Shifting Our Language

A few weeks ago, scientists from Southern Methodist University revealed they had discovered fossilized footprints left by dinosaurs some 120 million years ago. Such a story doesn’t typically make headlines; however, the matching prints were found an ocean apart in Brazil and Cameroon, back before the Atlantic Ocean had pushed its way between them. To those dinosaurs, South America and Africa were always connected by a land bridge. To us, the two continents are thousands of miles apart. The earth’s tectonic plates move slowly, but they are always shifting.

A lot of things seem to be immovable and timeless, but in reality everything changes. It’s just that most of the time, we barely take notice. Then one day you might open up a photo album and cringe at the fashion choices you made in your youth. Or, you sit down to watch an old episode of a beloved show, only to be appalled by jokes made at the expense of women and minority populations. 

During the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther took an incredible leap by translating the Bible into a language the people could understand. He also translated the words used in worship from Latin to German. A little while later, protestants in England did the same thing, producing the King James Bible of 1611 and the Book of Common Prayer. For the next 300 or so years, those were the primary sources people used in English-speaking churches, even as their own language shifted into something new. But after a few centuries, walking into church was like opening a photo album and glimpsing into the past.

When the Lutheran Book of Worship was published in 1978, much of the language was updated to reflect the way people actually spoke in the 20th century. In the companion book, Manual on the Liturgy, the authors made a case for the change: “Protestantism, which had begun protesting the use of an archaic and largely unknown language, Latin, in the Roman Catholic Church, now found itself in the position of using an increasingly obscure language. It was time, more and more people admitted, to use contemporary expression.”

Nobody uses words like “thy” or “thine” in everyday conversation. We structure our sentences more plainly than folks did in the renaissance. And so, it made sense to update our worship language some 45 years ago. And yet, many Lutherans— and I’m including St. Mark here— have still clung to one last antique of language in the way we say the Lord’s Prayer. 

Our students in Sunday School and Confirmation are going to focus on the Lord’s Prayer quite a bit this coming year. In order to help them understand the meaning of this prayer that Jesus teaches us, we will help them memorize it in language they understand. Because of that, we have begun to use the 1975 translation of the Lord’s Prayer in worship. It may take some adjusting for all of us, but I pray that this shift will allow us all to take in the full meaning of this most precious prayer that we say each and every time we gather together.

Peace,

Pastor Chad McKenna