Director's Cut
Sometimes the muse strikes, and sometimes the muse needs to be wrestled into submission. Last week’s sermon was more of the latter. I liked the scripture passage that was provided, Matthew 18:21-35. There’s plenty that we can say about that passage. Quite frankly, there is probably an infinite number of sermons that could be preached around the idea of forgiveness. It’s always going to have something to be said about it. But among all of those infinite options, I could think of exactly zero to write about. But spoiler alert I did preach a sermon on Sunday. My normal practice (as much as any act of writing has a reliable routine) is to read the passage on Monday, read some commentaries, and start chewing over what I may want to say over the course of the week. By the time Thursday rolls around, I have at least some idea of what I want to say. But this wasn’t a normal week. It was already a short week, with the Labor Day holiday, and I was getting back after vacation, which means playing a bit of catchup on an already short week. So I didn’t do my normal practice, and I didn’t know what I wanted to write.
Generally speaking, I usually don’t start writing until I know what I want to say, so that by the time I’m up there preaching there isn’t much that has fallen onto the cutting room floor. This past week, I knew I wanted to say something about what we owe one another, but I wasn’t sure what. So I went to one of my favorite wells, etymology. After I had started down that path, the rest of the sermon seemed to write itself. That’s not a commentary on the quality of the sermon; I don’t feel I can make a call on that, but I like how the process played out. I had a good time writing it, but by the time I finished the sermon I realized that my opening paragraph contained almost zero relevance to the sermon itself. But I’m too precious with my words and I didn’t want to get rid of my opening paragraph. Instead of deleting it, I just struck through it and ignored it on Sunday. But I had fun writing it, so I figured there was only one place for me to share it. So here it is.
The word “owe” has a fun linguistic history. Fun, of course, being a relative term. Owe comes from the old English word, agan, meaning “to have or to own.” At some point Old English speakers had a need for the Latin word debere which means “to be indebted”, so they created the phrase agan to geldanne which literal translation is “to own to yield”, which feels a little bit of a stretch, but I suppose I can see it. But I guess it was a bit of a mouthful, so eventually people dropped “to geldanne” and just used the word agan, which no longer meant to own, but now meant to owe. A fun side effect of that is that we now needed a word to mean “to own”, which is where the word “own” came into being. Like I said, a fun linguistic history, provided you find something boring to be fun. But I do find it interesting that the word for owning something eventually became almost the opposite of owning something. Instead of owning it, we no longer have it and are waiting to own it again.
Is it art? I don’t know, I’m not an art critic. But I found it at least mildly interesting and figured I’d share it with you all as well.
Peace,
Rev. Jeff Fox-Kline
