Words.

I’ve always been drawn to words. Even before I ever thought I wanted to be a writer, long before I wrote poetry, plays, or short stories, I liked to put words together. I liked to experiment and use the words I heard and put them into creative combinations.

In high school, I became much more infatuated with Faulkner while the rest fawned over Hemingway. The evocatively parsed salad bar of words meant much more to me than sparse communication.

Lately, though, words have begun to mean even more to me. Not simply because I write, teach, and preach as a priest or as a sentry posted to defend orthodoxy from the heretics. [That’s all nonsense to me, by the way.] But because our faith keeps coming back to words.

Simply words. Having words. Words to say, to share, to explain, to invite, to invoke, to provoke, to inspire, to proclaim, to hope, to give thanks. Words to be there when we need them.

A couple of General Conventions ago, we got into storytelling as a church, or at least the church wanted to. But we didn’t understand it. We didn’t see the connection between Sunday worship, the altar guild, vestry: all that church maintenance stuff and telling our stories of faith. What we needed was something more elemental, something that made more sense in the context. Not proof, not the solution, not the rule to follow. We needed it.

We needed to know that what was missing from our experience was access to the words.

We love our Book of Common Prayer which provides the words for us. We aren’t used to being without words in prayer or worship. We aren’t ever thinking about the times without the book: without our pre-prepared words.

We need words. And we need to be prepared to share them.

As Jesus reminds the apostles not to worry what to say, for the words will be given to them, we must be ready to speak, for that is the only way the words will come.

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My response to the question:

“How will you share your love of Jesus inside and outside the church, and how must the church change in order to be more effective at proclaiming resurrection?”