I visited Bill in the hospital. How’s it going? I asked.

Well, you heard about the CA, right?

Yeah, I said, Nancy told me. We talked for a while about his new diagnosis and what his course of treatment would be like. He called it “CA” the whole time; he never said the word “cancer.”

I called the nurses’ station early in the morning the day my father died. I was pretty sure he had died in the night; he had been losing ground so rapidly all day. The nurse sounded flustered and asked me to hold the line; when she came back, she told me that my father had “expired.” Library cards and driving licenses expire, I knew. I hadn’t known that people did.

And God said, “Let there be light, and there was light.” Just said it, and there it was. Same with the sun and the moon and all the plants and cattle and all the birds. LET THERE BE! God said, and BOOM! There was.

Maybe we think that we are like God, that our words actually bring things into being. That if Bill can avoid saying the word “cancer,” his illness will not overtake him. Maybe the nurse told me that my father had expired like a library card so I wouldn’t have to absorb the bare truth of his death. We tiptoe around the hard things, try not to get too specific, as if we were afraid that we would conjure them up simply by speaking their names.

But it’s too late – they’re already here. We weren’t the ones who brought them into being just by speaking them. They came into being on their own.

We read from a large and imposing Bible in church. After we have read we raise our eyes to the congregation and say “The word of the Lord.” From reading the Bible – which is really many books, written over a period of a thousand years and more, written in several languages across several cultures -- we seek to discern how it is the word of God. In it we meet a God whose word brings forth the universe. We also meet many people who think God is telling them to kill someone. Sometimes we hear God correcting them, helping them move beyond their fierceness and their equally harsh vision of him: “Do not lay a hand on the boy,” God tells Abraham, even as Abraham raises the knife to slay his son, “Do not do anything to him.” The Israelites under the judges think God has commanded them to kill everyone in their way as they take the Promised Land for themselves. Later, when they themselves are taken and led into captivity, they enlarge their vision of God to provide the comfort and hope they need. Isaiah doesn’t think much about killing people, but he does think that God will reward the patience of those who wait for him with gentleness and love: He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young. The words we find in scripture lead us into a new relationship with God. The words, and our reading of them: together, sometimes, they make a new thing.

This is my body, the celebrant says, and we look up: the altar seems illumined, somehow, and so does the host in the celebrant’s hand. Something is happening: ordinary bread and wine are becoming body and blood. This is the Lord’s doing, his coming to us in these homely elements. But it is a human being who speaks the words, and it is human beings who hear them, in a line of Eucharist that stretches back two thousand years, and back even before them in the things it remembers.

Early in the morning, I sit at my computer and wait for words to come. Most of them will disappear under the stern triage of the delete key, but a few will remain. Inspired by God, we say the Biblical writers were, and by that we mean that they have carried a deep truth forward to us, that they carry it to us still, whenever we take up the book and read. Not always the truth of journalism, the who-what-when-where-how of everything, but the truth of their encounter with a saving God, the same God we encounter in our own way and time. And so, although we will not be writing scripture any more – the editor of Revelation had grown so weary of the whole process of deciding which books would be in the Bible that he pronounced a curse on anyone who tried to add one -- our words are are inspired by God, too, some of them. Some of our written words carry us further into Christ.