Simple Words

April 22, 2018

“That’s the trouble with you! You want to go to specifics and give examples. I’m looking at the bigger picture; the philosophy behind it all.” My friend was getting frustrated with me. I don’t blame him; he has far more education than I do, and lives in the heady atmosphere of academia. He can rattle off the names and theories of a half dozen philosophers and educational theorists. If pressed, I think he could even give the dates of their major writings. “Too many educational programs lack the necessary philosophical underpinnings,” he went on. I don’t doubt it, but I travel in different circles. 

I’m a preacher. Someone once said that the job of the academic is to make simple things complex. While I’m not fully convinced, Common Core math could make me a believer. The job of the preacher is to take complex things and make them simple. I’ve read my share of theology, and most of the time, it will make your head spin. Metaphysics is heady stuff, but my job is to place it on the bottom shelf so ordinary people can reach it. 

Jesus was a master of this. he explained deep concepts in terms ordinary people could understand. He looked around him and made connections that most people miss, and in the process, brought heaven near. A woman looking for a coin, a farmer throwing seed onto a field, tenant farmers being squeezed by a ruthless landlord; these were the tools of his teaching trade. The academics and the elite hated it, but the crowds ate it up.

Abraham Lincoln is reported to have once said, “God must have loved the common man; he made so many of them.” Despite growing up in humble circumstances, Lincoln was anything but a common man, but he understood them, and today, is the most respected of all our presidents, an honor he did not know in his own lifetime.

I’m no great shakes as a preacher; average, I would hope. But I understand one thing; if ordinary people think I’m talking over their heads, they’ll think I’m talking down to them. If that happens, the game is over. It’s taken me a long time to learn to put big thoughts in small words, but when I get it right, lives are changed. I am thankful tonight for the opportunity I again was given this morning to proclaim the Word of God as simply as I know how, creating the possibility that those words of mine will reveal the Greater Word of God in the flesh; Jesus Christ, the Lord and Savior of mankind.