From the Pastor: Dwelling in the Word

Dear friends,

Several of us from Peace were at the Sierra Pacific Synod Assembly in Reno this past month. In addition to myself, you were represented by Chuck and Carolyn Bloom and Pat Baker. Bruce Lundberg and David Baker were there as retired pastors (and their spouses were along for the ride as well).

There were some wonderful things at this year’s Assembly; the keynote speaker, New Testament professor Mark Allen Powell, was particularly stimulating.

But I also liked a feature that was called "Dwelling in the Word." As a kind of devotional moment at the beginning of each session, one of the leaders of our synod (members of the Synod Council) shared with us what the Bible has meant to them in their life. It was a moving exercise, and I suppose I was not alone in thinking about what the Bible has meant to me.

I thought, for instance, of my mother’s Bible. It was an old King James Bible, presented to her, if I remember the story correctly, when she went off to serve as an army nurse in World War II. Her mother, my grandmother, had written a brief inscription on the front page: "Read your Bible as often as you can. Mother." My grandmother, an immigrant, had very minimal English writing skills, but that bit of advice was pretty clear.

And I thought of an early morning journey I took each Wednesday during one Lent when I was in high school. My pastor gathered a group of us for breakfast, and we read together—I think it was the gospel of John. We were using the recently published New English Bible, and it somehow grabbed me in a way my regular Revised Standard Version did not.

And I thought of a lecture from my Old Testament professor at Yale, the opening lecture of the introductory Old Testament survey course, where he said that his goal was to teach us the Bible in such a way that when we became preachers, our people would say (and here he was quoting, of course, from the disciples on the road to Emmaus) "Did not our hearts burn within us when he opened to us the Scriptures?"

The Scriptures, after all, are where we meet God. If we are truly to know God, it will only happen if we "dwell in the Word." I hope that is happening for you; I hope the little snippets of the Bible that you hear on Sunday morning are not your entire regular exposure to God’s Word. I hope you have some regular discipline of reading and meditating on the Word of God.

And if you don’t, I’d be happy to talk to you about how you could begin. There’s not much that would be more important to me, in fact, than to help you learn how better to "dwell in the Word."

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

Peace to you,

Pastor Richard O. Johnson

Classic Prayers

Almighty God, heavenly Father, through your Son Jesus Christ you have commanded your people to go into all the world and preach the good news to the whole creation: Grant us a ready will to obey your Word; and as we have entered into the labors of others, help us so to serve you that others may enter into our labors; and that we with them and they with us may attain life everlasting; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

--Henry Eyster Jacobs, 19th century

Lutheran historian/theologian

Liturgy Notes: Translation and Language

In our adult Sunday School class we’ve been talking recently about translation as it affects our liturgy. This occasion for this discussion is our looking at the new Evangelical Lutheran Worship hymnal, which at a number of points has offered "new translations" of some portions of the liturgy.

Many of us remember previous translation transitions. We navigated, not always easily, the "new translation" of the Apostles’ Creed in the 1978 Lutheran Book of Worship. We’ve learned to appreciate, and perhaps even say by heart, the "new version" of the Lord’s Prayer that was provided as an option in the LBW (both "traditional" and "new" versions are still included in Evangelical Lutheran Worship).

New translations are nothing new! They have been a constant through the history of the church, but because language changes rather slowly, most of us aren’t aware of how consistently liturgical texts change. Since the 1960’s, a series of ecumenical groups in the English-speaking world have been working on revised translations, and their work is the basis of most of the "new translations" both in the LBW and the ELW.

Why do we need new translations? One reason is simply that language changes. We used to say in the creed, that Christ will come to judge "the quick and the dead." The word "quick" meant "living"—but we simply don’t use it that way any more. For contemporary people, a different word was needed for the sake of clear understanding.

The same thing might be said for modern translations which pretty much do away with "thees and thous." In earlier times (quite a while ago now!), those words actually contained a distinction: it was a more "familiar" form of address than the more "distant" "you and your." That distinction vanished from English a couple of centuries ago at least, and now using those words is something of a museum piece—however much we may love the poetry of it.

Sometimes there are unintended theological consequences to seemingly harmless changes. Take the phrase "he descended into hell." The new ELW says "he descended to the dead." Now that’s OK if what we mean by that is that Jesus really and truly died on the cross; some parts of the Christian tradition have interpreted the "descent into hell" in precisely that way. Lutherans, however, have generally interpreted it in a very different way. Lutherans (and others) have taught that Christ actually "stormed the gates of hell" and defeated sin, death and the devil. So by translating "descended to the dead," we are actually muting, and maybe eliminating, what Lutherans have

always taught is the actual primary meaning of the phrase.

So translations are tricky business, whether we are talking about Scripture or liturgy. The goal is to find a translation that is accurate, sensitive, and aesthetically pleasing. I would hope another goal is that we don’t make changes just for the sake of change, but that there are significant and persuasive reasons for change. Sometimes we succeed in these goals; sometimes we fail. But new translations we will always have with us, for good or for ill. (And more often, I think, for good.)