The Spoken Word

Yesterday I preached a sermon on the human capacity for speech. It was based on a passage from James in which the apostle suggests that the tongue is a grave and dangerous tool. "With it," He contends, "we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing..."

How true. Words can be used for good as well as for ill. So many of the great things that have come upon the earth have begun and ended in the spoken word. Remember that this is actually how God creates-- "...and God said..." Perhaps this is the likeness that we share with God that is mentioned in Genesis 1... our own capacity to create by way of words and language. To name, communicate and reason our way together... It really is a gift, a power that God has given to us...

I remember when I first started to understand this. It was during my sophomore year in college. I read a series of books about language, culture and religion; the most notable was entitled, The Human Condition. Hannah Arendt was female, German and Jewish--probably all mitigating factors in 1958 when The Human Condition was published. None of this mattered to me when I read the book some twenty-five years later. After all, I was a young, free, Christian living in America and enjoying the care-free world of higher education. I could sit back and listen to Arendt's speech without fear of jail or even censorship. Nevertheless, the argument that she was making set me free--it set me free from something I didn't even understand.

The way that I explained it in the final paper for the class was that she had set me free from the process train. Reading her words, listening to her voice, it struck me that many people are taught and come to believe that life is merely process--that we simply find ourselves on the train and we have no choice but to ride this thing out. [Of course, most of us never even notice.] But Arendt suggests that human beings are capable of action--authentic action in the world. It is this action that creates the world and ultimately tells the story of life and history. And speech is the primary form of human action. It is our capacity to name, discuss and reason together that enables self-disclosure and allows us to enter into and take action in the world.

I still don't fully understand everything that I read in that book. But reading it offered to me one of those moments in which we are offered a chance to be reborn, into a world much more interesting than the one we've known.

Twenty-five years have now passed since I read The Human Condition. Sadly, I feel that much of that time has been spent riding the process train. Of course, that's what most people say when they reach their mid-forties. But still, I feel like I should know better. I understand, at least conceptually, the meaning and import of speech and action. I can only hope that even in the midst of my disappointment, I am still speaking toward a world that is more interesting than the one to which we seem to be settling.