Foreign Languages

On Friday, my day off, my husband and I drove south into Houston to attend the annual Christmas Bazaar at the Norwegian Seaman's church.  In some ways, going to this event seems a lot like going home:  my home state in Minnesota has a large Scandinavian-American community, and the decorations and the flavors and the sounds had a comforting familiarity.

And yet, it wasn't exactly the same.  This wasn't a church for people with a nostalgic, distant memory of their homeland, but for strangers and sojourners, people getting used to a new country.  Instead of feeling like the closed ethnic communities in my home state, there was an international flavor as we bumped into people from all over the country.  We talked to Minnesota Swedish Baptists and Wisconsin Lutherans and Norwegian immigrants planning a pilgrimage to the northern regions of the United States over the Christmas holiday.

While milling around a large crowd shopping for Scandinavian Christmas decorations, I happened to overhear some familiar sounds.  I recognized the sound of the Japanese language, although (sadly) I didn't understand any of the words.  I turned around and noticed four women perusing the Swedish linens and the Christmas trolls.

It has been over thirty years since I left Japan, after three and a half years as a missionary and teacher.  I recognized the sound of Japanese.  But I no longer understand the actual words.  Still, I wanted to make a connection.

'Are you from Japan?" I asked (in English).

"Kyoto," they told me.

"Ah," I answered.  "I lived in Japan a long time ago."  I emphasized word "long" so that they would not misunderstand that I was fluent in any way.

"Where did you live?" one of the women asked.  "Tokyo," I answered, ".... and Kumamoto."

"Ah," they answered.  (Kumamoto is not known as a haven for foreigners.)

We all nodded to one another in the Japanese way, and then we parted.  It was a small encounter.  I didn't find out why they were here, or for how long, or how they found this place.   It was almost as crowded in the church as in a crowded train in Tokyo; hardly room to turn around, much less to have a conversation.

A little later I was standing in line to buy some Christmas decorations.  Right in front of me was one of the four women from Kyoto.  She had some small decorations, and I said, by way of making conversation, "Those make good gifts."

"Not gifts," she answered.  Then there was a pause, and she said the word, "Souvenir."

I paused too, and I remembered something -- one word -- in a language I (mostly) no longer understood.  I remembered the word for souvenir in Japanese.  "Omiyage?" I said.

I remembered what it was like to be a tourist and a teacher and a missionary, and the "omiyage" that I brought home.  A Japanese ningyo, a handkerchief with flowers, a teacup, a pair of bamboo chopsticks.  I was buying memories, hoping that so many years later, I would remember something about living in that strange place.

And there is so much that I have forgotten.  I recognize the sounds, but I no longer understand most of the words.

But there is omiyage.  There are souvenirs, and somehow they still do the job:  they make real the memories that seem so far away.  Was my life transformed on that narrow island so long ago, when I taught students English and Jesus, and saw God in their faces?   Did I listen to church services in Japanese, and join the members afterwards for curried rice served by the pastors wife?

Sometimes it surprises me how spiritual we think we should be.  After all, we believe that God became flesh and blood, and that his disciples touched him and he touched them, and that they ate and drank together.    And when he left, I wonder if there were times when they forgot what the sound of his voice was like, or forgot the meaning of his words.

But there are still souvenirs -- things we taste and touch -- that suddenly bring the meaning back to us.  All we need is a word -- or a phase sometimes -- "Bread of Life" or "Good Shepherd" -- to remind us that we once spoke a foreign language, and hoped for a better country.

Bilingual

The other day a woman I am acquainted with startled me by saying that she has experienced people telling her to "go back where she came from."  I knew that she was born in the United States, so I could not imagine the scenario where someone would say something like that to her.

"When does this happen?" I asked.

"When I am talking to my 92 year old father," she said.

So people assume that, because she is speaking in another language, a language that they perhaps do not understand, that she is somehow less-than.  That she does not belong.

Things like this happen.  A woman from my congregation took her daughter to get her driver's license.  She has an hispanic last name, and the woman at the office asked if she or her daughter had a green card.  She is from CHICAGO.  But for some reason or another, because of the arrangement of certain letters in her name, it is assumed that she is less-than.  That she does not belong.

Like my new acquaintance, the one who speaks to her father in Spanish, and to me in English.  The fact is (and perhaps this is what really makes people uncomfortable) she is not less-than.  She is more-than.  She is bilingual.

I remember going to Disneyland when I was sixteen.  It was a long time ago, and we went on a tour with a number of other first-time visitors to Disneyland.  The tour guide was telling us all about the history of Disneyland, and then, she turned to some other guests sitting next to us, and she started talking to them in French.  I was fascinated.  I couldn't imagine being able to just switch languages like that.  I couldn't imagine being bilingual.

This is the immigrant experience.  It was the experience of my grandparents, on both sides.  My grandma Judy came from Sweden as a young woman, worked as a domestic in Connecticut, and kept her foot in both countries for awhile, traveling back and forth from Sweden to American until she met my grandfather.  She tried to teach us Swedish words.  I only remember a few of them now.

What is it that makes us want to believe that someone else does not belong?  That they are somehow "less-than"?  To know more than one language, more than one culture, more than one reality, is rich and necessary in our world.

I think that to be a follower of Jesus is, in a way, to be an immigrant.  When we take the values of the Kingdom of God seriously, we will realize that there is another language in the world.  It is the language of the Kingdom of God, and sometimes it doesn't make sense.  The kingdom of God speaks of valuing those who seem to be less-than:  the widow, and the orphan and the stranger.  The kingdom of God tells us to pay attention to the small and the vulnerable rather than the powerful and the successful.  The kingdom of God speaks of love that asks nothing in return.

And there are people who might hear that kind of language and say, "Go back to where you came from."

The woman I know who was told, "Go back to where you came from" -- she said that her family is from Patagonia.  She showed me pictures.  It's a beautiful place, where she's from. But she is called to be here now.  She promised to teach me a little Spanish.

The Kingdom of God is a beautiful place.  And more and more I hope to learn the language of that place too.   Every once in awhile I hear a new phrase:  "a bruised reed he will not break and a dimly burning wick he will not quench" -- so different than the language of the other world I live in, where the poor are crushed and turned away.

Someday this world will fall away, and all that will be left is the language of the love of God, and we will see the beauty in those we thought were less-than, and we will be astonished.  In the meantime, we are called to teach each other a few words of the New Language, to be bilingual.

The Power of One Word

This week my congregation's pre-school held graduation ceremonies for those who are leaving to attend public school Kindergarten, as well as those students who attended our Kindergarten, and will be attending first grade somewhere else.

Last year at this time I was not in town for the graduation ceremonies.  My husband had been in a car accident in Minnesota, and I was caring for him.  So I looked at the pictures and felt regret as I saw the students who were leaving our school.

This year I made sure I was there.  I got to give the opening prayer, and tell the parents how much I enjoyed being with their children every week in chapel, singing songs and praying and telling stories from the Bible.  But all of the important things happened after I sat back down.

The children marched to the tune of Pomp and Circumstance.  They recited the Pledge of Allegiance and the Lord's Prayer.  They sang one of their chapel songs.  And then, one at a time, they came forward to receive a Bible.  Each Bible contained a note from our congregation.

But that was not all they received.  They also received a Word.

Each student received a special word from their teachers.  The teachers prayed and agonized over each word.  You can tell that they want more than anything for that one word to be the Right Word, to be a True word.  And then, on graduation day, the teachers revealed the Word.  Tenacious.  Spunky.  Compassionate.  Spontaneous.  Energetic.  Inspirational.  Courageous.   Ambitious.  Every word was a gift.  Every word revealed depth.  Every word was one both to embrace and to live into.  Every word revealed teachers who both knew and loved their students.

There was something so powerful about this:  to be given a word, your word.  The word is like a mirror, but it is also a challenge.

Here.  This is who you are.  This is what I see in you.  It is not everything, but it is something.  It is your reflection in my eyes.  It is something you can take with you, and use, and add to.

I loved how the teachers didn't worry about whether the children could understand the word they chose or not.  They said "Tenacious", for example, which might not be a word that most five year olds would understand.  But the words were not just for now:  they were words to grow into.

Every word was different.  But behind each word there was one:  Beloved.  Every single child in that school was beloved.

That's the power of One Word.  It is the word behind it, underneath it, the word Beloved.

It seems to me that this is the power behind all of our words.  It is the word "Beloved" that gives them power.  If we cannot speak the truth in love, then all of our words are worthless.  They can destroy, but they can't create anything.

But with the word "beloved" behind it, One Word can do anything:  it can send us out into the world.

I can't imagine what all of these tenacious, ambitious, wise, energetic, charismatic, courageous, beloved children will do.  Maybe change the world.

How I Learned Japanese

I have been thinking a lot lately about my time as a missionary in Japan long ago.  I am not sure exactly why.   My memories of that time are hazy, but lately one of my missionary friends has been posting pictures of those days.  So that might be the reason.  Or it might be that as a Minnesotan living and pastoring in Texas, I feel some sort of culture shock again.  I am remembering what it was like to be a missionary.  What was it like being a missionary?  How is it like or not like being a pastor in a new place?

My actual job description was to teach English to Junior and Senior High School boys.  So even if they spoke Japanese to me, I always spoke in English to them.  A fair amount of the adults I knew also could speak some English.   In some ways we used English as a strategy to preach the gospel.  During the evenings we would host English Bible studies with groups of interested people.

We did learn a little bit of Japanese before we began our work.  We learned some basic sentence structure and key words.  But (I'm not proud to admit this) it was easy to avoid using Japanese in many cases.  Many people were eager to practice their English with us.  I was shy and self-conscious about making mistakes.

Except that if I didn't learn Japanese, I couldn't talk to the children.

Not my students, the little ones at the yochien (pre-school) that was connected to the church.  As far as I knew, none of those children were Christian, but their parents thought Christian pre-school was a good idea.

I wanted to talk to the children.  

So I learned Japanese.

I wanted to know the things that only the children could tell me:  about their lives, whether they had a dog, what was the picture they were drawing.  I wanted to know what they were learning in pre-school, who they were mad it, who they loved best.  I wanted to know what was their favorite color, if they had a dog, whether they were afraid of the dark.

You know, all the important things.

So I learned Japanese.

It wasn't like my English Bible Studies.  There wasn't an agenda.  I just wanted to know them, to talk with them, to learn about their lives.  I was curious.

I don't think I have ever known how to be a pastor without the children.  It's not that I don't think it can be done:  after all, there are plenty of good chaplains in nursing homes.  But in the same way that I learned Japanese from the children, I have learned how to be a pastor from children as well.

I have learned to be curious.  I have learned to listen.  I have learned to laugh.

I still have a few gifts I received from the children.  Hand-made things.  It's been a long time, so I no longer remember their names.   I don't even remember their stories.  I'm sad about that.  But I remember sitting down with them at the low Japanese tables, eating sweets and chattering together.  

I wouldn't have learned Japanese without them.

And for some reason or another, I can't be a pastor, or a missionary, without them either.

Conservative and Liberal Are Both Good Words

I was visiting with a member of my first parish one day many years ago.  He was also a tall, humble man, a retired pastor who had spent all of his ministry serving churches in rural Nebraska and South Dakota.  Now he had come back home to retire.  I remember him stopping in to my office often to chat, to ask me questions about the current state of the Lutheran church.  He was a Norwegian Lutheran, and my background as a child had been with the Swedish American Churches.

"We always thought that the Swedes were more liberal," he said to me that day.  "Liberal?" I asked.  "In what way?  Liturgically?  Morally?  Theologically?  Politically?"

He didn't even bat an eye.  "All those ways," he said, with a sweep of his hand.

Liberal.  Conservative.  We bat those words around a lot these days.  Sometimes when we say them, they sound like accusations, or even like character assassination.  "We always thought that the Swedes were more ... liberal", he said.  "Watch out!  He is pretty... conservative," (as if in warning.) Liberals are permissive.  Conservatives are judgmental.

But I can't help thinking:  At their roots, Conservative and Liberal are both good words.

Think about it:  Conservative means to conserve, to recognize value, not to throw out the old in pursuit of everything new.  I love to go to antique stores, and sometimes I think that the treasures I find have more character than all of the new, cheap stuff I can find in the discount stores.  Does this mean I am conservative?

Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, started the National Parks system.  It was a conservative initiative, a movement to preserve something of value for future generations.

My conservative congregations in South Dakota did not chase after brand names with big price tags.  They weren't flashy.  They didn't go in for expensive, flavored coffee (at least not while I was living there).  They weren't caught up in the latest fad.

I knew that they didn't like "Liberals", and I heard it bandied about in a scornful way.  But what does the word "Liberal" really mean?  It means -- generous.  "Apply liberally" -- means -- Apply generously.  Use a LOT.  And whatever you think about people you CALL liberals, it would seem to me that being liberal would itself be an attractive thing.  I want to be around generous people -- people who are generous with their time, generous will their good will, generous with their resources.

So the word "liberal" really means generous and the word "conservative" really means to conserve, to save what is of value.  And maybe what those of us who call ourselves liberal or conservative need to ask ourselves is:  are we really being generous?  Are we really preserving what is valuable?  Are we who we say we are?

Liberal and conservative are both good words.

But are we who we say we are?

Language School

When I was learning to be a missionary in Japan, I went to language school.  Five mornings a week, we got together in small classes with only about eight students in each classroom, because the emphasis was on oral language learning and drills.  There, we met missionaries from other traditions as well as students in Japan for more secular pursuits.

Eventually we would go to our assignments, either as pastors or as English language teachers.  But for now our main responsibility was to learn the language, at least enough to get started at communication and relationships.  Our language classes did not give us the ability (for example) to understand or speak in religious terms, but we learned to ask questions and understand the answers, and we learned some basic sentence structure and vocabulary.  After six months were were launched into our prospective vocations, where we would (presumably) continue to learn Japanese at the same time we were sharing the gospel.

I think language school is a good idea.  I sort of wish I had language school right now.

I am about to leave the congregation I have served for 17 years.  This congregation is located in a part of the country where I grew up.  I know the culture here so well that perhaps I take it for granted.  I am an expert on the upper Midwest, its language and its idiosyncrasies.  I know that you can call a casserole a "hot dish" and that it is all right to invite someone to go along with you somewhere by asking the question, "Do you want to come with?"  I know that you should not park on certain streets after it snows.  I know the variations of city, suburban and rural life here.

My new church is in an area of the country I have only visited a couple of times.  They have alligators there.  And they don't have winter, really.  Different flowers bloom at different times.  I know I will have to learn to say "you all", and I suspect that "you all" is just the tip of the iceberg.

I sort of wish I had language school, a time set aside to learn the language, but not just the language.  One of the things I remember about the time of "language school" was the time spent doing other things:  the afternoon we spent at a sumo wrestling match, the time I got lost because I took the wrong train, wandering around Shibuya station one day and seeing the statue of "Hachiko", the famous dog that waited for his master every day.  I remember going to Yokohama and eating octopus, visiting parks and admiring tea sets, learning to read, but not just the language.

I am pretty sure that I never really mastered Japanese, although I did improve over the years.  I may be fooling myself as well that I have mastered "Midwestern", too.  I have lived here most of my life, and perhaps I take it too much for granted.  Now, traveling to a new place, I suspect that I will be learning a new language, one that I will not master, although I hope to improve.

I don't have time set aside for "language school" this time, but perhaps it would be wise to set some time aside for it anyway.  Perhaps it would be wise to remember that I am not just called to speak, but to listen, not just teach, but to learn, not just to find, but to get lost, and be found.  Perhaps it would be wise for me to remember, as missionaries have told me before, that I am not bringing the Word to people, I am not bringing Jesus to people, I am not bringing the Holy Spirit.  God is already there.

For the Word became flesh, and He inhabits each particular language and culture, breaking bread, eating rice, getting lost and found, with us.

Native and Foreign Languages

At our new Sunday evening service and mission start, I am learning Spanish.  I stand next to a woman from Ecuador, and she helps me pronounce the words to songs I am learning.  I don't know the meaning of most of the words yet, but at least I am learning good pronunciation.

In the meantime, I am teaching her a little about intervals.  "We are singing that line wrong," I mention. "It is supposed to be a third.  Like this."  I sing the line.  I am pretty sure I have the musical line down right.  The pronunciation is a work in progress.

It is basic church:  we sing, we pray, we talk to each other.  Our liturgy is simple.  We eat together:  bread and wine, but dinner too.  And we are learning English and Spanish.  And music.

It's a start.

A long time ago, I lived and worshipped and taught in Japan.  I learned some Japanese, a little in school, some more from living and having experiences.  I discovered then that learning a language is more than learning words and pronunciations; that the language you speak affects your perception of reality.  In Japanese, for example, there is no "future" tense.  The way you indicate the future is by speaking of uncertainty.  In English we have no problem speaking confidently about things that haven't happened yet.

When I served in rural South Dakota, I was pretty sure that we were speaking the same language.  But in truth, there were nuances of language that I didn't understand, that I had to learn:  the language of "yields", the rhythms of the seasons, how to take the wind seriously.

These days, the church I am serving has started a Sunday evening service, in Spanish and in English.  But there are more languages we are learning, or not learning, on Sunday evening, or morning, or at other times.  We have been playing around with our worship services over the past couple of years, going from two different services, to one blended service, and we have been having conversations about worship and faith formation and what it means to be a disciple.  We have realized that it is so easy to speak about "church" and "worship" in terms of "what I like", or "what I prefer."  People choose a church because it has the music they like, or because it has a youth program they like, or because the worship time works for their family.

When I have met with people who are joining our congregation, these are the things that they specify most often:  worship times; times of Sunday school; youth program; worship style.  I think it is unavoidable because this is the language we speak in the rest of our life.

It is the language of choice.  It is the language that consumers speak.  And we are all consumers.  It is the water we swim in, the air we breathe.

But somewhere along the line, if we are going to be faithful disciples of Jesus, we will need to become bilingual, learning foreign words like "community" and "purpose", "mission" and "neighbor."   Perhaps at first, it will be enough to learn to sing the line, or perhaps to pronounce the words, without knowing what they mean, or to taste bread with a different flavor than we are used to.  Later we will sit down with one another, rise up to go to the world, and realize that we are here for reasons so different than we had originally planned.  We are being transformed when we just came to get a piece of bread; we are changing the world when all we planned to do was sing a song.

A Little Bit of Heaven, Here

Last week I was part of a meeting with our church Leadership Board and the mission developer who will be starting a new worship service and ministry in our building.  We worked out the nuts and bolts of the agreement, figured out who was responsible for what, who is accountable to whom, how we will support each other and what our next steps are.  We talked about many of the practical details that need to be worked out.  We also heard a little bit of the mission developer's vision and passion.

The new ministry will be called Tapestry.  It will be bilingual and seeks to welcome people into community across cultures and language.

As we were talking, I thought back many years, to the time long ago when I served as a missionary teacher in Japan.  I taught English as a second language to Junior and Senior High School boys at a school affiliated with my denomination.  At the same time, I worked to get better at speaking Japanese, and better at teaching English.  I worshipped at a local Japanese congregation, and taught some Bible studies in English, too.

There was one in particular, every Monday night.  It had been going on for centuries, it seemed.  All of the people who attended it were pretty fluent in English, and serious about their faith.  They were all ages, and some had been attending for many years.  The Monday night English Bible study took place at one of the large missionary houses across the street from the boys' school.  All of the short-term missionaries took turns leading it.  We worked our way through various Books of the Bible.

One thing we always did, every single week, before we started reading the assigned scripture reading, was ask a particular question, a question to make people think, but also a question to give everyone a chance to speak.  I remember one week, it was my turn to lead.  We were studying Acts 2, the story of Pentecost, and the coming of the Holy Spirit to the disciples.  My question was "Do you believe in ghosts?"

Some people said 'no.'  Some people said 'yes'.  Some said 'maybe'.

A funny thing happened the second year I was leading the Monday night English Bible study.

A young exchange student from Australia found us, and began attending the Bible study.

After a few weeks a couple more students, one from Germany and the other from Austria, also found our Bible study and became part of the conversation.  A little later a student from Central America also found us.

It was now the International Bible Study, with all of these voices and different perspectives, all gathered in a missionary's living room, having conversations.

All of my memories are old and fuzzy now, but I still remember gathering in the living room, and the students who came, from different parts of the world.  I remember thinking that the Kingdom of God is like this, and how seldom we see it, and how hard it is.  I remember thinking that we were all strangers, in one way or another.  The Japanese Christians because they were practicing a language and a faith not native to them, and the exchange students because they were sojourning in a strange land.  We were all strangers and sojourners, in one way or another, learning new geography, new languages, new practices.  Some of us believed in ghosts.  Some did not.  Some said 'maybe'.  But the Holy Spirit was weaving us together,  just for a short time, and forever.

I wanted the church to be like that.

So I was sitting in the church meeting last week, hearing the nuts and bolts and the visions and the dreams for this new ministry.  All of them are important.   I heard the visions and the dreams of the mission developer, who also taught English as a Second Language but also taught Spanish at a local high school.  "The hallways were integrated, but the classrooms were not," she shared.  But what if we did not stay separate?  What would it take?  I suspect it would be wonderful, and painful, and stumbling, like living in a foreign country, with all of the loneliness that comes along with the adventures and new experiences.

Still.  Even so.  I want the church to be like that.  

Language Learning, Incarnate

I have been thinking for quite some time now that I would like to learn a little Spanish.  There are a number of Spanish-speaking immigrants in our community now, and an Hispanic Seventh Day Adventist congregation even meets in our sanctuary on Saturday morning.  Some of the congregation members are pretty fluent in English, but not all of them.  It has piqued my language-learning curiosity.

When I first started thinking about learning Spanish, of course I went out and bought the prettiest, flashiest set of Spanish flash cards I could find.  They are quite attractive, if I must say so myself.  They haven't helped me learn any Spanish, but they are sitting right there in my office.

I have asked other people how to go about beginning to learn Spanish.  I have gotten a variety of advice, starting from self-directed courses with tapes and CDs, to on line resources and even apps for my iPhone!  I even downloaded a free app.  Free is free, after all.  With the apps, you can make language learning into a sort of game.

Here's my confession, though:  even though I am an introvert, I can't imagine myself learning a language from a book and a set of tapes, or even a web site.  I can't imagine myself learning a language by myself.

Part of it is accountability.  I can't imagine myself sitting down at the same time every day, or a different time every day, and remembering to take the books or the tapes out, or get on the web site and do the lessons.  I am sadly afraid (and this is a character flaw) that my language learning self-discipline would last all of two days.

But mostly I can't imagine learning a language by myself.  I can't imagine trying to learn a language without the motivation of actually speaking it to someone else, even if the words are as simple as "Buenos Dias."

When I lived in Japan, my best language teacher was the wife of one of the local pastors.  I went to visit her every week, and we sat down and had a conversation.  I don't remember any more whether we had a textbook or not.  But the main thing was, she didn't know any English.  If I wanted to communicate, if I was curious about a Japanese custom or a food or anything else, I had to throw caution to the wind and just ask her, with whatever language tools I had.  If she had questions for me, I had to try to answer, and keep trying until she figured out what I was trying to say.

Now that I think about it, she wasn't my only language teacher.  I had many others, all of them good, in their own way:  the four year olds at the pre-school, the children in my church's Sunday school, the history teacher whose desk was next to mine in the Japanese high school where I worked.  The parents of some of my students, clerks in department stores, people I sat next to on the train:  they were all my teachers.  Because I wanted to know them, to learn about their lives, I wanted to learn more.

Of course, language is a multifaceted thing.  It is not just speaking, but listening; not just listening but understanding; not just understanding but wanting to understand.  It is not just words on a page, but words in the air, between people.  It is not just denotation, but connotation.  A language suggests a world, and opens the door to that world, if only a crack, at first.

It occurs to me that faith is a language too, even a strange one, from a strange land which sometimes feels far away.  But does anyone really want to know the language of faith any more, to open the door, just a crack, and to see what the people know who live there?  Does anyone want to sit down across the table from them, and and listen, and try to understand, and find out what it's like to walk on water, or to find your five small loaves of bread suddenly multiplied?

Faith is a language.
I can't learn it by myself.

What's a Meta-phor?

Almost as soon as we finished reading the Gospel at our Wednesday bag lunch Bible study, one woman asked the question, "So, is this a metaphor?  This is a metaphor, isn't it?"

She was referring, of course, to the beginning of the scripture reading from Matthew,  "You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?  It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot."

I thought it was a great beginning, in part because it reminded me of an incident that happened a couple of weeks ago on a Sunday morning.  It was just before the 10:00 contemporary worship service, and I was milling about, welcoming people and making sure everything was in place for the service.  A young mom sitting with her two girls saw me come by and said, "Pastor, you're a literary person.  What's a metaphor?"

This is one of the things I like about my work.  There's so much variety:  you never know what question you will be asked, who who ask you to pray for them, what stories you will hear.  No one had every asked me, "what's a metaphor" before, and I was momentarily flummoxed.  I was thinking on a totally different wavelength, I'll confess, and kept thinking only of similes (God is like... oh, wait!).  Finally,  I partially recovered and remembered that the Bible is full of metaphors.

"Ok, one example," I said quickly.  "God is a rock."  It wasn't the most elegant or subtle metaphor in the Bible, but it worked for about a minute before the worship service was supposed to begin.  God is a rock.  Or, more poetically, "A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing."

So today I was very pleased when we were done hearing the verses, "You are the salt of the earth.  You are the light of the world.  A city on a hill cannot be hid," and someone blurted out, "Is this a metaphor?"

Yes, it is.

Did you know that the Bible is full of metaphors?  I wonder why that is.

I suppose that the easy answer is that the Bible is full of metaphors because literature is full of metaphors, language is full of metaphors, despite my inability to come up with a really good one at a moment's notice.  But I think there's another reason that the Bible is full of metaphors, that we need to speak of God in comparison with something else, and we need to speak of our mission in terms of something else, because we're always grasping at something greater than ourselves, and greater than our ability to express.  As Paul writes in 1st Corinthians:  "as it is written, 'what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him' -- these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God."  If you read on in 1st Corinthians, you can tell that Paul alternates between clear, poetic language and grasping at straws, trying desperately to describe the mystery of the great God who chose to be known in the weakness and shame of crucifixion and death. 

So 'you are the salt of the earth' is a metaphor.  and 'a city on a hill cannot be hid' -- which means that the church is prominent and will be watched, to see if we practice what we preach, if we really live by the mercy and love that we say God has given to us.  But it seems to me that a city on a hill might be vulnerable to attack as well.  If we hide, there's a better possibility that we can stay safe.  But the church is not called to be safe.  The church is called to risky loving, all the time holding on to that other great and true metaphor:

"A mighty fortress is our God; a bulwark never failing."