Power Language

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Epiphany 3
January 23, 2022
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
​Have you ever heard of Josh Wardle?  Yeah, me neither, until this week.  I share an interest in word games with many of you: scrabble, crossword, and the New York Times Spelling Bee game.  Some folks are more drawn to numbers and go for Sudoku.  Either way, puzzling is good for the mind.  Playing at just about anything is good the soul.  Tom Duke turned me onto a newer game called Wordle.  Josh Wordle created it and named it Wordle as a twist on his name. As a software engineer, it was relatively simple for him to create.  Wordle is completely free.  It has no app, no ads, and it makes no money.  To play all we have to do is go to https://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle.
 
The premise is simple.  You have six tries to find the five-letter word of the day.  When you are wrong on guess, Letters that are not in the word turn grey.  When you find a letter that is in the word, but not in the right place, that letter turns yellow.  When you find a letter correct and in the right place, it turns green.  Players have have six tries.  Once you find the word, or fail to find the word, the game is ends, until the next day, when there is a new word.
 
As the story is told in the January 3rd New York Times, Josh Wardle’s girlfriend and partner, Palak, likes to play word games.  She plays lots of them, so Wardle made Wordle for her to play.  The two of them, only, played Wordle for months as a fun diversion from their working life and pandemic isolation.  Palak shared the game with her family, they shared with friends.  Down the line, somebody shared it Tom, and he shared it with me.  On November 1, 2021, there were 90 players.  On January 3, 2022 there were 300,000 players.  As of this week, there are 2.6 million players.
 
The idea that catches me is the immense power of what marketing people call ‘word of mouth.’  The concept is also called storytelling.  I googled Josh Wardle and found the article entitled “Wordle, a love story.” Since then, story has been told in countless articles, news reports, and good old-fashioned face to face communication.
 
It is not much of a stretch to use this technology assisted example to understand how we got the Bible.  After all, the Bible is a library of stories, songs, and recollections.  In a world where few could read, word of mouth, storytelling was the only media.
 
Each of our lessons for today tell pieces of the God’s story with humanity.  The oldest one is about Nehemiah and Ezra, unearthing old scrolls in the rubble of their destroyed and almost forgotten temple.  The people gather from far and wide to hear the story with interpretation, finding their way back to the God they thought had abandoned them.  Imagine coming back to a long dead ancestors home after a wildfire like scorching and destruction, and having heard bits and pieces about God and God’s love for the world, imagine unearthing an entire Bible, and hearing it read for the first time.  Certainly, that would clarify what was lost in chains or storytelling and the intrusion of other more harsh and competitive god stories from Babylon, Assyria, and Persia.  Those stories were of many gods warring for affections and sacrifice and obedience.  It is no wonder that the One God, Yahweh, the Great I Am of the Hebrew story might come off as angry, particular, and nationalistic.  Even with all of that baggage, the One God remains merciful, forgiving, compassionate, and tenaciously loving.  God’s story characters are not mighty and hardly righteous superheroes, rather they are deeply flawed, and thoroughly human.  Only in cahoots with God do they get some things right, and keep the story alive.  As that sing on Sesame Street, “One of these things is not like the others.”  This is what so compelling about the One God among the various gods to be worshipped at the altars of success, status, and competition.
 
475 years later, with his people under the thumb of yet one more oppressive empire, Jesus takes his place in the story.  Early in the telling, when Jesus is stands up to read at Temple worship, he reads from a copy of what Ezra and Nehemiah found.  Flying in the face of liturgical tradition, he does not read the portion appointed for the morning. Jesus turns to the text from Isaiah’s ecstatic dream of restoration and wholeness.  Jesus’ boldness in speaking those words in the first person implies that he is God’s restorer and revealer.  After only two verses, he sits down.  These things were supposed to go on for much longer, with rabbinical commentary added on.  Instead, Jesus drops the mic.  The Temple folks do not take it well.  We will hear the rest of the story next week.
 
Some 30 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection, the former bounty hunter of illegal Christians, Saul, has his own experience with Jesus, becoming Paul, who tells the story all over Asia Minor and nurtures these Christ following communities when they get outside the lines of love, grace, and mercy.  His letters to fledgling churches are part of our story too.  Today, we hear from a letter Paul writes to the church at Corinth. Remember, is not unlike the Las Vegas of the Mediterranean.  There are plenty of salacious attractions for human attention, and a band of hucksters cashing in on self-styled religious fervor.  Paul’s culturally contrasting words to a mad, mad world are sublime and calming, echoing resonant harmony with Jesus’ embodiment of God.  And so, the story spread, mostly by word of mouth, to these words we read, speak, sing, and pray today.  This is how we connect to the story, join the story, and keep telling it.
 
The image of the body of Christ and its many members is worthy of much more reflection for sure, but Paul delivers his own mic drop here too. “Strive for the greater gifts.”  Here again, the story continues.  Spoiler alert, Paul will write: “the greatest of these is love.”  Not the feeling, the lose yourself in it way of seeing, being, and doing kind of love.  What Paul invokes is Jesus’ powerful powerlessness.
 
I do not see it as an accident that Josh Wardle’s domain name for Wordle is “powerlanguage.”  The power of words attracts us.  It is no accident that we call our story the Word of God, and Jesus, the Word made flesh.  The power in reading, speaking, and telling of the Word propels us, helping us find our place, shaping our belonging, affirming our ultimate worth, and nudging us not to do more, but to be more present who we really are, and whose we really are.  This is power language: this wildly self-emptying love, which is worth whatever we have to give up to find.  Word up.  Drop the mic.  Amen.