I had recently spoken in a sermon about the concept of ‘fusion languages’ and the Faith.

What did that terminology mean? I was fascinated by the translating of the Jewish and Christian Bibles into scores of those Pentecostal languages which contained the meeting of at least two tongues, as in the language of Chaucer with its happy marriage of Norman French and Middle English.

When the service ended, I was suddenly challenged by a linguistic academic who rebuked my terminology: ‘The correct category name is Mixed language.’

My fascination remains unabated.

The language of ‘Mix’ is the language of the fundamental Event in all history which we call the ‘Incarnation’ and which imprints the entire year with its blessing.

Search Scripture, too, for the many mixed liaisons across cultures: Ruth, Naomi… powerful women create Messianic territory, making the uniting of heaven and earth a possibility in human history, prefigured by Adam and Eve in the garden of Paradise. All brought to birth, as we chart Sunday by Sunday in the Church calendar with the constant expectation of the fusion in Mary’s womb of spirit and flesh.

Our whole being searches for Transfiguration by the understanding of the divine/human Mix.

The heart of Christianity is the expression of this in the marvellous Testament: ‘From this time forth I make you hear new things.’ ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God...’

Our entire life’s quest is centred on this Mix.

MIXED TRADITION IN TURIN

In 1982 my family life was transformed by moving from London to Turin to be pastor of the English-speaking (Protestant) church, and eventually to preach in the principal Waldensian church and in smaller local congregations. My wife, Betti, and I lived bang in the middle of the city, near the central railway station, with our two young children and the cat.

We had been transported there by a good friend, a brilliant Italian Jesuit priest, Felice, a Taizé devotee, who worked with his hands, constructing homes for the poorest.

MIXED TRADITION

The flat we lived in was between the church and the principal synagogue, from whose library I borrowed books. Certainly, we mixed languages: an academic neighbour was a keen esperantist!

The gospel indeed exists in hundreds of translations. Some of our congregation attended from a big international centre for business studies and themselves spoke English as a bridging language.

Today’s three Bible passages together express the mixed language of heaven and earth which ever exists behind all speech, in our world at war. The mix is divine and human and universal. The prime unity is the l Word who became Flesh. We learn all this in our churches; as a wartime Christian put it: ‘All real life is meeting.’

This language is often now seen as obscure in our ultra-secular age as Christians try to bring the mix to the world’s consciousness: ‘On earth as it is in heaven.’ The metaphysical equivalent of physicists in the Einstein revolution of how things are, talking of black holes and dark matter relatively. Of the sun itself which, of course, is manifest from ancient times in the speech of myth and the first chapter of Genesis.

Albert Einstein was the Jewish German apostle used by God to engage the world with a new metaphysics concerning ‘God said: Let there be light!’ And the Genesis of the Hebrew Bible offers the crucial question: what follows on after that mix of heaven and earth; how does God accept a conscious part of creation? God fuses God’s creation with our mortal frame. And the overwhelming language of Imagination begins. The prophet Einstein encouraged the use of God-given Imagination.

He liked to speak of Imagination as the language which ‘repairs the world’. He was clearly aware, as a Jew, of the terrible danger of mixing hatred with truth.

THREE READINGS

Today’s three readings from God’s Word, which present God’s mixing of heaven and earth as we are on the brink of the Saviour’s journey to the Gate of the Holy City, are words from the prophet Isaiah where God promises a ‘new thing’ in a world of hatred, ’now it springs forth; do you not perceive it,’ with a summary of Paul’s good news. He, Paul, suffered the loss of all things in order that he might ‘gain Christ’ and the power of Resurrection; and the physical sign of the anointed Saviour in the sweet balm of future bliss.

The Psalm which the Church now bids us sing (126), on her pilgrimage with sufferers of seemingly endless persecution and insult today, expresses the devastation of loss of security in the terrifying mix of suffering held before humanity by Jesus on the Cross; crying out to our world hungry for saving, the paradoxical mixture of his secure offering.