You may have seen this story making the rounds on the internet. It was on NPR the other day: A Victim Treats His Mugger Right
I post it for three reasons:
I don’t know what the guy’s religious beliefs are, but he gets it.
Some of us hate preaching. If a movie crosses the boundary between storytelling and moralizing, we call it “preachy.” Occasionally when I talk to someone else about a movie or book, I’ll say something like “it was good, until the narrator started preaching.” Documentaries get preachy when they catalogue all the ways our culture or our government fails. We tell someone “don’t preach to me” if they start telling us how to behave. There’s Madonna’s song, “Papa Don’t Preach.” “Preachy” is the word we use when a monologue gets heavy with “shoulds” and “oughts.” Sure, occasionally we use it in positive ways. I’ve heard someone completely non-religious shout “preach it!” to a television celebrity when they supported what he was saying.
I believe there are two reasons that the word “preach” has taken on such negative connotations in our culture. First, most preaching relies heavily on “shoulds” and “oughts.” Second, most preachers fail to inhabit more than one point of view.
We call the verbs “is” and “have” state-of-being verbs. They describe the way something is: its state of being. Good writers and storytellers avoid state-of-being verbs and passive voice. It sounds better to say “someone stole the candy” than “the candy was stolen.”
I call the verbs “should,” “ought,” and “must” state-of-non-being verbs. They describe the way something is not, but should be. Unfortunately, most preachers use state-of-non-being verbs freely. “We ought to love our neighbors.” “We mustn’t judge.” Yuck.
Rather than tell us what we must or should do, why not simply show us doing it? Paint a picture of what the world would be like if people did love their neighbors. Imagine a situation—a specific situation—in which someone doesn’t judge. Tell us about how a small congregation responds when one of its teenage girls with HIV gets pregnant.
The other thing that makes a sermon preachy is when the preacher inhabits only one point of view. Speaking from an omniscient, authoritative, deeply religious position, the preacher never puts her toe into the turbulent surf of human experience. She takes the Word and makes it unincarnate, abstract, lifting it above the messiness of human life and placing it up in glory, where we can stare at it in its crystal perfection. When she preaches about hope in the face of despair, you can hear it in her rhetorical questions: “Why not just give up? When we see the mess the world is in, sometimes we just want to throw our hands in the air and call it quits, don’t we?” She’s uncomfortable with staying with this train of thought, because her very next word will be, “but.” She can’t just leave “calling it quits” at the end of a sentence, so she adds “don’t we?”
And this is if she preaches better than most. Because across the street, her colleague at the other church won’t even go there. “Some people just give up,” he says. “They look at the mess the world is in, and they just throw their hands in the air and call it quits.” Because they are not as enlightened as we are, even though they should see the world differently. We know we mustn’t give up, mustn’t lose faith. Gack!
Preacher, please. Give us at least an inkling. Try, just try for a bit, to be a one of the ones Jesus didn’t heal. Be the pagan woman who Jesus insulted by comparing her to a dog. Get on the other side of grace, and spend some time with those of us faithless ones. Dwell with us for awhile in this darkness before you brush it aside with a wave and a “but Jesus said.” The Word put on flesh, which means it saw the world from a particular perspective—the world in 3-D, thanks to those orbs of gristle and fluid on either side of his nose that we call “eyes.”
Parallax. That’s what it is. Every human being with functioning eyes walks around with two simultaneous perspectives, which our brains interpret as depth. Can you give us that? More than one perspective, just so we know that what we see has depth and reality, instead of the two-dimensional flannel-graph preaching we usually get at church?
And if you don’t, well, then you can forgive us if we nod off to sleep. Because, really, I’ve got enough people preaching at me all day long.
I’m enjoying teaching the short-term Bible study “The Bible, Uncensored.” If you’ve visited this blog before, you probably know this is a theme of mine. I think we get more of a sense of the radical nature of the Gospel when we translate passages that are meant to be shocking into their shocking English equivalents. By noting the vulgar aspects of Biblical language, we also get a better understanding that these stories are often about real life, and not just some idealized heartwarming Christian version made for the Family Channel.
For example, when Saul, angry with his son Jonathan for helping David, calls him a “son of a perverse and rebellious woman,” who is “a shame to [his] mother’s nakedness” (NRSV, 1 Sam 20:30) some translations choose to make this into a propositional statement. The Good News Bible says, “How rebellious your mother was! Now I know you are taking sides with David and are disgracing yourself and that mother of yours!”
Taken literally, Saul’s statement makes no sense. How could Jonathan’s shameful acts shame a shameful woman? But Saul’s statement is not meant to be taken literally. It is an insult. Eugene Peterson gets it better in The Message when he writes, “You son of a slut! Don’t you think I know that you’re in cahoots with the son of Jesse, disgracing both you and your mother?” I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone call someone else a “son of a slut,” but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t happen. Also, like the Good News, he leaves out the crude reference to his mother’s reproductive system.
I’ve said before that my understanding of Hebrew is only slightly worse than my understanding of html. In other words, if I sit down with a dictionary, a grammar, and several translations, I can more or less figure things out. So I confess that my grasp of this particular passage may lack some nuance. But I think it’s pretty clear what Saul means. He is using an almost universal kind of vituperative rhetoric which every child learns on the playground: when you really want to insult someone, you do not insult them. You insult their mama.
The NRSV and JPS have almost identical language. My Oxford Study Bible has this helpful scholarly-sounding footnote:
By calling Jonathan the son of a perverse, rebellious woman Saul means to brand Jonathan as genetically disloyal, but the choice of words points the insult at Jonathan’s mother; his mother’s nakedness refers euphemistically to her pudenda, which are shamed by his having entered the world thereby.
I love it! In the future, when someone cuts me off in traffic, this is what I will do: I will honk, shake my fist and yell “you son of a perverse and rebellious woman! Your mother’s genitals are shamed by your having entered the world thereby!”
The Access Bible has a similarly helpful footnote: “Nakedness is a euphemism for the genitals. Saul’s remark is coarse and insulting. He accuses Jonathan of treason and says that he is a shame to his mother’s genitals.”
Okay. Granted, there is a theme here of genetic disloyalty. Saul cannot believe his own son would act to divest his family of power. So genetic disloyalty, treason, or whatever you want to call it is wrapped up in this statement. But that’s where the actual relevance of Jonathan’s mother ends. Saul is not primarily concerned with Jonathan’s mother. He is not giving his son a stern talking-to, saying, “your mother would be very disappointed in you.” This is coarse, vulgar, your-mama kind of language. We have a similar phrase in English that English-speakers use when they want to level an insult at someone which involves their mother’s reproductive system. Samuel L. Jackson has perfected the delivery of this versatile noun/adjective/verb to such a point that thousands of high school and college boys across the nation practice it at least four or five times daily in front of a mirror. Again, this compound word may be colorful, but it is in no way descriptive of any actual state of affairs. When Jules in Pulp Fiction refers to himself as “a mushroom-cloud-layin’ m*****f*****,” this is not a propositional claim about nuclear weapons reproducing in incestuous ways. It is colorful and vulgar. But it has nothing to do with his mother.
So, although “M.F.S.O.B.” may not be the most accurate translation of this lengthy phrase, I think it captures the intent a lot better than the alternatives. I’m also not suggesting that Bibles actually use this vulgar phrase, but I think Bible students ought to realize that ancient kings used language that was no more regal or dignified than street punks. And if Saul sets the precedent, other kings follow suit. David and Rehoboam also use stereotypically macho vulgar language.
Why is this important? It’s important to me because the Bible has been censored so long, and in so many ways, that one of the big arguments in church is about “relevance.” We’ve got some sincere preachers desperately trying to make the Bible relevant to their culture, and other Barthian preachers stiffly arguing that the culture should be made relevant to the Bible. It’s a bunch of crap. Relevance should be a non-issue. These things are already relevant to each other, and it’s our M.F.ing preaching that’s created the supposed “homiletical gap” between the world of the Bible and the culture we think we know so well. What we have is not a relevance issue. What we have is a credibility issue.
I want to blow up the whole equation. The Bible doesn’t say what we think it does. The culture doesn’t mean what we think it does. Rather than trying to make one relevant to the other, we should immerse ourselves in both.
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