at that time) 350,000 lives. A political culture, a culture cooked politics, for politics is ever downstream from culture, putting people at daggers drawn. A community of communities seeing, in full, for the first full time it may be, the ravages and damages of racial bias, hatred, and prejudice. And pain, the pain of every day. And then, January 6, 2021. Insurrection with presidential incitement.
For the rest of history, for the rest of our lives, we shall have to live with, and attempt by faith to live down, both to live with and to live down, such utter calumny, such tragic, needless, heedless yet revelatory disaster. It (was) an apocalyptic—a revelatory—moment, hundreds wrecking the capitol…One said, ‘this is like 9/11, except we did this to ourselves’.
(RAH, 1/7/21, (slightly amended)). More on this another week.
Listening for A Prophetic Word Today
Amos spoke 800 years before the birth of Christ. He mourned the bitter loss of an only son, before that phrase would trigger theological reflection, as it does for us. He foretold a darkness at noon before that phrase titled an account of Stalin’s purge. He spoke of songs becoming laments before the poetry of Robert Pinsky subsequent to 9/11. Amos like John the Baptist comes before Jesus the Christ. Amos’s prophecy about a famine of the word may fit most or some of our current experience. I wager it fits more than we care readily to admit. But this is not the last word.
We trust our life and future to Jesus Christ (repeat). It is his word, finally, that carries us, and his role as Prophet that means most for us. In him, the voice of the prophet continues, even in a word famine, to speak to us.
The other cold day I noticed the temperature. –2 degrees Fahrenheit. Here is a strange reality. There are great gulfs crossed between gas to liquid and liquid to solid. But those gulfs are numerically unheralded. They are not know by great numbers like 100 degrees or 0 degrees. No, they are found out on the arithmetical periphery, in forgotten minor numbers like 32 and 212. Celsius is so much more orderly. But Fahrenheit is like prophecy. You find the word spoken in forgotten places (repeat). With Amos, in a little hamlet of Tekoa. With Jesus, up on the lakeshore. With Wesley, in coal mines. With King, in the black church.
The prophet gives voice to silent agony. This is what Amos did, however unsuccessfully, for his people, smitten by a word famine.
The prophet gives voice to silent agony. Reinhold Niebuhr did so over a long life-time of restrained, earnest engagement with life. This paragraph of Niebuhr’s abides in memory: “Nothing worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing that is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we must be saved by love.” (Sifton 349)
The prophet gives voice to silent agony. So said Abraham Heschel, as he and Niebuhr, then older men, walked their dogs together on Riverside Drive. Heschel preached Niebuhr’s funeral. Wouldn’t you have loved to overhear their banter? Listen to Heschel’s voice: “The demand in biblical religion is to be alert, and to be open to what is happening…Awe enables us to sense in the small things the beginnings of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and simple.”
The prophet gives voice to silent agony. The generations deep hurt of people of color in these United States finally found fullest voice in the well tempered homiletics of Martin Luther King. In Christ, the divine voice has taken full throated residence in the heart of hurt. A voice to be heard needs loving connection with an addressable community. The prophet does not stand above or apart from his people. He abides, dwells, tabernacles among them. Among us.
The prophet gives voice to silent agony. During WW II Paul Tillich took the NYC subway downtown once a week to speak over Radio Free Europe, to speak to his German relatives. Listen to Tillich’s radio voice: Listen to his radio voice regarding the National Socialists: “They know all about tragedy, for their creed educates for tragic heroism, it educates for death, but this is all Nazism knows, whereas democracy, socialism, Christianity all have something that stands beyond tragedy, a hope for the human race.” (Sifton 265).
Honoring Prophetic Speech
Up then and let us wait for the Word, waiting without idols, waiting without substitutes. And as we wait, let us honor the prophetic speech of Amos, of Jesus, of Wesley, and, especially today, of King. And let us act so in particular.
Let us prize the days in winter, the gifts of winter snow days, to read, to read ourselves, to read to our grandchildren, to invest in the joy and the spiritual grace of reflection that comes from reading. A literate person today is not one who can read, but one who does read.
Let us protect and preserve the possibility of a divine Word, heard as spoken, by listening with intense presence and presence of mind, come Sunday, and responding both in affirmation and in critique. People have such remarkable, and shabby reasons not to worship. Not you, not we. Listen…for the word of God.
Let us then speak ourselves, as we have spirit. At least in prayer. By visiting with one another (and that more than a broadcast e-mail). By writing down our views: in a journal, for a letter, as a letter to the editor. Numbers 11:29: “Would that all God’s people were prophets”.
Our job is not to remember and recite, but to live and speak!
Our job is not just to remember that King said, “The great stumbling block is the white moderate more devoted to order than justice”.
Our job is to be alert to the weighty matters of justice and mercy and love—of jobs and money and life.
Our job is not just to remember that King said “if a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live”. Our job is to find that something.
Our job is not just to remember that King said “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”. Our job is to re-build that nation, even, in the deep shadow of January 6.
Our job is not just to remember that King said “let freedom ring” Our job is to make it ring, in our time, in the face of the fears of this time.
Our job is not just to remember that King said, “I just want to do God’s will…we as a people will get to the promised land”. Our job is to get walking.
For one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
