You or Y'All?

The Lord says, “I will look with favor upon you and make you fruitful and multiply you; and I will maintain my covenant with you.” Leviticus 26:9

You are God’s field, God’s building. 1 Corinthians 3:9

The seminary professor who taught me Biblical Greek used to say "all translators are liars."

By this he simply meant that the old cliche is actually true...any time you take something from one language and cultural context and move it to another, some things are "lost in translation."

One of the biggest, and most important issues this raises for us as modern Christians is around one word: YOU.

In English, we only have one word...YOU...and it can mean you, individually...or you, a group. It works when we are talking to each other face to face, because we can tell which one is meant; but this is a real problem in writing.

This might sound like a small difference, but it profoundly affects the way we read the Bible. If I read the two passages above, it is easy to think they are speaking directly to me...Matthew Short, the individual. I could focus on how God promises to look with favor upon me (that feels nice!) and make me fruitful. I could write a book, as many have, about how God will multiply me and bless me if I just follow the words of the Bible. Then, I could turn to the 1 Corinthians reading and think about how God makes me a field for feeding others, or how God makes me a building in which the Spirit will live (that's also a nice thought...)

But, here's where Texas English can save us. Since spending a year in Ft. Worth, TX on internship, I have had a new word in my vocabulary: "Y'all." It means YOU, plural...all of you. This is the closest English parallel we have to how the word "YOU" is used in both ancient Hebrew (Old Testament) and Koine Greek (New Testament).

And I'll give you one guess which version of "you" is in the original writings of the two passages above.

Yep, you guessed it. Y'all.

It turns out the Lord isn't promising to look with favor on me, but on us. It turns out God isn't promising to make me fruitful, or to multiply me or my desires. God is saying "I will maintain my covenant with "y'all". I am not God's field for feeding others, we are; and it is not my heart that God uses as a building, it is the heart of the community.

Still you might be thinking this feels like a small distinction to make. Isn't the basic meaning about the same? No. It's a big difference, and a profound way that we, as followers of Christ, are called to be counter-cultural rebels.

We live in an insanely individualized world. Our economy is driven by our identity as individual consumers who seek fulfillment of individual desires. Our wealth relative to the rest of the world affords us options and choices that previous generations and previous cultures could have only dreamed of. I can control the temperature in my house and in my car to the accuracy of a single degree to meet my personal preferences (this morning, I'm turning the heat up!). Everything I am surrounded by every single day whispers to me: "the best thing you can do is anything that makes YOU happy." Like my kids having too many sweets before dinner, this tastes good at first, but it will eventually make us sick.

Doubt what I am saying? Look at the state of this election season and the quality of our public discourse. We are sick with hyper-individualism. We have forgotten how to discuss the public good, instead opting for hyper-partisanship that looks remarkably similar to savage tribalism.

The antidote for this is one word: "Y'all."

God calls us to be a community of disciples together. Do we disagree about some things? Absolutely. But we disagree agreeably because we recognize our calling to be the blessed community of faith as the highest calling of our lives. We recognize that God makes us a field together, and that it is only together we can produce mercy and justice for a world that needs both. We recognize that God makes us a building together, and that is where God chooses to dwell. Not just in my heart, but in the heart of the community that gathers around Water, Wheat, Wine, and Words.

Ironically, this doesn't mean we downplay the importance of the individual. Just the opposite. YOU, the individual reading this, have an incredibly important part to play in this cultural antidote given by God. The community is incomplete without you. God makes us a field together. We're missing some of the crops without you, and the world is starving! God makes us a building together. We're missing some of the bricks without you, and the world needs shelter from the partisan storm. Don't sleep in on Sunday morning. Don't miss that day of service. Don't ignore the calling you have in your baptism to be part of the great "Y'all" that God will use to bring healing, hope, and grace to a world that desperately needs all three.