A Living Word

Why do we keep telling the same old stories?  Every week, in this church and in churches all around the world, we are visiting and re-visiting the same ancient Scriptures.  Why?  Not because we forget the stories (though sometimes we do), not because repeating the words makes some kind of magic happen, and definitely not for our own entertainment.  The stuff in the Bible isn’t always particularly entertaining. 

We keep returning to scripture because here we find God’s Word, which is neither dusty nor useless.  God’s Word is alive, and speaking the words of scripture brings life to God’s Word.  This living Word brings us to life as well, continually forming us in God’s image.  We tell these stories because these stories tell us who we are. 

We live in a world full of stories and podcasts and streaming services—many of these are entertaining, but what are these stories teaching you about the world or about who you are?  I’ll confess I don’t always see the value in some shows, but there are some series I never get tired of re-watching.  Maybe you have a favorite series or a movie like that as well, and I imagine these stories are more than entertainment to us.  I imagine there’s some deep truth there that resonates within us and helps us make sense of the world. 

At this point in the church year, we have dwelled deeply in the story of Jesus’s life and crucifixion and death, then for seven weeks—a week of weeks—we heard of Jesus’s resurrection and appearances to the disciples, then his ascension, and finally, last week, the arrival of the Holy Spirit that Jesus promised. 

Jesus spoke of a Father who is God and he spoke of himself as God, and the Holy Spirit is also God—three beings as one God.  Three in one, one in three, the Holy Trinity, and for a concept this confusing—how can “one” also be “three”?—we have this one Sunday of the entire year called Holy Trinity Sunday.  Trinity is a word that never shows up in Scripture, and there aren’t many places in Scripture that reference a three-fold understanding of God, so we pull those stories out and re-read them, to remind ourselves that humans didn’t invent the Trinity.  Instead, humans came about because of God, which is our origin story in creation. 

I’ve heard the creation stories—don’t forget that Genesis includes two different creation stories, and today we only heard the first one—so many times that I barely hear it anymore.  Sometimes it helps me to get perspective from somewhere else, someone who also explains creation and our human connection to the created world. 

Robin Wall Kimmerer can explain creation through stories.  Kimmerer is a scientist and a poet, as well as an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.  She grew up in the United States and speaks English; as a scientist and college professor she also speaks and teaches the specialized language of scientific names for plants and animals.  In her book, “Braiding Sweetgrass,” she tells about her attempts to learn and practice speaking her people’s native Potawatomi language. 

During an annual tribal meeting, Kimmerer was excited to attend a language class where all of the fluent Potawatomi speakers would be gathered.  There were only nine speakers, the youngest of whom was 75 years old.  They urged younger folks to learn and practice speaking so that their culture could live, their way of seeing the world and showing reverence to creation.  Kimmerer is moved by their pleas and begins attending language classes twice a week and covering her home in notes to learn vocabulary words. 

After much studying, she was frustrated to have only a kindergartener’s vocabulary.  Kimmerer explains that English is full of nouns, words for naming things, and in English, only about 30 percent of the language is verbs.  In Potawatomi, the language is 70 percent verbs, action words needing to be conjugated, with different tenses and cases.  Here is how Kimmerer describes what she learned about the value of her tribal language:

“European languages often assign gender to nouns, but Potawatomi does not divide the world into masculine and feminine.  Nouns and verbs both are animate and inanimate.  You hear a person with a word that is completely different from the one with which you hear an airplane.  Pronouns, articles, plurals, demonstratives, verbs—all those syntactical bits I never could keep straight in high school English are all aligned in Potawatomi to provide different ways to speak of the living world and the lifeless one.  Different verb forms, different plurals, different everything apply depending on whether what you are speaking of is alive.[1]

“No wonder there are only nine speakers left!  I try, but the complexity makes my head hurt and my ear can barely distinguish between words that mean completely different things.  One teacher reassures us that this will come with practice, but another elder concedes that these close similarities are inherent in the language.  As Stewart King, a knowledge keeper and great teacher, reminds us, the Creator meant for us to laugh, so humor is deliberately built into the syntax.  Even a small slip of the tongue can convert “We need more firewood” to “Take off your clothes.” 

“…I remember paging through the…dictionary…and the print was too small and there are way too many variations on a single word and I was feeling that this was just way too hard.  …Pages blurred and my eyes settled on a word—a verb, of course: ‘to be a Saturday.’  Pfft!  I threw down the book.  Since when is Saturday a verb?  Everyone knows it’s a noun.  I grabbed the dictionary and flipped more pages and all kinds of things seemed to be verbs: ‘to be a hill,’ ‘to be red,’ ‘to be a long sandy stretch of beach,’ and then my finger rested on wiikwegamaa: ‘to be a bay.’  ‘Ridiculous!’ I ranted in my head.  ‘There is no reason to make it so complicated…A cumbersome language, impossible to learn, and more than that, it’s all wrong.  A bay is most definitely a person, place, or thing—a noun and not a verb.’  I was ready to give up.”[2]

“And then I swear…an electric current sizzled down my arm and through my finger, and practically scorched the page where that one word lay.  In that moment I could smell the water of the bay, watch it rock against the shore and hear it sift onto the sand.  A bay is a noun only if water is dead.  When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word.  But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from its bondage and lets it live.  ‘To be a bay’ holds the wonder that, for this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores…Because it could do otherwise—become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that, too.  To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive.  Water, land, and even a day, the language a mirror for seeing the animacy of the world, the life that pulses through all things, through pines and nuthatches and mushrooms.”[3]

“Of an inanimate being, like a table, we say ‘What is it?’  And we answer Dopwen yewe.  Table it is.  But of apple, we must say, ‘Who is that being?’  And reply Mshimin yawe.  Apple that being is. 

“Yawe—the animate to be.  I am, you are, s/he is.  To speak of those possessed with life and spirit we must say yawe.  By what linguistic confluence do Yahweh of the Old Testament and yawe of the New World both fall from the mouths of the reverent?  Isn’t this just what it means, to be, to have the breath of life within, to be the offspring of Creation?  The language reminds us, in every sentence, of our kinship with all of the animate world.”[4]

“The animacy of the world is something we already know, but the language of animacy teeters on extinction—not just for Native peoples, but for everyone.  Our toddlers speak of plants and animals as if they were people, extending to them self and intention and compassion—until we teach them not to.  We quickly retrain them and make them forget.  When we tell them that the tree is not a who but an it, we make that maple an object; we put a barrier between us, absolving ourselves of moral responsibility and opening the door to exploitation.  Saying it makes a living land into ‘natural resources.’ If a maple is an it, we can take up the chain saw.  If a maple is a her, we think twice.  …The arrogance of English is that the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be a human. 

“A language teacher I know explained that grammar is just the way we chart relationships in language.  Maybe it also reflects our relationships with each other.  Maybe a grammar of animacy could lead us to whole new ways of living in the world, other species a sovereign people, a world with a democracy of species, not a tyranny of one—with moral responsibility to water and wolves, and with a legal system that recognizes the standing of other species. 

“…We Americans are reluctant to learn a foreign language of our own species, let alone another species.  But imagine the possibilities.  Imagine the access we would have to different perspectives, the things we might see through other eyes, the wisdom that surrounds us.  We don’t have to figure out everything by ourselves: there are intelligences other than our own, teachers all around us.  Imagine how much less lonely the world would be.”[5]

The Word of God is living and active, in all of creation as well as within us and among each of us.  God is not just a powerful force far away, but in our understanding of the Holy Trinity, we confess our faith in a God who is in relationship with God’s self, three-in-one, and this relational God is in relationship with all creation as well. 

How does God make you come alive?  How does God animate your own spirit?  Where will you notice God in creation, and where will you notice what is alive?  May God’s Spirit be alive in us, awakening us to the living Word and to all the living world. 

Amen. 

Pastor Cheryl

[1] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013, pages 53-58.

[2] Ibid 54.

[3] Ibid 55.

[4] Ibid 56.

[5] Ibid 57-58.