Watch Your Language
At the time of writing Andrew Mitchell, currently the government chief whip, has got into trouble over subjecting a police office to verbal abuse in which four-letter words were prominent. Interestingly, Mr Mitchell’s problems relate not his (acknowledged ) use of a widely popular swear word but to the allegation that he deployed another four-letter word, calling the police officer a ‘pleb’
If you or I were to use the F-word to a police officer in public there is a strong chance we would find ourselves in handcuffs, sitting in a cage in the back of a van and on our way to a night’s complementary stay in no-star accommodation. If we called a police officer a ‘pleb’ we’d still probably be allowed to make our own way home. Curiously, for Mr Mitchell the situation seems to be reversed. Police officers, it seems, just have to put up with being cursed at in the street by representatives of government but a politician using the P-word courts a political death sentence, especially if senior police officers just happen to mention to the press that such an incident has taken place.
Sometimes, it seems, it is not just the word itself that matters but who says it and in what circumstances. I wonder; is that is true concerning how we talk about God? During September and October Methodists and URC folk in Brentwood are having a five-session joint Bible study course on the Ten Commandments, staring at number ten and working our way down to number one, two commandments per meeting. My Methodist colleague, Wes, gets to lead the session that includes the third commandment: “You must not make wrong use of the name of the Lord your God; the Lord will not leave unpunished anyone who misuses his name.” (Exodus 20: 7 Revised English Bible) What are we to make of that these days?
To take one example, is it breaking the third commandment, is it taking the Lord’s name in vain (as the King James Version of the Bible translated it), to scatter the exclamation ‘OMG’ throughout text messages, emails, tweets and Facebook comments? If this is something ‘the Lord will not leave unpunished’ then many teenagers (and others) up and down the length of the country should start worrying now. Alternatively, perhaps the perspective of those using the comments really matters here. After all, if you have little or no knowledge of the God encountered through the Bible, God made known in the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; if you have never been part of a bunch of people trying to live out the implications of that in their lives (aka ‘church’), then the ‘G’ in the initials for ‘Oh my God’ really can’t be a reference to the one who is Lord in Exodus 20 and is Lord for followers of Jesus. It seems to me that the emphasis here is all on the ‘M’ – ‘my’ – in the term, which is not to say that I’m commending its use: everyone should be careful about what we mean by ‘God’.
The ones who should be really careful about how they use God’s name, however, are those who claim they are trying to respond to God in their lives. And that goes beyond careless use of the divine name in conversation. It includes any claim we make about what God thinks about what goes on in the world today; not just how God feels about all that careless use of the term ‘OMG’. I suspect God gets much more exercised about those who ‘tag’ the divine name unto acts of terrorism, claim to have God on their military side in ‘fighting for Christian civilization’ against Islam, or are ever-ready to say that Christian brothers and sisters with different views really don’t know God at all.
Yes, we Christians really need to watch our language when we talk about God.