I'd almost felt guilty for setting aside Eugene Peterson's "Eat This Book" after picking up Shane Claiborne's book on impulse and then falling in love with it. But in finishing up "Eat ..." I'm also realizing that Claiborne was just the spark I needed to breeze through the rest of Peterson and realize much of what I love about it.

In the chapter covering Peterson's research during the time he wrote The Message, he gets a little adventurous in his tale. In covering the tendency of language to take the form of sacrilege in two directions: up and down. Down, we're familiar with: language intended to defile and desecrate.

But sacrilege up? That's where Peterson goes into some treacherous terrain, most notably in criticizing the way in which the King James Version of the Bible was translated. Peterson's point in doing so is to highlight the concept of the Bible as being God's word to us in common, everyday language of the day.

As Peterson points out, the old Greek translations used to have words that only existed in the Bible. About five hundred of them. It was deemed that not only did the Spirit lead people to pen the word of God, but He also provided special "Holy Ghost" words. The result has been to refine and dress up Biblical language.

The excerpt below points out how a 19th century archeological find changed that, putting the the way in which God speaks to us in a vastly different light:

There was never any question but that New Testament Greek was different from classical Greek. But how to account for the difference? The "Hebraists" and the "purists." in their quite different ways, did their best to come up with an answer.

Until that April day in 1897 when Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt fished that first piece of paper out of the Oxyrhynchus rubbish heap. And then another and then another. As they read these they were able to piece together what life was like on the muddy streets, crowded markets, and noisy playgrounds of ancient Alexandria. Early on they noticed that many of the words they were reading were among the five hundred or so Holy Ghost words that were supposedly unique to the New Testament. As they continued to decipher and read what was written on these unimposing scraps of papyrus paper they were able to account for nearly all five hundred words. The words came from wills, official reports, letters from husbands away on business to their wives at home, a letter that a son who had become a soldier wrote to his parents, a letter in which a father admonished his children who were away from home, petitions, accounts, shopping lists, bills and receipts - the kinds of writings that never get bound into books and catalogued in a library. This was the kind of writing that, when it has done its work, is thrown away. Scholars and translators working on the Bible had no idea that this language was even there for the very good reason that it had never come within throwing distance of a library - these casual, "unliterary" writings had all been buried in the garbage dumps. All those special words that occurred nowhere else in written records, those "Holy Ghost" words, were all the time buried in a town garbage dump, preserved under Egyptian sand. They were all street words, spontaneous, unstudied expressions out of the immediacy of workplace and kitchen.

Unstudied expressions. I just love that phrase.

A few weeks back, I was engaged in the highly theologically-correct act of watching the season finale of The Sopranos. I never took to the show in all the years it was on. Heck, I've only had HBO for about three years now. But I knew it's place as a cultural phenomenon and wanted to catch the final episode if only to see if there was something I could appreciate about the show. I didn't exactly fall in love with it, but there was something about that I sorta admired. I wasn't sure what, but when I ran across this Leon Weiseltier coda on the series, I think I saw it a bit more clearly:

Consider only the language. Or more precisely, compare David Chase's dialogue to Aaron Sorkin's dialogue. In Sorkin's shiny nonsense, people speak in repartee, and always find the words they need, and nothing insignificant, nothing tedious, is ever uttered. They talk as nattily as they look. Even their afflictions are oddly high-spirited, as coolness conquers all. There is not an unmordant or unmoralized second in anybody's day. Sorkin's phony people go from portentousness to hipness and back. They are the figments of a disastrously glamorous imagination, the polished puppets of a shallow man's notion of profundity. In The Sopranos, by contrast, there is no eloquence, even when there is beauty. Silences abound. These people speak the way people actually speak: they lie, and lie again; they hide; they repair gladly to banalities, and to borrowed words; they struggle for adequacy in communication; they say nothing at all. Their verbal resources are cruelly lacking for their spiritual needs. They cannot say what they mean, or they do not know what they mean. Their obscenities are their tribute to the power of their feelings: the diction of their desperation. When they reach for sophistication, they mangle it. Their metaphors are awkward and homely, as in Tony's climactic soliloquy in his therapist's office about getting off, and staying off, the bus. Yet all this inarticulateness is peculiarly lyrical, and deeply moving. It is also a relief from the talkativeness that passes for thought in fancier places. Words should be fought for.

Words should be fought for. Of course, Weiseltier does tend to put an awful lot of them in front of what eventually is his entire thesis. Another attribute I love - when I have the time to read, that is.

I'm reminded of these two tangents whenever we share praise reports and prayer requests in some of the small groups we share in church. Invariably, it seems, there exists a sermon of sorts in someone (or sometwo) that is just begging to come out. And often, it's not always the time it's requested to come out ... it just blurts out. As a group leader asks a direct question, a hand goes up, someone in the group gets acknowledged, and a mini-sermon comes out. That might have been better to share during praise reports, but so be it. Ask for a praise report and you may get a full thirty minute sermon - or life story.

It used to be that that bugged me. I've since learned to appreciate that life is never as pretty as it should be and that things often go out of order and chaotically enough that it might just be best to appreciate what's in front of us than to try and force that unplanned sermon back into the virtual toothpaste tube it sprang from.

But from a further step back, it's worth appreciating them even more as some of those "unstudied expressions," full of words that are "fought for."

In Compass Class on Saturday, we studied the chapter from "S.H.A.P.E." on abilities. We had a nice, handy list copied from the book of abilities we were to check off if we recognized them in ourselves. My own? I had a few to do with communications checked off, among a few others. But the essence of my job is to help people tell their stories. Whoduthunkit - that Marketing degree of mine actually gets some mileage these days. And as we go around the class with everyone rattling off some of the items they checked off, it was apparent that there wouldn't be enough time to hit everyone in class. And since I didn't have a good, concise elevator pitch that explained my own list in a way that I felt would have been of any interest to most in the class, I held back - hoping that my silence might quicken the time I get a good seat in the sanctuary (alas, I was only modestly successful on this count).

Yet, another in the class saw the time as an opportune time to give a praise report of his own. Like I said, once upon a time, that might have bugged me. But one of the things I've picked up on in communications is that not everyone knows how to wait and find that time to communicate their message with the most impact. I can't say I master it to perfection myself, even. But in hearing this wonderfully splendid, out of order praise report, I was reminded that it's not just words that are sometimes fought for - it's the message, audience, and context that are just as hard to find.

The beauty of unstudied expressions is that the one using them ultimately improves and we're blessed with a front row seat to a work in progress. What's the old saying? ... if you've never failed at something, you're not trying hard enough. The praise report we were blessed with might well have been the single most important thing that person had to share in a long time. We get a good deal of them in our small groups, too. Sometimes, they're artfully delivered in picture-perfect storybook fashion. Other times, they're fought for. And, in this case, God bless those doing the fighting.