Planted by Water

I liked this brief account of an interview with Eugene Peterson (writer of The Message) from LICC, about how words can become so cliched among Christians. I guess one thing you could never accuse Peterson of is being cliched (sorry I don’t know how to get an ‘e acute’ with my current typing facilities for my blog!) but I do feel it is a little unfair of him to quote actual Bible verses as examples (though I suppose it is possible to use even the Bible’s words in a barren, routine way). As I can’t find a link for this article, I have copied it, from the email sent to me, below.

But I was wondering whether any of my readers can think of Christian cliches - or ‘Strange Things Christians Say’ - that we might hear in our meetings or among Christians. I’ll start with one that I would have to admit to saying myself. It is when making an appeal at the end of a sermon:

If you’re here and…..(duh, like, how are they going to respond if they are not ‘here.’)

Any other suggestions? Here’s the interview with Eugene

choose your words

When I interviewed Eugene Peterson for Church Times recently, the author of The Message had a few choice words for Christians who speak jargon without thinking.

‘A cliché is as bad as a blasphemy,’ he observed.

That’s a serious allegation, which, if true, means that all of us probably need to wash our mouths out with soapy water on a regular basis. He picks out such well-worn phrases as ‘Jesus saves’, ‘born-again’, ‘God is love’ and ‘All things work together…’ as ‘pious conventions’ which, once they’ve lost their freshness, lead to us taking the name of God in vain.

Perhaps you’d expect a man who spent 12 years creating his own, multi-million-selling paraphrase of the Bible to be sensitive when it comes to the use of words. It’s not that he thinks the Bible needs embellishing to make it more attractive – in fact, he says he is ‘fiercely orthodox’ in his beliefs. Instead he argues that any language we use habitually can lose its power as we become over-familiar with it. Even words of life can die a death.

Dr Peterson now has a new book out. Eat This Book: The Art of Spiritual Reading looks not just at how we speak words but how we ‘take’ the words of the Bible and make the most of them - or not, as the case may be.

‘Passionate words of men and women spoken in ecstasy can end up flattened on the page and dissected with an impersonal eye,’ he warns. ‘Wild words wrung out of excruciating suffering can be skinned and stuffed, mounted and labelled as museum specimens.’

We have a choice, therefore: to reduce the words of the Bible to a series of statements we must believe, fullstop - or to allow them to transform us through the life-changing power of story, which ‘invites our participation’.

How, then, do we approach the Good Book without simply treating it as a tract? Dr Peterson explains that, through a process he calls lectio divina, we can read the text, meditate, ‘pray the text’ and ‘live the text’.

God’s love, ideally, is being incarnated as we speak… And as we read, and as we choose to respond. After all, ‘the Word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood,’ as it says in The Message. Choice words, indeed, which can bring our faith to life.

Brian Draper