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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 |