Neologisms and Nazareth

Epiphany 3, 2010

Canon Mark Oakley

As some of you know I am a language person. I am fascinated by the power of language, resonance, verbal beauty, enigma, meaning-making. And I am always fascinated by the creation of new words as time goes by, or "neologisms" if we want to be very Mayfair. A recent book by John Ayto called "20^th century words" is fascinating and from it you can eerily outline something of the history of the last century by the words that came into being. And so in the early 1900's we find created the words "car-sick, concentration camp, and the verb, to bomb", the 1910's: "gas gangrene, Oedipus complex, write-off". The 20's: "gold digger, pansy, speed cop". 30's: "stateless person, soap opera, polythene". 40's: "final solution, apartheid, digital". 50's: "drip-dry, mushroom cloud, discotheque". 60's: "acid, identikit, database" 70's: "bag-lady, bean-counters, E-numbers". 80's: "shell-suit, yuppie, video nasty" and then the 90's: "laddish, false memory syndrome, dumbing down".

It is Christian belief of course that we have a message that is timeless and yet, every priest ordained, makes the vow that he or she will seek to communicate this message afresh in each generation. The Church struggles to do this, sometimes well, sometimes very badly. I normally cringe every Christmas when the joint Churches advertising campaign puts out the latest poster to entice people back to church. The danger is that if we sell ourselves like a hamburger, we will be treated like one, making the message cheap, consumable or probably disposable. The ideal for putting across our message about that transcendence and enigmatic love, the source of life and love we call the mystery of God, is resonance rather than relevance, trying to reach those deeper wells within us that constantly need replenishing by those things that matter and that last. It is a difficult task as every preacher knows and it is often a comfort, although a challenge, to be reminded by St Francis that we should preach the Gospel at all times and only if we have to, use words. The best translation of our belief is the life it prompts us to live, the relationships it frees us to form.

So, it is important after hearing today's reading from Luke's gospel  (Luke 4.14-21) to know that Jesus was a preacher and a teacher. He understands our problem. Here, though, it is one of the shortest sermons ever. In Luke's Gospel he is almost still wet from his baptism when he starts preaching in the local synagogues and "was praised by everyone". What dangerous territory that is. No wonder he had to make things quickly transparent. He makes it clear from the start which words he is bringing into their lives so that they can't start wondering off in their adoring fantasies of him and creating something well off target.

This,in Luke's gospel, is his first public appearance and it is is Nazareth, the place of his hidden years, the years we know very little of before his ministry, a village that was insignificant and small at that time, maybe only a couple of hundred people. Out of and into obscurity, as it were, he dramatically launches his creed. And as Fr William said he last week, he does not ask us to worship him but to follow him. To make his creed ours, his priorities our priorities, his outlook, our outlook. And the words he places in the centre of them from the very beginning are these: "the poor, the captive, the blind, the oppressed".  I wonder when people think about the Church today whether they think these were the words that launched us. They probably think it was more like "division, hierarchy, intolerance and homosexuality". Words Jesus didn't like or in the last case, never mentioned.

Jesus taught that God anoints us to bring good news to the poor, release to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the Lord´s favour. Now, we can sit and hear that and think well, I´m not a doctor or a prison warden or a street preacher and I don't know many really poor people so that´s not really my thing, so I´ll leave it for the time being. Literalism is very useful at times. What Jesus does is actually turn religious people upside down because these were the categories of people that many of his day thought had displeased God and that's why they were like they were. He holds up the marginalised, the overlooked, those with no voice who struggled for some dignity, and says these are the VIPs in the Christian community, these are the ones who need reassuring, holding, standing up for that God is their God too. And so the life that Luke goes onto write about is the life of a man who does just that: touching the contagious, loving the mentally ill and disabled, eating with the unwashed, prostitutes, the unseemly,telling stories about smelly half-blood Samaritans being better than priests and making the prayers of a publican more authentic than a holy man, dying as a criminal, making women the first witnesses to his resurrection. His words were not left for the sermon, they became the script for his life and that script has now been handed to us.

In 1923 Bishop Frank Weston spoke to the Anglo-Catholic Congress with these words:

"If you are prepared to fight for the right of adoring Jesus in his Blessed Sacrament, then you have got to come out from before your Tabernacle and walk, with Christ mystically present in you, out into the streets of this country, and find the same Jesus in the people of your cities and your villages. You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the Tabernacle, if you do not pity Jesus in the slum. . . . And it is folly-it is madness-to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the Sacraments and Jesus on the throne of glory, when you are sweating him in the souls and bodies of his children. It cannot be done. . . . Go out and look for Jesus in the ragged, in the naked, in the oppressed and sweated, and in those who have lost hope, in those who are struggling to make good. Look for Jesus. And when you see him, gird yourselves with his towel and try to wash their feet."

The language, perhaps, needs refreshing a little for our day but the Gospel is that of his Lord. And so it means working out how we do this both as a Christian community and as individuals. It means working out how much we give to Charity but it also means seeing what we might do with that bit of extra time we have, it means giving the extra thought for the person struggling and seeing how we might bring some good news, some hope, to them. It means working out priorities before we vote. In the story of Jesus it was small but momentous acts of love that brought in the kingdom he came to preach - it will be true of us, the meal cooked for the one who can't, the letter sent, the volunteered morning, the hand of our life outstretched rather than stuffed in the warm pocket. This is not survival of the fittest. It is asking what we are fit for. We cannot just live lives like spiritual sandpipers, running across the sands in search of something. We are committed to those words Christ placed in the midst of us: the poor, the captive, the blind, the oppressed. Our eyes should be as firmly fixed there as in that synagogue. It won't be long before he adds to that sermon and spells it out: "what you did to the least you did to me".