What Is The Message You Give?

For most of my ordained ministry — from early on — the focus was on the  messages we give to others.

One of the main areas was what we say to children without uttering a word.

This is most prevalent in the worship space.  Children are totally aware of how people feel, about them being just “kids”, by the looks they receive.  Right?  Kids are suppose to act like grown-ups when they are in the pew. And by the way whenever they are in public.

I witnessed this in a Taco Bell one afternoon:  The mother says, to her little boy of about 6, “Stop acting like a child.” 

Really?

Some people, mostly my age group, are totally unaware  of this way of being with children.  We have grown too close to the way it has always been.  

I 1998 Barbara Brown Taylor wrote a little book titled: When God is Silent.  I’ll say that she was writing about the messages we give.

                                                                        Or, actually don’t give.

And the sad thing is we are mostly unaware of it.

I have read this book many times in the last twenty plus years.  And it has never failed to inspire me.   However this time, as I read, I kept  wanting to clap and clap some more.

I am thinking that one of the reason, I read something new, is that I wasn’t ready to hear before. However, in the last five years, my eye have been opened to the need for the traditional church to make some major changes.  

 What I was reading, in Brown’s book, is about how the Word of God has been (my interpretation of her thoughts) diluted and misrepresented.  Actually I will be even more bold and say: How God, and God the Word, has been represented in the modern world, spoken and though silent actions.

Brown prefaced her point by first explaining how ‘words’ in every avenue of our lives, have been used to get us to do something, or spend our money, or follow a trend in thinking, or follow a cause, or support a charity.  

She references a eulogy for a literary critic and linguist named Steiner. She writes: “…any preacher who reads this eulogy for the Word without sensing a chill is not paying attention.  We should all be wearing black, because the assaulted, gutted word whose diminishment he laments is the same word we rely on to talk to people about God… a common language we share, and our congregation listen to us with the same ears as they listen to politicians, salespeople, and news commentators.  

Their ears have been assaulted. They are fired upon every day by words intended to influence them, to manipulated them, to separate them from their cash….”(p.19)

It has to give anyone who listens to others talk, about not just God, but anything, might make them wonder the same wonder Pontius Pilate had, as the accused Jesus, stood before him: 

                                              “What is truth?”

Really!  Think about it.

Brown sights the example of, “the KKK”  who stood on street corners, with white robes and fire torches, claiming they acted in God’s name.  

What was the message?

Or when, in 1987, Oral Robert sent an urgent message to the television audience that: “God is taking the initiative….unless he raises a total of $8 million, above regular ministry expenses by next month, he will die.”

Whats the message?  

Or a more subtly  — another one of Brown’s  examples — “…a nicely landscaped neighborhood of second homes is going up one mile from the Hispanic trailer park where there are no screens on the windows.  A government grant for more public housing has been turned down for fear of whom it might attract in town……”(p.28)

What is the message?

The messages we speak, whether from the pulpit, or in the nightly news, or with each other is a fragile tool.

The messages we give when we act, or hold a poster, or ignore the reality of what is.  

We give a message. 

When we ignore oppressive behavior, bullying in any form.

What is the message we give?

All small examples given by us though how we speak our words, our body language and actions.  

We give a message.

My little book: I Still Have So Many Things To Say To You, was prompted by a poster, someone was holding outside local a high school, that gave this message: “God Hates Fags.” 

                                           Really?

Through history we have taken the language of God and melded it into a foreign language that no one truly understands anymore. 

My wonder is how do we reverse the way we have, for so long, inadvertently devalued our ability to witness to the Word.

How can we speak in ways that don’t get confused with the popular forms of verbal  manipulation today?

How can people, who want to know God, learn to listen to what God/Jesus came to tell us? 

Any thoughts?