Sermons for the Month
A Passion for Greek
DATE: January 21, 2001
SERVICE: Epiphany III
TEXT: Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10“To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN Words matter. Language is important. How important? To die for. Recent language riots in Algeria resulted in the deaths of four Berbers protesting the government's decision to make Arabic the official language of Algeria, a slap at the Berbers' Tamazight tongue. In Pakistan, riots throughout the last half of the century resulted in the deaths of people protesting Urdu as the official language in a country where Urdu competes with Bengali, Sindhi, Punjabi and others. In India, language is a sensitive issue. In the 1965 riots, people died over the issue in Madras, and 30,000 teachers lost their jobs. Even in our own country, we have a long tradition of language battles. Ben Franklin himself was a player in the dispute with the Pennsylvania Germans in the 1750s. But today, the strife continues. One needs only to mention California, Hawaii, Oakland (Ebonics), Miami, Puerto Rico to recall language wars which pit English-only advocates against the speakers of indigenous or immigrant languages. Enter Microsoft. The Seattle-based company has been working on software programs for Turkish, Cyrillic, Arabic, Thai, Hindi, Tamil, Marathi, Konkani and Sanskrit. Now they are developing software to help defuse language tensions in Greece: software for ancient polytonic Greek - an alphabet that dates from the age of Plato. The challenge of polytonic Greek is that it has six accent marks, a much more complicated form of writing than modern monotonic Greek, which has just one accent mark. But despite the fact that it hasn't been spoken as a language for centuries, people are passionate about Plato's Greek. Proponents of polytonic Greek have squared off with monotonic modernists for years, with writers being hauled into court for not using the proper forms. Worse: people have died in riots incited by the language. So, wanting to avoid violence and glide gracefully into Greek culture, Microsoft saw that it would be politically correct to offer polytonic software to the people, and bring Plato's language into the digital age. They aren't going to make money on it, but Greeks love it - especially the Orthodox Church. "Ancient Greek," said one devotee, "is like your grandmother. You don't see her every day but you love her to death." We feel the same way about Scripture, don't we? Our affection for the Bible is like a Greek's passion for Plato: We can love it and leave it. Although we may not read the Bible every day, we sure want to keep it handy on the coffee table ... even if it is a little dusty. It was precisely this realization that overwhelmed the people of post-exilic Jerusalem. Nehemiah tells the story of a time when God's law had been missing in action. A remnant of the people of Judah had just returned from exile in Babylon, and their governor Nehemiah - a good and faithful man - led them in rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem and instituting social and religious reforms. In chapter 8, Ezra, the scribe, cracks open the ancient book of the law of Moses and begins to read it to the gathered people. They hang on his every word, from early morning until midday, and as he speaks, the Hebrew of the text is interpreted to them by people standing nearby. You see, even though Ezra is reading the Scriptures loud and clear, the people cannot understand them completely until they are interpreted in the more familiar Aramaic. When they grasp what they are hearing, they are so moved that they weep (v. 9). Unlike these Jerusalem Jews, we do not have a problem with access to the Scriptures in our own language. What is remarkable about this passage is the power of the Word of God to penetrate the human spirit, to speak to the heart, to touch the deepest corners of the soul. Regrettably, people are passionate, sometimes fanatic, about the translations they prefer. Some of God's children will never forsake the Elizabethan English of the King James. They'll fly into an argument like partisans of Plato's Greek to defend the KJV. If you are a Catholic it's the Douay-Rheims. Or the NIV. Or, you'll run into those who may not have a translation they love, but have a translation they love to hate. The Revised Standard Version (RSV) is frequently the target of such attacks, as is the NRSV. And, who knows? There may be a few who prefer the KAV (Klingon Authorized Version). To repeat: Our problem today is not access, but faithfulness. To "understand" the Bible means, quite literally, to "stand under" the Bible - to place ourselves under its authority, to take it personally, to allow our lives to be shaped by it and to give it our trust and our confidence. When we seek to understand the Bible, we are doing more than making a reasonable effort to understand what the words mean. Instead, we are "standing under" Scripture's view of God and humanity and sacred history, and giving it not only the insight of our brains, but also the allegiance of our hearts. This is why all the people of Judah wept when they heard the words of the law, and then went their way to eat and drink and to make great rejoicing. They wept and rejoiced, in heart and mind, "because they had understood the words that were declared to them" (8:12). It's all well and good to join the battle of biblical inerrancy, interpretation and authority. But it doesn't matter one jot or tittle if we don't read the Bible! So what's the problem? We're not talking Plato's Greek here. There's no polytonic problem. No accent aggravation. Every one of us can pick up a good English translation and read God's Word for ourselves. I think one of the reasons Christians don't read the Bible is not that its too difficult to understand but that its understanding is too hard to take. When we read the Bible we discover, for example, the church is not a democracy but an autocracy with Jesus as our King and savior. We find that Christians are to march to the beat of a much different drummer than does the world, a drummer, however, that we very comfortable following. Reading the Bible might mean we have to give us some of our toys and sacrifice some of our luxury for the sake of others. Oh, no mistake about it. The Bible is a hard book to read. But when we do read the Bible, there's a good chance we'll also experience what the Israelites in ancient Jerusalem did, as they stood attentively at the Water Gate. They not only got a portion of daily water for their bodies, they got living water for their souls. And when they did, Nehemiah tells us they went away "to celebrate with great joy" (NIV). For the Bible contains the promises of Jesus Christ as well. It's only the third week in January. Why not read the Bible through this year and let your transformation begin AMEN