When the Question is Asked (Yes I Am That Nerdy)

A reading,

Ecclesiastes six-eleven.

 “The more the words,

The less the meaning,

And how does that profit anyone?”

The Word of God, for the People of God…

Thanks be to God.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

What do you read, my Lord?

Supralapsarianism, Transubstantiation…

Ontological, Teleological, Eschatological…

Hypostasis, Kenosis, Johannine…

Salvation, Baptism, Eucharist…

Grace.  Faith.  Hope.

Love.

What do you read, my Lord?

Words, words, words…

Full of sound and fury and signifying… something.

Ah, but brevity is the soul of wit!

Do you see what I did there?

The irony is not lost on me.

We gather today to celebrate words,

Or, more accurately, The Word.

And here I stand, in hipster glasses,

Head shaved, rockin' beard,

Hilarious shirt and ratty jeans...

Railing against words.

Just me and Qoheleth…

Versus the world.

Oh, we love Ecclesiastes, sure,

When he’s quoting The Byrds:

To everything, turn, turn, turn,

There is a season, turn, turn turn...

Or forming unbreakable cords.

But when he speaks unspeakable things,

No lectionary for you!

“Meaningless, vanity, hebel…

Death and folly…”

We’ll have none of this!

There may be nothing new under the sun,

But the layers of dust have hidden a treasure

So old, it’s new all the same.

But I digress.  Another day, perhaps.

This is not a defense of Ecclesiastes.

This is not an attack on words.

This is my support… of silence.

Silence is not the opposite of sound.

It has a density and an effect.

Words and silence,

They are two sides of the same coin.

They are tools, but they are fragile things.

Over-used, they become dull,

Meaningless, one might even say.

Why say it in fifteen minutes,

When you can say it in ten?

In five?

In a minute?

A second?

An instant?

In silence…?

Silence has power!

It makes WALL-E and EVE

More believable than Jack and Rose.

It can chill the spine

When it’s quiet – too quiet.

It can make you weepy.

“Why didn’t she call me back?”

“He should have texted me by now!”

Words may have dulled,

But silence remains sharp.

So sharp, in fact, that we fear it.

Nowhere is this clearer than right here.

Not so much during worship,

Not in the quiet meditation,

Or the over-long breaths between takes.

It is the silence of God we fear most of all.

We read it over and over in the Bible.

Someone wakes up one day,

And they’ve got a direct line to The Name.

God speaks, they hear, we act.

Pretty straightforward.

So what’s the deal, God?

Where you at?!?

We wait, and we listen

And we long for your Voice!

And we’re left with this instead…

This… this silence…

It’s so big… and it scares us.

But not empty like you’d think.

It’s weighty and cumbersome,

And that’s so much worse!

We sit and we wait for

Answers,

Comfort,

Something…

Anything.

And it never comes.

All we have some days is the silence,

Your Silence.

When all the noise of the city washes away,

And the last note of the hymn stops reverberating,

And the whisper of the prayer is gone,

All we really have is Silence.

So much silence we drown in it.

So much silence it begins to permeate us.

It is so terrifying, and we beg and plead

For God to make the silence go away.

Another hymn,

Another prayer,

Another homily.

Because we have forgotten.

Yes, God is in the hymn.

Yes, God is in the prayer.

Yes, God is in the homily.

God is in me, and you.

God is in the words.

And God… is in the silence.

We have become disembodied.

We know how to hear with our ears.

When was the last time you listened?

With your hands?

With your feet?

With your heart?

With your soul?

Prophets weren’t lucky, hand-picked individuals.

It was not something special that let them audibly hear.

No, they just knew how to listen:

How to listen to a God who still speaks.

A God who speaks through silence to our very core.

A God who speaks in the spaces between words,

In the subtext below words.

A God who does not need our ears,

Who knows how to address something so primal.

So let yourself drown once in a while.

Let the silence fill your every pore.

Because God is there.

…Just… don’t expect words.

Because God knows, just like Qoheleth knew:

“The more the words, the less the meaning.”

And you two have some very big things to talk about.

Well…

You know what I mean.

Amen.