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When preachers are translators
Hope you had fun with the babelized Bible text on Tuesday. (The mystery phrase, by the way, was “you must be born again”) At the very least, it gives an appreciation of the complexities involved in translation and the challenges faced by Bible translators. Next year’s Biblefresh initiative will swing the spotlight onto the publication of the King James Version in 1611, and the preface to the original edition is certainly worth a read. In it Bishop Miles Smith writes that:
Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain, that we may look into the most holy place, that removeth the cover of the well, that we may come by the water.
Since then the science of Bible translation has grown and developed, with translations tending either towards formal equivalence or dynamic equivalence. Advocates of formal equivalency aim for a word-by-word accuracy which stays as linguistically true to the original text as possible. Dynamic equivalence translators, on the other hand, aim to capture the sense or impact of the original words in their finished text.
I believe that every preacher acts as a translator. We seek to understand our source text (the Bible) as well as we possibly can by studying the source culture from which it emerged. We then seek to study the target culture of our congregations and the language which they speak in order to transfer the impact of source text to target culture.
Here’s the question, though – are we formal or equivalent translators? In other words, do we lean more towards Scriptural accuracy or cultural accessibility? Most preachers put an enormous amount of time into scanning the cultural airwaves in order to produce a dynamic translation of the Bible in the pulpit. The danger, though, is that we can over-translate the Bible to the point of harmlessness. No matter how carefully researched our illustrations may be, the Word of God is always a word from another place, isn’t it?
In his book Peculiar Speech: Preaching to the baptized, William Willimon considers this very issue and concludes that try as we might, Christian preachers ‘talk funny’ because the word of God is a word from outside, impacting on our little worlds.
Do we agree with him?:
Speakers often are…
Tried to think of something to say.
Couldn’t.
Didn’t.
(A luxury not often afforded to preachers…or congregations!)
Fun with mistranslation
If you are sitting there contemplating Sunday’s preaching task and wondering whether your message ever really gets across, why not distract yourself with a little help from the babel fish? Those who remember Douglas Adams Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy will doubtless remember the babel fish. This curious creature feeds on the sounds around about it. When inserted into a human ear it excretes those sounds in the language appropriate to the hearer’s brain.
A visit to the Lost in Translation website will give you pretty much the same experience. You insert a phrase in English, press the button to “babelize” it, and your phrase is then translated into and out of English via several machine translations…until it is barely recognisable. Those of you who felt that people’s faces last Sunday betrayed a degree of confusion over your carefully honed words cannot help but be reassured. At least your message wasn’t this muddled…or was it?
Anyone care to hazard a guess as to which phrase of Jesus’ ended up as “they must still be tolerated”? [Clue: think Nicodemus]
Most of us preach from a Bible which has already made the journey from Hebrew and Greek into a modern English translation. Some of us even do it from a translation so dynamic that it is more like a paraphrase. By the time we then put the translated paraphrased Word into our own words it may have been through not one but several babel fish! Eugene Peterson, the brilliantly gifted man behind The Message, says that in it he was simply writing down what he had done for years in the pulpit by expressing the Bible in the ‘language of the parking lot’. That’s all very well, but if we then do the same exercise starting with his words, we make a long and convoluted journey from the original text.
At what point does translation in the pulpit become babelization, I wonder? More to follow on this…
Content is king?
Last week I was sent a link to this remarkable picture. It shows some graffiti on a wall in Nantes, Western France. The unusual thing is that the graffiti displays its message both in sign language and braille – allowing many to access it. You have to admire the skill and ingenuity of the artist who has gone to all this effort. That said, it is still graffiti - a (presumably) uninvited painting on a space which does not belong to the artist. Not only that – but I cannot understand it. Since I read neither sign nor braille, it means nothing to me. (I’m sure someone will let me know what it actually says)
[Paul Morris, of Wycliffe Bible Translators, has now translated it for me: “Entendre l’infini à perte de vue” – “hear infinity as far as the eye can see”. - brilliant!]
Photo: www.woostercollective.com
Skill of presentation is all very well, but if the content is poor no amount of fancy presentation will rescue it. Whenever I am training preachers, it is necessary to spend a good deal of time talking about presentation skills. This may include everything from facial gestures and body posture to digital presentation software and embedding videos. This stuff, many feel, is the ‘sharp’ end of preaching. They see it as the place where preachers usually fail their congregations through dull, unarresting and unimaginative presentation. They may have a point.
The thing is though, whilst good content can be spoilt by poor presentation bad content cannot be rescued by good presentation. Powerpoint is no substitute for prayer and embedding is no replacement for exegesis. This is doubtless the reason why Richard Lischer poses the question in his book The End of Words , as to how Martin Luther King’s I have a dream speech might have looked in Powerpoint! We so easily get caught up in the finer points of presentation and illustration that we often short circuit the earlier stages of the preaching process. In this regard, the capabilities offered to us in a digital age are more curse than blessing. The fact that we can do all these visual things makes us feel that we must do them. A preacher who spends hours tweaking her or his Powerpoint slides compared to minutes deciding what to say has been hoist with their own digital petard, so to speak. When this happens, both preacher and people suffer.
Of course setting content and presentation against each other is a false dichotomy. Both are vital and neither should be neglected. However, preachers know thyselves, and if you would rather spend twenty minutes choosing your slide background than an hour analysing the biblical background through commentaries – beware!
On my first week in Christian ministry I was dropped on at the last minute to speak at a Women’s Meeting – a new experience for me then. The retired missionary who had booked me for it saw the slight panic in my eyes, and clamped a firm hand on each shoulder of this frightened young man. Looking at me sternly she said ” it doesn’t matter what you say dear – just say it loudly”!
Surely not?
Deflated
For those of you kind enough to vote in the air guitar poll – I have to tell you that the story is at an end. All but bereft of life it sits now on my office floor – a pale shadow of its former self.
I leave it to you as to whether this is connected in any way with the TubeDude I mentioned in Friday’s post, although as I am about to preach, I rather hope it is not…
Lessons from the TubeDude
When Krish Kandiah tweeted the question yesterday morning “What is lacking in the church’s teaching on holiness?” my initial response was the one word answer “example”. I still believe that is the most fundamental thing. However, on further reflection my thoughts have turned to the TubeDudes.
The first time I ever encountered one of these people-shaped tubes it was at Twickenham Rugby Stadium. Most of the time it just sat on the floor in a crumpled heap of brightly coloured fabric. Every time the home team scored a try, though, it was a different story. The air would rush in, the figure would soar up to its full height and wave its arms about in celebration at their success. The workmanship, the seams, the jolly design and the colours were all there – but until the air came rushing in it was as nothing.
To say that all preachers should be pneumatic is neither to refer to their physique, nor to trot out any of those old cliches about hot air. Unless preachers are enlivened by God’s pneuma, or Spirit, they are as much use as the TubeDude lying crumpled on the stadium floor. Not only this, but God’s is a truly Holy Spirit – and if we want to have anything useful to say about holiness it will be because he informs both private preparation and public speech.
When it comes to questions about how we do that, of course we venture into far more uncomfortable territory where words like ‘discipline’ are lurking. Let each find their own way into the holy place – but it is surely important that what we say on our feet is shaped by what we hear on on our knees? That way holiness lies.
Picture: advertisingballoons.com
Beware of preacher traps
After drawing attention to Jeeves’ unanswerable questions in my previous post, I now find myself drawn towards them as I square up to the preaching task for Sunday. The trouble is, I also find myself haunted by childhood recollections of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet’s attempts to catch a heffalump. Having decided on digging a deep pit, Piglet reckoned that the thing to do would be to “put a jar of honey in the trap” so that the heffalump would go in after it.
As preachers we are drawn in by the thought of instant “applicability”, and should be cautious of Jeeves’ questions lest we fall into a trap. One or two cautions spring to mind:
- Fear the fad: if we preach on today’s hottest topic – it could be tomorrow’s luke warm topic. Better to look for the underlying issue – be it greed, uncertainty, hope or anxiety. Otherwise it can be like getting rid of weeds by pulling off the top – new growth soon spurts out of the roots.
- Avoid the easy targets: it’s so easy to take pot shots at a world which drools for fame or where people actually do wonder whether blondes have more fun. The trouble is, we just sound angry, and angry preachers make lousy messengers of love.
- Don’t peddle snake oil: a preacher who steps up to the pulpit like a travelling showman stepping up to his barrow and offering a universal panacea for pain or a surefire guarantee for happiness is likely to get a similar response – scepticism.
- Don’t answer the unanswerable: preachers who fear uncertainty teach others to do the same. If we can’t explain away suffering or tell people how long they will live, we shouldn’t attempt it.
picture: www.greeting-cards-4-u
Of course, if these are the things we shouldn’t do…what about the things we should? If I could only get my head out of this jar perhaps I could tell you..
Coincidence?
As a Christian I’m not sure that I’m supposed to believe in coincidence, but the Twittersphere has given me pause to reflect on that today. Within the space of two hours I had one tweet from a Biblefresh preaching conference asking ‘what is wrong with preaching’ and another from a national newspaper about Ask Jeeves’ 10th anniversary.
Allow me to explain. Search engine Ask Jeeves are celebrating their ten years and 1.1bn questions by asking people to contribute their answers on 10 unanswerable questions. Those questions are as follows:
- What is the meaning of life?
- Is there a God?
- Do blondes have more fun?
- What is the best way to lose weight?
- Is there anybody out there?
- Who is the most famous person in the world?
- What is love?
- What is the secret to happiness?
- Did Tony Soprano die?
- How long will I live?
It struck me as I read the list that perhaps the gulf between these questions (or at least some of them) and our preaching agenda could go some way towards answering the question about what is wrong with preaching!
Of course there is a difference between fad and relevance – which we should always acknowledge. It was not for nothing that Karl Barth instructed his preaching students to “aim your guns above the hills of relevancy”. In some ways the preaching agenda is more focused on the day after tomorrow than upon tomorrow. But what about today? If people are asking this mixture of serious and frivolous questions today – shouldn’t we seek to answer at least some of them from the pulpit?
Which ones have you tackled recently?
Stronger than steel
The gossamer thin silk spun by spiders is, apparently, considerably stronger than the steel we see woven into cables which support suspension bridges over water or lifts in their shafts. Woven in the same thickness it would support the same weights, and more.
Centuries and centuries ago a frightened man found himself on the wrong end of his employer’s spear. He ran from his job, abandoned his house, fled to the desert, prayed to his God, and wrote a poem. (See 1 Samuel 19 and Psalm 63) The poem was kept, passed down from manuscript to manuscript, language to language and epoch to epoch. Today, his words will be read again – aeons in time and acres in culture from the place where they were born. And yet the gossamer thread of soul-truth, stretched over such a distance as this, will wrap round the heart and tug it to God.
As preachers today take from the scriptures and take to their pulpits they rely on the strength of this thread which God has woven. So thin that it cannot be seen and yet so strong that it cannot be broken it makes preaching possible.
This Sunday, as every Sunday, I shall thank God for the strength of that thread. Mind you, as a spider-averse person I’m not so sure about the other kind…
Mr Amazed…
…was the Mr Man I turned out to be in the end at last night’s teenage event. Loud music, a floor full of teenagers…and complete silence when the time came to talk. Afterwards it was humbling to see numbers of people seeking prayer.
As the years go by I’m sure Mr Amazed should have morphed into Mr Expectant…but God’s still working on it.
preachersa2z
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