Everything’s Not Lost

Last month I had the great chance to preach for our home congregation that is just a few blocks from our house.   I had done a lot of thinking about what would be appropriate and had read commentary to help make it applicable for this context.  A few days before I preached I went over what I was going to say with the person who would translate.  I wanted to make sure he understood and was ready for some of the specific words I was going to use that relate to the son in the story of the lost “prodigal” sons, and to specific types of servants or slaves.  I was sure that some of the concepts related to honor and shame would translate well, but I was worried about these words for servants and for adoption.  Afterward, I felt the sermon went pretty well and there were comments of appreciation for the sermon and the good translation.

But then I went back and listened to the recording I made of that Sunday, and I was pretty disheartened by what I heard.  I originally made the recording so I could learn how to better phrase some of these things in the “Casa” language, but from what I could already understand, it seemed like a lot of the key points of the sermon were glossed over with a vague summary.  I then went over with our language teacher some of the key sentences about how we are adopted by God, and the son is accepted back as a full son and not a servant, etc. Our language teacher didn’t seem to think it was too bad a translation, but I discovered that there really isn’t a clear way to talk about adoption in this language.  It comes down to saying something like, “a child you have taken/gotten.”   There are a lot of different circumstances of “getting” children here though, as they are loaned to family members, go stay with families to study, are used as servants/slaves, etc.  So I was not really excited about the whole translation process.  But it has really highlighted the need to learn the language better than just small conversations so that there doesn’t need to be a translator.  However, I was pleased the following Sunday because there’s always a summary of the previous week’s sermon giving during the announcements. The secretary giving the announcement gave a very fitting summary, stating that we need to respond by following God with thankfulness as a result of the grace he’s given by accepting us as children and not independent workers.  All's well that ends well, right?

-- El Padre