It’s ground up wood mixed with water, rolled flat, dried, spattered with a little bit of ink, and sometimes wrapped in the skin of a dead animal.

It’s hydrogen and oxygen, combined to make the most common substance on the planet, together with air, moving with the vibration of sound waves.

It’s baked flour paste and spoiled grape juice.

It’s the nervous, shaky voice of a seminary student delivering his first sermon. Perhaps even the firm voice of an experienced preacher. But it’s also a tentative explanation offered to a questioning friend. It’s a personal testimony over a cup of coffee. It’s a weakly sung hymn, a sermon delivered to fidgety people and crying babies, and the same words with the same hand gesture that you heard last Sunday and that you’ll hear next Sunday too.

It’s a homeless Jewish carpenter, born in a barn, hounded by the establishment, dying a cruel death in public humiliation.

It’s the Word of God. And it’s not what we expect.

Maybe, if you guessed already what I was talking about, it was what you expected. But if you guessed correctly, then maybe you’ve become so accustomed to the “trappings” of Christianity and to the way God presents himself to people that you’re not so surprised anymore by the claims that the Word of God makes about itself. But take a step back from your long association with the Christian church, from your firsthand acquaintance with Christian symbolism and sacramental theology, and see how surprising these claims really are.

The spoken Word

“Faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:17). Can you believe it? The Holy Spirit uses simple words, be they read or spoken, to create and sustain saving faith in our hearts. He doesn’t use miracles with dazzling demonstrations of power. The miracle is there, but it certainly is not the flashy and showy display of ostentatious pizzazz we might expect of something from God and claiming to be powerful. Yet even all the glitz and glitter of all the kingdoms of this world cannot compare with the splendor of the kingdom to come and the kingdom to which we are bound. Faith comes from hearing. It is not a flash of enlightenment after hours or days of mind-emptying meditation or an ecstatic emotional high after years of ascetic self-discipline. Faith simply comes from hearing the Word of Christ.

Baptism