Words, Words, Words

By Rev. Daniel Burhop

You have to read a lot in college. It’s just an accepted fact. Every semester begins the same way: a trip to the University Bookstore (or to an online distributor). You have required books. You also have recommended books, in case you find yourself with a lot of free time. Yeah...right.

Books, books, and more books. You carry them to class. They fill your bookshelf, or more likely, are piled on your floor. Every dorm room and every college apartment is full of them. Don’t forget the library.

At first, it seems great. If you read the book, you gain the knowledge. Knowledge is good. That’s why you are going to college isn’t it? So, you read and read and read.

Slowly, you turn into Hamlet. Polonius was given the task of determining if Hamlet was going crazy or not. When he approached, Hamlet was reading a book. Polonius asked, “What do you read, my Lord?”

“Words, words, words,” Hamlet replied.

Crazy? Perhaps. Or maybe he was just a regular college student (don’t forget, Hamlet attended the University of Wittenberg), who had read so many books that everything seemed to run together.

Do you ever get down to the bottom of a page, or worse yet, several pages, and realize that while you were reading, and your eyes looked at every word on the page, you don’t remember a single thing you read? I hope that isn’t happening right now.

As powerful as words can be, it’s awfully easy to ignore them. That’s one of the dangers of college. You read the book, but you don’t gain the knowledge.

A bigger danger, though, is that you spend so much time reading, that you forget about a more important Word. Another man from Wittenberg wrote about this Word in His hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” (LSB 657): “God’s Word forever shall abide, No thanks to foes, who fear it.” In college, many things will distract you from the Word. Some of those things, like studying, may even seem good; after all, your vocation as a student is to read, read, and read some more. Even good things can lead you away from Jesus. Even good things can become your god.

Thanks be to God that He does not willingly let those things take you away from Him. As the hymn continues, “For God Himself fights by our side With weapons of the Spirit.” Those weapons of the Spirit that Luther writes about are the Word and Sacraments. When you read the Bible in your daily devotions, when you hear the Word of God read and sung in the Divine Service, it is not simply “Words, words, words” that you are reading and hearing. It’s a Word that is “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12). It is a Word that God says, “goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it” (Isaiah 55:11). It is a Word that “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

It is a Word that was given to you in your baptism: “the word of God in and with the water.” It is a Word that is given to you in the Lord’s Supper: “the words written here: ‘Given and shed for you for the forgiveness of sins.’” It is the Word that was made flesh, Who carried your sins to the cross and into the grave. It is the Word “who was delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification” (Romans 4:25).

While you study away, fulfilling your vocation, remember that the Word of God remains with you. Yes, you will read and read and read some more. But remember these words of Martin Luther, written in his treatise To the Christian Nobility: “It is not many books that make men learned, nor even reading. But it is a good book frequently read, no matter how small it is, that makes a man learned in the Scriptures and godly…Above all, the foremost reading for everybody, both in the universities and in the schools, should be Holy Scripture...”

That being said, open up the Gospel of St. Matthew and hear of Jesus who is “with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). Read through St. Paul’s letter to the Romans and be reminded, “all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus

were baptized into his death” (Romans 6:3). Hear the words of the author to the Hebrews, “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1-2).

These are not just “words, words, words” that God speaks to you through His Son. The Word that creates and sustains your faith is the same Word that created and sustains all of creation.

Rev. Daniel Burhop is the pastor of University Lutheran Chapel, a full-time campus ministry serving the University of Colorado at Boulder. He can be reached at burhopdgo@gmail.com