Words to Live By
Humans, maybe Americans especially, are great at euphemizing. We can take the most horrific of circumstances and remove all emotion or feeling from the action, object, or event by assigning words that reduce the impact that we feel. As a believer that God works in mysterious ways, one person that taught me about that was comedian George Carlin. Though he does not talk about any spiritual implications of euphemistic language (nor much spiritual at all, at least in a positive light), he brings up a few good examples of where this has come into play in one of his routines. In one particular instance he brings up the fact that “Shell Shock”, a condition of soldiers in World War Two that basically meant that the war had broken them through traumatic experience, was euphemized over the course of wars to “Battle Fatigue”, “Operational Exhaustion”, and finally to “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”. He says that if we were still calling it shell shock, veterans of recent wars may have gotten the care they needed. Sometimes, bigger words or more words might sound more important, but really they do more to make themselves sound important, while diluting the actual meaning of the words.
I think a similar problem exists in Christianity to a degree. Sometimes we use too many words, or bigger words then we need, to convey the point. Sometimes we’ve used a word so much that we just glaze over the true meaning. For an example, let’s take a look at the hymn “Amazing Grace”. I’m sure most of you (Christians at least) can remember the first verse of this hymn by heart. Personally, it’s one of my favorites, and it’s a favorite of many people I know. In case you don’t remember, I’ve quoted the first verse of it here.
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me;
I once was lost, but now I’m found;
Was blind but now, I see.
The meat of what I’m trying to say is here. In this song, when we sing these lyrics, we usually just sing along and think about things like, how amazing He is, or how great it is to be saved, or even how nice it is to sing these words. But if we really look at what this song means, we’ll see that there is more to this song then meets the eye. Namely, when we sing it we are making 3 very important admissions. First, that we are a wretch. There are two definitions of wretch; the first being “a deplorably unfortunate or unhappy person”, and the second being “a person of despicable or base character”. Which of these are you? My guess would be that the songwriter was implying that he was the second, and he may be right: “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). We are flawed beings. The second admission is that we are lost. Without Him, we know that we are just moving in the wrong direction, because there is only one right way to go, and you can’t go that way by accident. “Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). The third admission is that we are blind without Jesus. “Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12). Is this what you think about every time you sing that verse? When I think of the verse with the meaning of the words written out like this, it makes this hymn of rejoicing that much more powerful then it is when I’m going through the motions in church.
I was talking with a good friend of mine today and we were talking about how sometimes we churchify words to make them sound good, or we look for words that sound good when we’re talking about God. I think that this is not the way to look at it. We should be looking for words that give us the full impact of God. If we can’t find the words, we should unpack the ones we can find into a fuller description of what that means. If we’re just looking for words that make us sound good in the church, we’re trying to sell ourselves instead of God, and that’s not what we should be doing. If we seek to glorify ourselves in our mission, then we have failed. God may use our mission for good, but what will the cost be for our own souls if we are seeking the glory for that from a few words that we thought sounded good? I’ll say right now that if I used any words that may have gotten the point across better then others, all the glory goes to God, not to me. Even if I have a talent for writing, it’s only because He gave it to me.
In this Easter season, we will go to church and sing the same hymns, recite the same prayers, and make the same creeds as we have many times. But I encourage you to examine them again, and think about what you are saying. God is not looking for robotic servants, take the time to acknowledge what you are saying and put some power behind the words. Words are the means to meaning, but you have to put the meaning in them for yourself.
