Thirty Years of Translating

Nestor did not cry at his mother's funeral until the second reading.

He got through the first one. He got through the part where his own daughter stood up and did not manage hers, and he went up and stood beside her and finished it for her, steadily, in a room full of people, and sat back down.

Then Tia Chelo, who is eighty-four and does not speak much English, was helped to the front by two of the grandsons, and she read Psalm 23 in Spanish.

El Señor es mi pastor; nada me faltará.

And Nestor put his hand over his mouth.

He has been in an English-speaking church for thirty-one years and he loves it. That has to be said, because he would want it said. He has served on the building committee for nine of those years. He has taught the boys. He understands every word of every sermon and he is not sitting there struggling.

But he was six years old when he learned that psalm, in a kitchen with a stone floor, from a woman who was already old then and who said it every night with her hand flat on the table.

And he had not heard it in that language, out loud, in a room, since he was maybe nineteen.

Afterward, at the house, with all the food out and everybody talking at once, his cousin found him standing in the hallway and asked if he was all right.

And Nestor said something he had never said before, because he had never known it before.

He said: "I think I have been translating for thirty years."

His cousin said, "You speak better English than I do."

And Nestor said, "I know. That is not what I mean. I mean I hear it, and I understand it, and then it goes in. There is a step. It is a small step and I do it fast and I have never noticed it. And Tia Chelo just read something and it went in with no step."

Now, you may only speak one language. Most people reading this will.

Stay with me anyway, because the step is not only about Spanish and English.

You have a language you think in, and it is not the same as the one you were handed for church. Yours has your father's phrases in it. It has the words you use for what hurts, which are not delicate words. It has the way people talk where you are actually from, which may be four hundred miles or forty years from where you sit on a Sunday.

And you have got very good at the small fast step. You do not even see yourself doing it.

Every one of them heard it at home

The very first thing that happens to the church, on its very first day, is a language event, and it is worth noticing what God chose to do with all that power.

And how is it that we each hear them in our own language to which we were born?Acts 2:8

He could have done the opposite. He could have given every listener sudden fluency in one holy tongue, which would have been just as miraculous and rather more efficient, and would have made a fine point about unity.

He did not. He sent the word out in fifteen different languages at once, into the ear of every person in the street, in the one they had learned from their mother.

To which we were born. Luke could have written "which they understood". He wrote the other thing, and the other thing is the point: not the language you can manage, the language you came from.

So hear this, said over you, in whatever you count in. You are met by God in your own tongue and you always have been, and the small fast step you have been doing for thirty years was never required of you. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who did that at Pentecost and who is described as the one who bears witness with your spirit, which is to say He speaks in there, where the translating stops.

Now let me say the thing about your church, because I will not have this article used badly.

Nestor's church did nothing wrong.

Nobody there kept him out. Nobody made him prove anything. They loved him and he loved them and he built half their extension. The step he has been taking is not the fault of a single person in that building, and it is not evidence that he was in the wrong room for thirty-one years.

Some things simply live where they were laid down. That psalm was laid down in a kitchen with a stone floor and it lives there, and no amount of good preaching in another language reaches into that room, because it is not that room.

Here is what that means for you. There is a place in you where things were laid down, and it has its own vocabulary, and God is not waiting at the door of it for you to translate before He comes in. He gets in the way everything else got in there. The written word says the Spirit searches even the depths of God and makes those things known to us, and He does not stop at the edge of the language you were raised in.

There was a man five hundred years ago who spent eleven weeks in a room turning the New Testament into the German that a mother, a child and a man in a market actually spoke, and who said that whoever wants to speak German should not ask the Latin how to do it. His argument was exactly this one: that the word of God has never once required a person to leave home in order to hear it.

Not too holy to be clear. And not too holy to be local, either.