The Rev. Pamela Dolan

The power of a single word. We’ve all experienced it in our lives. The word that means you lost a job, or a marriage is ending, or someone important to you is gone. The first time you hear the word “love” from your soulmate, or “mommy” or “daddy” from your child. A single word can speak volumes and change our lives. 

When the Gospel of John tells us that in the beginning was the Word, we just know that “word” needs to be capitalized. It’s not just any word: it’s the Word, the Word that is somehow synonymous with God, the divine Word that brings all life, all creation into being. 

Thinking of Christ as a word, or even “The Word,” feels like a far cry from thinking of Jesus as a little baby laid in a manger, all wrapped in swaddling clothes. It’s hard to put the two together. For me, it helps to think of the Word as not so much a single word on a page, a static, eternal, unchanging noun. Rather, I think of it as an utterance—a word spoken, with nuance and tone and breath involved. 

This is the same Word that said, “Let there be light” and “See, it is very good.” This word is alive, active, part of a conversation. And the breath that compels it is the same breath, ruach, that breathed life into Creation, making a living being out of the dust of the earth.

Christmas, of course, is our time to celebrate the gloriously impossible reality that the eternal Word became mortal flesh and lived among us. As the Letter to the Hebrews puts it, “In these last days God has spoken to us by a Son, appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word.” He sustains all things by his powerful word—which is why we need to come together so often to hear that word spoken in community, and to experience it in the sharing of Christ’s body and blood.

Our own words are powerful, too. Way back in the sixth century, St. Benedict wrote to those wishing to live a Christian life: “If you desire true and eternal life, keep your tongue free from vicious talk and your lips from all deceit. Turn away from evil and do good and let peace be your quest and aim.” The words we speak, and the words we listen to, have the power to heal or to hurt, to build up or to tear down. We need to choose them wisely and use them with compassion. 

In the coming year we will face many challenges, some that appear almost insurmountable: the climate emergency, the ongoing war in Gaza, and the increasing polarization in our country, to name three of the ones that tend to keep me up at night. It might seem that words are a weak, insubstantial thing to bring to bear against these enormous issues. In fact, though, words are often the strongest or weakest link between our hearts and our actions. Maybe we can think about it this way: If we know what is good and just and true, then very often the first step to bringing that goodness and justice and truth into the world is to put it into words.

To use just one very small example, I think about the land acknowledgment that we print in the back of our bulletin every week. If our hearts tell us that the treatment of the indigenous people of this land was and is unjust, then words alone will never suffice to create justice. But words can be the first step in a journey toward embodying justice. 

Words educate. They provoke. They inspire. And most of all, words become dialogue and conversations, and those conversations become the basis of relationship. Words help give shape to our hopes and dreams and aspirations, and as such they create possibilities where none before existed.

According to the church calendar, Christmas is a very short season—only twelve days! But what a difference these twelve days could make if we choose to spend them thinking about and praying about the words we speak. Can we use our words to promote justice and fight for equality? Will our words help bring peace into war-torn places? Will our words speak of hope in a weary world and bring love and peace to our neighbors?

Some of my favorite words come from the theologian and civil rights pioneer Howard Thurman. He is an example of a person whose words and whose life were lived in true, authentic harmony. His words, especially because they inspired people like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, changed the world. I’ll just end with his beautiful little poem, “The Work of Christmas.”

The Work of Christmas

When the song of the angels is stilled,When the star in the sky is gone,When the kings and princes are home,When the shepherds are back with their flock, The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among brothers,
To make music in the heart.          AMEN.

*The poem “The Work of Christmas” is from Howard Thurman’s The Mood of Christmas and Other Celebrations