The Joy of Spurious Word-play

Preaching can give you a wonderful sense of power. All those eyes looking to you, and ears waiting for your words, for the truth that you alone can bring. Sorry, made the mistake of saying what I really think there for a second. What I meant was that it can give you a humble desire to bring people nearer to the truth.

There are of course nuances in the Biblical text - and things that additional research can shed light on. And preachers often like to go into these areas, as a diverting way of making their preaching more interesting. And in its way it can be a good thing, or at least a neutral one. But there's a trap you can fall into. A brief digression on the Aramaic word "Abba", for example. Most would digress just as far as to say it means "Daddy", and therefore we should look to our father God with the gormless loving wonder of a toddler. The danger of this application is that we end up with a matey familiarity that the word maybe doesn't actually carry. Or maybe the link I've given is wrong. I don't know.You may not realise it to hear me preach, but I'm not actually an expert in 1st Century Semitic Languages.

But this spurious word play opens up all sorts of opportunities for the would-be creative preacher. The best technique is to find a word, not in Aramaic or Greek or Hebrew (or in your native tongue) that sheds a kind of spurious half-light on the subject at hand. Ideally, make sure it's a language there's no danger of anyone in your audience - sorry, congregation - understanding. And then the opportunity to build all sorts of conceptual castles on a dodgy linguistic basis is open to you.

So you discover in your research for a sermon that the word "God" in the ancient language of the Sarawakian people sounds a bit like the word for "Stilton Cheese". You expand the concept - surely this implies that when we say "give us our daily bread" we can expand this meaning to add a wholesome dairy-based analogy? So much more appetising than dry bread alone. For God is more nourishing than mere bread - he is surely our daily provision of protein and fat-soluble vitamins as well - a daily cornucopia of nourishment.

And before you know where you are, you are comparing the colour of the veins in the cheese to the blue of the sky - and explaining how our Father, who is in the (blue) heavens, is our daily cheese. And what colour is the Blessed Virgin assigned in traditional religious painting? Precisely. Before you know it, half an hour has passed. The preacher has demonstrated how clever he/she is. We have all been let into a secret of Heaven that would have passed us by otherwise. We have a whole set of thoughts on God that we wouldn't have otherwise. and we can all go home happy, in the knowledge that, as Graham Chapman once sense, indeed Blessed are the Cheesemakers. And we can happily sing along to the children's song that the preacher has written specially for the day, "We wanna be Cheesemites for the Lord".

All of this diversion was caused this morning based on a reading of Deuteronomy 6 in the New Revised Standard Version. But I guess that's going to have to wait for another day now.