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My adult life, in many ways, has been about words. Lots of words. Words in sermons, words in reading, words in writings. I wonder how many words I have written over the years. I wonder how many different words I have used over time. Recently I was thinking of some words that have never been spoken by me nor appeared in any form of writing. Allow me to share some of these unused words:

Privation, yoke, vessel, eddy, Schadenfreude (I have used German words in past), oblate, platypus ( I did once see one in Australia), arrowhead, oblate, geriatric ( I may soon be needing to use this one), gratifyingly, nymph, sucrose, chapeau, (the only other French word I know is restaurant), catalo, and, to end here, zymurgy. This, of course is not an exhaustive list, just a small sampling of words I have not used from the array of vocabulary consisting of 171,000 + words in the English language.

Words communicate. Yes, a rose by any other name may still smell as sweet, but we would otherwise have no idea what the author/speaker was talking about without a word for it. I mean, in playing charades, how might one distinguish a rose, from, say, another fragrant flower with thorns?

Also, words, either because of who speaks them, and/or how they speak them, can be authoritative. Words can produce trust or mistrust. They can explain or confuse. What would our day-to-day life be without words? They are of great importance. This is why sign language has been developed…to show through gestures what words say. This is why those both deaf and blind also have a way of communicating words through brail or finger spelling.

One of the ways Genesis says God created is by word, “And then God said….”. John’s gospel, read at Christmas Eve and, in some years, in a Sunday after Christmas, says “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The Word. We, like John, understand this Word, the Word, to be Jesus. And we understand this Jesus to be the ultimate communication of God to us. This Word, John tells us, became flesh and lived among us. A strict translation would say God pitched God’s tent among us.

There are many words about God. Reading through even just some of those words uttered or written by Christians, does not reveal the same God among us. Sometimes in our own congregations we hear different takes on this Word, differing understandings of God.

What is a Christian to do? The simple, yet profound thing to do is return to the Word of God: Jesus. What words being written and said match up with what God said to us in Jesus? What words make us recoil upon hearing them? What words can we never imagine being spoken by the mouth of Jesus?

I don’t know if God has a list of words never used. If so, God’s list would be extremely lengthy as God speaks God’s Word in all languages. I do know what word God has used and continues to use: The Word that still dwells among us. The Word that is still flesh and pitches its tent in our campground. It is a Word that was at the beginning, is in our present, and a Word that will have the last word about us. We can put that in our oblate, gratifying eddy. It will create a lot of Schadenfreude under our chapeaus.