In a couple of weeks I am going to be performing the wedding of my niece and her fiancé. At the end of the ceremony I will say, “By the authority given to me … I now pronounce you husband and wife.” With the words of that sentence two individuals will be wedded into one, a new living entity will have been created in this world. That is the power of pronouncement.
Spoken words have the power to inform, to command, to question, to emote; they have the power to communicate. But words also have the power to act upon the real world. Pronouncements are words which act. Maybe the easiest place to recognize this form of speech is in the wedding ceremony. But examples are more common that usually acknowledged. Curses can be pronouncements when they go beyond expressions of anger to actually effect a negative change in the world. Blessings can be pronouncements when they go beyond expressions of kindness to effect a positive change in life. Confessions can be reflexive pronouncements, creating a new life for the person with the courage to reveal a personal truth.
Speech with creative power has a long history. We need look no further than the first chapter of the Bible; God says, “Let there be light,” and there was light. Curses and blessings and confessions and creative pronouncements seem to have been more prevalent prior to our modern industrial age. But that doesn’t mean that they have lost their power. I will be tapping into that power in a couple of weeks.
While anticipating the wedding I came across a passage from the Letter to the Hebrews: “By faith we understand that the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear.” (11:3)
One of the ways speech creates something new in this world is simply by revealing things that already existed; something previously hidden enters into the known world. In a sense this is what a wedding ceremony does. My niece and her fiancé will speak and publicly claim the commitments they have already made to each other. I will pronounce that the wedding together of these two lives, some of which was invisible, is now visible and publicly recognized.
Another way speech participates in creation is by uniting things which had previously been invisible to each other. A whole new world is created when one person says out loud, “I love you,” and another replies, “I have always been in love with you.” Yes, this qualifies as communication, but it is also creation through the power of the spoken word.
The author of Hebrews sees the whole world as being created out of invisible things by the power of speech to make these things visible. This is a long way from the popular, and the orthodox, way of imagining how the world was created. We often imagine creation happening ex nihilo, out of nothing, maybe like the way our universe began with the big bang. Often we imagine that God has made things the way we make things, beginning with a plan and then combining various parts into a new whole. We talk about God as a architect and talk about the building blocks of the universe.
What if creation is much more like what happens at a wedding than what happens on a building site or in a factory, or in a pharmaceutical laboratory? What changes when we imagine that “the world was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made out of things which do not appear,” instead of by the a process of design and construction?
A whole lot of things (some more important than this short list):
- Creation becomes an ongoing process, God is still speaking and revealing things which had previously been invisible
- The breadth of creation expands to include important things which are invisible to the eye, but not to the heart or to speech (to paraphrase a famous fox)
- We are able to participate in creation, in the way I will participate in the wedding of my niece and her fiancé when I pronounce them husband and wife
Some beautiful power is available to us when we speak the truth and make visible things what were once hidden.
