Words

A resident was talking yesterday about the beauty of Christmas hymns in German. He said they are just more beautiful. And then I told him how I absolutely loved Psalm 150... in Hebrew. Not only because I was forced to sing it in Hebrew class last year but because there is something lovely and beautiful about the language and the way it describes sound in that chapter. Even the word for spirit or breath in Hebrew is gorgeous - RUAH. If you say it, you breath out - "Roo-ahh." I find myself immediately contemplative of my own spirit and the breath of life. Then there's the likes of Sarah Brightman and Josh Groban who sing songs in many different languages. Are they beautiful because we have no idea what they mean?

So I'm thinking about language and the craft of writing and composing. Purposefully putting certain words next to certain other words to create a pattern, a process, a certain way of pairing words that speaks to an entirely new thought. It is an art. This isn't to say that once the words are translated that they have lost their meaning. On the contrary, one of my favorite poets does not compose in English. I rely on a poet who speaks her language AND English to rewrite her poems. I count on that poet to take the essence of the poem and convey it to me in my language. A word for word translation will not do. It does not translate. It does not convey.

And this leads me to wonder about the task of a preacher. We study the original languages so we can then read them and find a way to translate them into a message that conveys the meaning. I never knew that studying poetry would come into play so much as a preacher. Who would have ever thought? I'm not writing poems after all, I'm writing sermons. But it isn't about the words and yet, it is. If the words cannot carry the message, the message falls flat. This is my task.

Have you ever heard of Eugene Peterson? He wrote a translation of the bible into contemporary, modern language called The Message. Here's a quote from him about why: "While I was teaching a class on Galatians, I began to realize that the adults in my class weren't feeling the vitality and directness that I sensed as I read and studied the New Testament in its original Greek. Writing straight from the original text, I began to attempt to bring into English the rhythms and idioms of the original language. I knew that the early readers of the New Testament were captured and engaged by these writings and I wanted my congregation to be impacted in the same way. I hoped to bring the New Testament to life for two different types of people: those who hadn't read the Bible because it seemed too distant and irrelevant and those who had read the Bible so much that it had become 'old hat.'"

In a smaller way, every Sunday, this is the task before: make an impossibly distant and hard to relate to text be entirely real and entirely relate-able. And you know what? I absolutely love it. There is always a moment when I am writing where I go, "Oh shit. There's absolutely no way out of this misery of a parable. What was Jesus talking about?!" And yet, every single time, a light bulb has clicked on, the spirit has shown up, and I have been humbled into realizing yet again, how great is the love of God.

Oh, do I love words and the Word.