Speak Something into Nothing

I want you to look at a picture by Brian Kershinik, courtesy of Donald Miller’s blog, www.donaldmilleris.com,
titled, “Nativity.”


Notice that the holy family is a focus, but they are not centered in the picture.


You don’t have to be an artist or a critic to see that what commands your eye is the host of angels or saints who are in movement. They are flowing in white toward the Christ Child, but they are not stopping there. Even the size of the baby tells us something. In this painting, the baby is smaller than he might be, as if to say, that Jesus came not to point us to himself but to lead us on to the Father. We come,, like Wise Men, to see Christ in order to see God.

Movement toward God – this was the mission of John the baptizer. He said I’m not here to point to myself and say follow me. I am here to prepare the way for One greater than I. And the irony is that the very public event when John points to Jesus says there is, is also the place where the Trinity speaks, the Voice of the Father, the tangible presence of the Spirit alighting on Jesus like a dove.

If you were there that day, then the words Father, Son, and Holy Spirit wouldn’t be just words, would they? You would that they are words speaking to a reality.

In our Call to Worship reading in Genesis it says that God was creating the Universe, and he made the earth,, but so far, it was nothing. It was a black void – Chaos.

“Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness “ writes Eugene Peterson. “God’s Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss.”

And then God spoke something into the nothing. And something happened.

Donald Miller tells the story of Bob Goff and his family. One New Year’s Day a man in San Diego named Bob Goff was sitting around the house with his family and the kids were bored. If you don’t like college football, let’s face it, it’s a boring day. Goff believed it was a sin to be bored on New Year’s Day. So Bob Goff asked his kids, what can we do to honor the fact that God gave them this day to enjoy?

The idea they came up with was a parade. They went around the neighborhood knocking on doors telling everybody they were having a parade, today. They invited everybody not to come watch the parade, but to “be in the parade.” That was the rule. Everybody has to be in the parade. There are no bystanders in this gift of the day.

They had the parade and ended it with a cookout. Ten years later hundreds of people participate in the annual New Years Day Parade in the Goff’s neighborhood. They elect a Grand Marshall. This year it was the mailman who rode on a float and tossed letters. The elect a Queen, usually a resident of a local retirement home.

“People on Bob’s street know each other better because of the parade. The children grow up thinking New Year’s Day is a special celebration honoring the miracle of a day, “ Miller writes.

“It strikes me how wonderful it is God gave us time. He had made us characters in a grand epic. The epic is meaningful but there are dark forces trying to convince us it is meaningless, worth nothing, and therefore boring. Bob’s family decided to fight back.”

They spoke something into nothing.


I’ve realized my favorite stories are stories where people decide to take a journey, because you can’t just sit and do nothing. My favorite western, Lonesome Dove, recounts how Gus and Call decide one day, let’s go we’re going to Montana with a herd of cattle. The epic Lord of the Rings is really just one long walk. And then there is that other epic story in which our two heroes embark on a physical and spiritual journey to reach their Promised Land. I’m talking, if course, about the movie Dumb and Dumber.

There is the scene where Lloyd and Harry return to their dump of an apartment. Lloyd has just lost his job as a chauffer – “they get really crazy when you leave scene of an accident” – and they realize they don’t have much really going for them in their present situation.

“We got no food. We got jobs. Our pets heads are falling off!”

That speaks for all of us, doesn’t it?

And Lloyd turns to his friend Harry and says, “I’m tired of being a nobody. Most of all, I’m tired of having nobody.” And he convinces Harry to embark on a quest for the place of his dreams, a place called Aspen. And they go.

Even though they’re pretty dumb, even Lloyd and Harry speak something into nothing.


We don’t have sit around and be bored, eking out an existence that sort of resembles living. If we’re bored, it’s our own fault.

Victor Frankl wrote the now classic Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl is a survivor of the Nazi death camps. His father, mother, and his wife died in the camps. If anyone had an excuse to throw in the towel at the meaninglessness and grind of life, it was Frankl and his fellow inmates. But they didn’t do that.

Frankl argues that what kept people alive in spirit was their belief that life expected something of them, that life needed them to at least die with dignity, to play a role that would teach the world the important lesson of honor, and also of evil.

“We had to learn ourselves and we had to teach the despairing men that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but what life expected from us,” he writes.

Life expects something from us. And to say Life expects something us is another way of saying God expects something from us.

God expects us not to just sit and be bored. God expects us to speak something into nothing. He expects us to live by the baptism and power of His Spirit and work with Him to do the things that He does. So how do we speak something into nothing?

Have a parade. Invite people in your neighborhood over for a party. Take time to mentor a kid. Host a small group Bible Study. Ask someone to be a prayer partner with you. The whole point of our Talent Program was not, “Look how much we made.” The point was, “Look at the cool stuff God has given us. How can we use this to bless others?”

The mission of our church is to “Make Disciples and Create Community.” What is one thing this winter you can do that will contribute to our mission?

We are on our way to someplace good. We are on our way to Some One good.