Acts 2.8 How is it that each of us hears in our own language?
I was once making a funeral visit for an elderly man in York who had come from Swaledale originally. His daughter wanted the Twenty Third Psalm read in Swaledale dialect, a version that his god-father Kit Calvert had written. The son in law felt unable to do it as he would be too emotional, so I offered to do it. Now I am not from Swaledale, but I am North Riding of Yorkshire born and bred. Anyway, I must have made a fair fist of it because later when the son-in-law sadly died, I was asked to do it again.
Hearing words in our mother tongue is important. I once went with some friends who were all at theological college together to a wedding in Northern Ireland and a group of us travelled up to Stranraer in Scotland to catch the ferry to Belfast for the wedding in Portadown. We arrived at the ferry terminal and a man on duty directing the traffic spoke to me through the car window. I hadn’t a clue what he was saying, so I felt unable to know to respond, so he said it again, but I still was none the wiser. He was of course speaking English but with such a strong Scottish accent I could not make out the meaning of the words he was saying. He was speaking my mother tongue but not in a way that was anything like my mother’s accent!
On the Day of Pentecost the crowd assembled in Jerusalem from every corner of the Roman Empire and they heard the message in their mother tongue. They were baffled that amidst the cacophony of sound they each heard in their own language. The spoken word is complex and perhaps none is more complex than the English language with inconsistent spellings and pronunciations. We have hundreds of different languages in our world and then within that there are accents and turns of phrase which are particular to different places. I was picked up the other week by a fellow superintendent who said he had learned a new phrase from me, which was “keen as mustard”. A similar thing happened when I once said of John Wesley that his intention was to “ginger up” the Church of England. Often when visiting families to prepare for a funeral they will tell me something the deceased person used to say, a little phrase that everyone who knew them well would be familiar with. And I use it during the service by making reference to it.
Hearing the message in our mother tongue, in a language we can understand and relate to is crucial. Because failure to do so means the message might not get through, goes unheard, not understood, it loses its effectiveness, and its sharpness is blunted. This is why at the time of the Reformation so much commotion was concentrated around having the liturgy in the vernacular. In more recent generations, missionaries travelled far and wider across the world and often had to translate the Scriptures into the mother tongue of those to whom they went or learn another tongue and preach in it. “How shall they call if they have never heard, the gracious invitation of God’s word?” (770 HAP)
For some years now the Methodist Church has been concerned that we speak of God in ways that makes sense to people, use less jargon, and out of date terminology and perhaps theology, but rather make an effort to use words that are easy to comprehend. This is not always an easy task. No longer to we speak of “the propitiation for our sin” that we used to in the 1936 Book of Offices Service at the Comfortable Words, for example. We have a tendency to use words and phrases that are familiar to us and someone from another country or from a different culture might not know what we mean. The Gospel and God’s message indeed God, is for all. And sometimes it is the way we announce the message, the words we use, that is the problem.
Let me give some examples and I realise I will ruffle some feathers, but my task is to challenge, provoke and disturb as well as comfort. Always referring to God as “Father” is not helpful to everyone. If your experience of Father is not a good one, thinking of God as the being like our dad was might not be helpful and another image, metaphor is needed. When the Methodist Worship Book came out in 1999, the phrase from Ordinary 2 Holy Communion referring to God as our “Father and Mother” caused a stir. Sometimes the translation of the Bible causes problems. Not everyone can relate to male pronouns so “mankind” can be regarded as non-inclusive to some people so we should refrain from using such terms. Not everyone is a “he”. At my ordinands’ testimony service my female colleague objected when the Chair of District chose the hymn “A glorious company we sing the master and his men”. Essentially we need to watch our language. That’s why I use NRSV, generally speaking. Most of the translations used in this circuit seem to be non-inclusive and sometimes they are paraphrases not even translations. Shortly Neil Richardson, a former President of the Conference, is going to give a lecture to the Methodist Sacramental Fellowship on atonement theories based around the theme of “minding your language” when speaking about such things. Atonement theories are theories not undisputed truths, they are interpretations and explanations. The Methodist Book of Offices service did not included the word “satisfaction” to describe the atonement in its Holy Communion Liturgy when it took the BCP as its baseline. I am not sure the latest hymn book committee knew that when they permitted some hymns to be included in Singing the Faith! Sometimes it is our theology that needs attention and we are very slow at changing that. We need to be careful we don’t get trapped in a time warp. We don’t really grasp that the reason why churches keep changing their liturgies and their hymn books is because our understanding of God keeps changing and we become aware that some of the things we used to sing, sing with great gusto are no longer appropriate.
On the Day of Pentecost according to Acts 2 different tongues were heard. To change the metaphor, we could say there was expression through different colours, different flavours. Now I think that when we think about the life of the Church, we see this made manifest in different expressions, with different emphases but essentially proclaiming the same gospel. Over the past 50 years the various denominations of the Church of God have encountered one another and have been learning things from each other, from other branches of the Church in our own land and from the World Church. A former superintendent of mine once said when they considered the life of the circuit we were both stationed in at the time that it all was much of a much-ness, and rather grey in colour. The churches appeared very similar to each other in terms of what the flavour of the worship was and how faith was expressed and made manifest. There was little diversity, little creativity and little imagination. And we need to experiment with other colours, so like a diamond the many colours shine in God’s sun light with the flavour of things so that there is a feast not a collation of blandness. Some people think there is only one Methodist way of doing things and they are of course, wrong. Most of us only know what we know, we do not know the things we have no experience of. We may believe all Methodist Churches are like the one we go to and they will most certainly not be. It may equally be the case that some thing we think are Methodist ways are not in fact Methodist at all. And against a backcloth of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church that we are supposed to believe in, the ecumenical movement of the last fifty years has exposed us to all sorts of things from other traditions that can enrich us. So in our Conference authorised hymn book we have material from all over the world, from traditions of the whole Church, from every age. And similarly in our Conference authorised liturgies within the Methodist Worship Book and additional material we have a rich seam of resources which hardly ever gets tapped because we tend to stick with what we know.
And when we speak the message we need to speak it in ways that make sense to people. That means attention to the context and so how we present it in place A might be different from when we present it in place B. We need to celebrate diversity not dumb it down so everything is a mess of pottage based on the lowest common denominator. We need to let the colours sing, to let the flavours be savoured and the glory be God’s.
In the world of today, where everything seems to be in jargon, initials, acronyms and new words for old concepts seem to be coined with every passing week in order to reach people we have to be tech- savvy, we have to “use all the means” we can as John Wesley said in a different context. I confess that I do not come easily to smart phones and other devices, to apps and downloads, to chat and facebook and facetime, I am more comfortable with a fountain pen, and hard paper copies of documents, but I do see the importance of them all. God allowed the people gathered in Jerusalem from every known nation of the world at that time to hear the good news in their own language and we must strive to make that same good news of the kingdom known to people in our world in ways that they can relate to without diluting the message. We are tasked as John Wesley put it “ Do all the good you, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can to all the people as you can, as long as ever you can”.