What`s the Good Word?
By Foy Valentine, Founding Editor
A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in baskets of silver.
The wise man who wrote this proverb understood that words can be priceless treasures. They can be sublimely beautiful, marvelously powerful, immeasurably effective.
When John introduced his Gospel by saying that "in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God," he laid out one of the profoundest concepts ever to engage the human mind. Its profundity is fathomless and its simplicity is sublime.
Mark Twain is said to have observed that the difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
It was the search for exactly the right word and precisely the right combination of words that kept Virgil at the hard work of composing his masterpiece, The Georgics, for seven long years even though it consisted of only 2183 lines.
Charles Rann Kennedy says in The Terrible Meek, "all the things that ever get done in the world . . . are done by words."
Christendom`s peerless theologian and the author of The City of God, Augustine, referred to himself as "a peddler of words."
Though the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, the Parthenon in Athens, and the Forum in Rome have long since fallen in ruins, their ideas live on because of their words.
A baby`s first word is the occasion for any family`s delight and celebration. After making marvelous little pre-speech sounds for weeks, the small creature one day forms an actual word, a sound that makes sense. Soon there is another word, and then another, until torrents of words tumble out in one of the most remarkable of all human achievements-human speech. In spite of many books and uncounted articles that have been written about the origin of human speech, there is much about the phenomenon that is still utterly unknown and that is quite possibly unknowable.
Words are a perfect wonder.
Gibberish, on the other hand, is nonsense. It is sound and fury signifying nothing. Without meaning it carries no message. It communicates no sense from the one mouthing it or to the one hearing it.
A word "fitly spoken," however, is reason expressed in a language that others can understand. It makes sense. It communicates. It carries meaning. It can be strangely powerful.
In coming now to say something about the Christmas word, it should be understood that this is rightly perceived to be a deeply sobering responsibility. Yet it has exhilarating potential. The matter needs not be obfuscated with much speaking but ought to be so simple and plain that "wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein" (Isa 35:8).
The Christmas word is Immanuel. God is with us. The eternal Word of God has become flesh. The Creator has identified with the creature. Divinity has embraced humanity.
The Christmas word is Incarnation; and incarnation is the best communication ever conceived by God or humankind.
The Christmas word is Grace; and God`s amazing grace everlastingly trumps human inadequacies, human stumblings, human sin.
The Christmas word is Joy; joy to the world so that the pain of birth is totally eclipsed by the joy of new life.
The Christmas word is Giving; and we know deep down, at this season better than any other, that giving is better than getting, that it is God-like to give.
The Christmas word is that there is a Star in the sky; a Star shining bright even though there are ominous clouds on the horizon.
The Christmas word is that there is a Song in the air; and the Song`s pure beauty overrides the noise of braying donkeys, bleating sheep, bawling cows, and all the cacophonies that this old world can dream up and hurl at us.
The Christmas word is Angels, messengers of God, innumerable angels over us and around us and among us although the cruel oppressor`s ruthless legions are garrisoned ever so nearby. God`s messengers are hardly subject to our human weights and measures. All our puny attempts to weigh them and measure them and get them to hold still while we corner them and count them remind me of my old theology professor W. T. Conner`s dry witticism that "it`s really better not to know so much than to know so much that`s not so."
The Christmas word is Good News; and God`s irrepressible Good News has come just as fully and freely to unwashed shepherds in the fields keeping watch over their flocks by night as to the rich in their fine, warm houses, or to the high and mighty in their ivory palaces.
The Christmas word is Salvation, the salvation word which God had determined to say before the foundations of the world were laid, salvation that is simple and not complex, practical and not theoretical, clear and not garbled, understandable and not incoherent, kind and not cruel, good and not evil.
The Christmas word is that the Kingdom of God has now come; the kingdom of right relationships which was coming, has come, and now is.
So come and join in the Christmas parade.
Step lively to the beat of this Different Drummer.
Say Yes to all the promises and "yesses" of God that in the fullness of time have found their consummate Yes in Jesus Christ.
What`s the good word? The good word is Merry Christmas.
And God bless us every one.
