Following a Star

Scripture Lessons: Isaiah 60: 1-6 and Matthew 2: 1-12, NT page 2 Sermon Title: Following a Star Through High School, College, and then Graduate School, the subject that gave me the most trouble was foreign language. As a high school sophomore I actually failed Spanish and had to retake it as a Junior. Then in College I nearly failed it again, and entered seminary with considerable anxiety because I knew that every student preparing for ministry in the Presbyterian Church would have to learn both Greek and Hebrew to graduate, two foreign languages. In the end, I did OK, but I complained a lot, and I assumed that it was English that was easy and these other languages – Spanish, Greek, and Hebrew – they were the ones that were so hard. I continued thinking that way until I really got to know my father-in-law who moved to Knoxville, Tennessee from South America and, in his first year of being here, took masters levels classes at the University of Tennessee. These classes, of course, were in, what was for him, a completely foreign language. Being from Columbia, South America, he grew up speaking Spanish, and before starting classes at UT he took an English emersion course and learned proper English. But here’s the thing about English – it’s one thing to learn English in the class room and it’s another thing to learn the English that people actually speak, and it’s another thing again to learn the English that people actually speak in Knoxville – I am sure that not one of his teachers taught him that “you-uns” is an appropriate 2nd person pronoun. I’ve told you before about the story that he tells of walking around downtown Knoxville. He was out buying a lamp for his desk and two ladies cornered him and asked him if he’d been saved. Having just opened a checking account his understanding of the word “saved” was very literal, based in finances, and assuming that being saved had something to do with a savings account, he told them that he did have a checking account but had yet to be saved. Then, on another occasion, he was going through the line at the UT cafeteria, he asked for biscuits and groovy, which is understandable, because there are so many words in the English language that sound similar but mean very different things. Advise – advice. Conscious – conscience. Lead – led. To – too – and two. English is complicated, so my father-in-law had to learn to laugh at himself, because the English language is full of intricacies that you can’t learn in a classroom, and still, after living here for nearly 40 years and speaking English every day, he’ll ask a question about this language that I assumed was easier than Spanish, Greek, or Hebrew. I’ve just read a great article to explain some of the challenge of the English language. The article, written by Dr. John McWhorter, celebrated professor of linguistics at Columbia University, begins with this: English speakers know that their language is odd. So do nonspeakers saddled with learning it. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a spelling bee. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal. While Dr. McWhorter is sure that English is not normal, many English speakers are like me, assuming that the other languages are the problem and that English is the one that makes sense. It was Texas Governor, Miriam A. Ferguson, who was famous for saying that if “English was good enough for Jesus than it is good enough for Texas School Children.” So you see, some are not just convinced that English is easier to understand than other languages, but are convinced that it is better and that the world should work to understand us and not vice-versa. The quote from Governor Ferguson represents generations who fear that the Spanish language, is taking over the United States, and this fear is rooted in reality. In June of this year the New York Post reported that our country now has more Spanish speakers than Spain, that we are second in Spanish speakers only to Mexico, and that by 2050 our country will be home to an estimated 138 million Spanish speakers. This shift is nothing if not dramatic and uncomfortable, but so many of the oddities of the English language can be explained because this is not exactly the first time its ever happened. Now surely, never before has our nation faced a migration of this magnitude before, unless you consider the way English swept away the language of the Native Americans, but Europe has faced such radical immigration before and our language reflects it. If you remember reading Beowulf in High School than you know already that Old English, essentially, a branch of German, is so unlike modern English that it now requires a translation – that Old English and Modern English are so different from one another that the two are virtually indistinguishable. And what spurred the change to make modern English so different from old English? Well, the Angles and Saxons who invaded what is now the United Kingdom, over time they blended their culture and language with those who were already there – the Celts, then the Vikings came bringing Old Norse, then the Romans brought Latin. Then the French came over and brought with them what I think are the most interesting oddities of the English language – have you ever wondered why a cow is called a cow until it is in your kitchen, when it is called beef, and a pig is called a pig until it is pork? According to Dr. McWhorter, we do so because, “English-speaking laborers did the slaughtering for moneyed French speakers at the table. The different ways of refereeing to meat depended on one’s place in the scheme of things, and those class distinctions have carried down to us in [this] discreet form today.” It’s amazing really. So many of our English words come from some other place, so an etymologist, or someone who studies the origins of words, has a lot to gain from studying our language because our words come from all over the place, whereas an etymologist has not nearly so much to do in a language like Arabic, where the words all came from the same place and remained basically unchanged from one generation to the next. English is, according to Dr. McWhorter, a polyglot smorgasbord, and smorgasbord is a word that we stole from Sweden, which proved an interesting point to me: that basically everything that I think makes our culture great, we stole from someone else! That’s the case with our language, but not only our language – think of the food that we call American – both the hamburger and the hot dog are German. The pizza is Italian. The French Fry – French. And then think of some of those things that are truly Southern, truly ours – like okra, but okra was brought here from Africa, stowed in the pockets of slaves. We have benefited, for just as the wise men came from the East, so the Nations have come, and brought things that we can use. Pigs were first domesticated in Europe and Asia, but they were not perfectly prepared for human consumption until the invention of southern barbeque. Horses were domesticated as far back as 3500 BCE in Central Europe, but no one learned to make them walk until they made it to Middle Tennessee. Our food, our language, our culture, has global roots, and we should be proud because it’s this ability to adapt and perfect what we’ve been given that makes us great, but we are not always so proud. In hearing our First Scripture Lesson from the book of Isaiah, that the “Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn,” but we don’t rejoice when we see them coming. We say, “Well there goes the neighborhood.” I suppose that our focus cannot be so much on what might change, will change, or has changed already, but on the gifts that have been brought. The wise men came from another land entirely, and they knew something that so few understand even now, that he was a King – deserving of gold, and that he would die young and so he needed, so soon after his birth, frankincense and myrrh, the oil and incense that anoints the body for burial. You can tell by these gifts – like so many others brought here from some other place, some other nation – that even while he was misunderstood by his own, feared by King Herod, he was fully comprehended by the foreigner who saw in him, the light of the world. Today, our call is to see in him what they saw. While Herod saw in him a threat – they saw a promise. A hope. A King poised to change the world. Too often we are more like Herod than we are like the wise men. We look out on the world in fear, but these wise men saw that what had just come into the world had in fact made it better. Just as the foreign tongues of the world made English into English. Just as the immigrant brought with him the hamburger, the pig, and the horse. Just as the wise men brought him Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh, so today these wise men bring us a new perspective on a very old story – that this one who has been born is bringing about something new that will make all rejoice. “Lift up your eyes and look around; They all gather together, they come to you; Then you shall be radiant; Your heart shall thrill and rejoice, Because the abundance of the sea shall be brought to you, The wealth of the nations shall come to you. Thanks be to God. Amen.