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Preaching from Year B and Year C, November 2024 to January 2025 Finding a language for eternal things

By Christopher Burkett

Editor of The Preacher, Sociologist and Trainer

Every time I’m asked to lead a service from the Book of Common Prayer (BCP) I’m struck by how radically language changes over time. Even relatively minor phrases can make us stumble. For example, in the BCP Communion service intercessory prayer we pray that those in authority ‘may truly and indifferently minister justice’, which sounds to contemporary ears as if we are asking for a casual and careless administration of justice!

Some colleagues eager to restore the implied equality and unbiased aspect of the original, substitute ‘impartial’ for the misunderstood ‘indifferently’ – ‘may truly and impartially minister justice’. Unfortunately, that simply doesn’t sound well, perhaps because it has a too modern ring to it. (My dictionary tells me that this usage of ‘impartial’ only began in the early 1600s, whereas ‘indifferently’ had been used like this for a couple of hundred years by then). The substitution begins to confuse the expected poetic rhythm.

And anyway, if I change that word, how do I decide which of the many other words that are similarly confusing, I should change as well? A good number of the possibilities will be much more troublesome in the substitution than indifferentl/impartially, and the beautiful cadences of the BCP language will be lost. It will probably sound like the hotch-potch it has become. The poetic familiarity that prompted the BCP’s use in the first place, will be destroyed.

In the event I always leave the language of the BCP exactly as it is in the form published in 1662. My reasoning being that those who have chosen this liturgical form will know it well and have long since made their own decisions about phrases that are difficult. For me to second-guess what those phrases might be, and unilaterally change what I consider problematic, seems to claim an authority that appears arrogant. It sets up my wish to only say what I mean as a competitive voice to the choice the worshippers present have already made. Better, I think, to live with ambiguities and let the beauty of language stand as it is. After all I wouldn’t question the inclusion of difficult poetry in the sermon, whatever its age or obscurity, as long as it clearly served the purpose of the preaching.

 

THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG

But, of course, the issue isn’t only about the direct meaning of the words used, whether their origin be seventeenth-century English, liturgical Latin, or Wesleyan hymnody. For example, current cultural circumstances make it impossible to say somethings in some ways; or to put it more positively, the world as it now is, requires things to be said that even a short time ago wouldn’t have been mentioned. As this magazine is published, many preachers will be speaking about harvest. Can we now ever talk about harvest without also talking about the environmental crisis our world faces? I think not. Similarly, the sermons published here turn our thoughts towards Christmas. As recently as the 1960s and 1970s, sermons in the season of Advent regularly had a penitential tone, whether or not ‘the Last Things’ were explicitly addressed. Nowadays it is much more difficult to voice those matters. The dominance of the season of glad and merry consumerism makes it almost impossible for anything beyond rather anodyne references to the gift of new life, to be heard.

The features and sermons published here are ‘case studies’ in how colleagues are tackling these issues of language, engagement and how we are heard. How practically do we ‘open up the mystery’ and introduce ‘the language of possibility’ so that our hearers are left with ‘something to explore, wonder at, or think about’, as Julia McGuinness puts it. Or, as Duncan Macpherson illustrates, as we speak with particular ‘eschatologies’ at work in our understandings, do we need to more explicitly recognise what categories we are using? And how can that recognition better shape what we say? Serious consideration of these matters, theological and stylistic, should allow ‘the calm of eternity to enter into the present’, in Bruce Bryant-Scott’s phrase. The sermons published here offer insightful and varied ways to do just that.

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