Word of God, come down on earth,
Living rain from heav’n descending;
Touch our hearts and bring to birth
Faith and hope and love unending.
Word of truth, to all truth lead us;
Word of life, with one bread feed us.
(ELW 510)

In last month’s issue of Nativity News, we focused on the first part of the liturgy of Holy Communion—“The Gathering.”  These are the elements that focus us on God and on the fact that we have gathered together as a community for the purpose of worship. The second section of the liturgy involves hearing and responding to “The Word.”  God speaks to us, by the power of the Holy Spirit, through reading and hearing the Scriptures; finding the intersections between the Word of God and our everyday life; confessing our faith in the words of one of the ancient creeds

 (Apostles or Nicene); joining our voices together as one as we pray for the church, the world, and all needs, known and unknown to us; and physically enacting God’s Word of forgiveness and reconciliation through the sharing of the peace. God speaks to us, and we respond to God’s Word in return.  It is instruction in the Word and it is conversation with God.  We recognize that through the Word of God—through Jesus Christ—God reveals himself to us and welcomes our whole selves, our concerns, and our world into His heart. 

Through Scripture and sermons, prayers and passing the peace, we do not just hear with our ears—we can expect our hearts to be transformed.  God’s Word, as we are reminded in the book of the prophet Isaiah, is powerful and dependable in ways human words never can be:  “’Rain and snow fall from the sky.  But they don’t return without watering the earth that produces seeds to plant and grain to eat.  That’s how it is with my words.  They don’t return to me without doing everything I send them to do’” (Isaiah 55:10-11).  Our sermons, our prayers, our greetings of peace are not perfect, of course; however, the Holy Spirit works through these words to steep us in the Word. Clinging to the promise that God’s Word does what it says, we do well to “put ourselves in the way of God’s Word” through worship, as well as through Bible reading and study and prayer. 

Ultimately, though, it is not just in the Scripture readings of the liturgy that we encounter the Word.  The Bible is rightly called the word of God insofar as it functions as a means through which we encounter the Word of God—Jesus Christ, our Lord.  Fittingly, after we receive the Word with our ears, we go on to receive the Word with all of our senses as we take into ourselves the body and blood of Christ.  (More on Holy Communion next month!) 

Ah, but there is one more crucial aspect of our gathering around “The Word,” and that is this:  in listening for God, we learn to speak to those who need to hear about Jesus Christ, too.  Just as God invites us into His heart through the Word, so our hearts are broadened to include others.  Being saturated and steeped in God’s Word is our preparation for a life of speaking God’s Word to the world. 

Lord, speak to us, that we may speak
in living echoes of your tone;
as you have sought so let us seek
your straying children, lost and lone.
(ELW 676)

In Christ,
Pastor Jill