The vernacular is the real test. If you can’t turn your faith into it,
then either you don’t understand it, or you don’t believe it.
C.S. Lewis

Vernacular: the mode of expression of a group or class

For my last couple years of high school, I was your typical angry teenager. As such I preferred to listen to angry music, angry secular music that is. This wasn’t a comfortable place for me as a Christian because the general message I got from the wider Christian world was that I should be listening to only Christian bands. There was even the explicit message that I got monthly from a Christian publication for teen boys that if I liked such-and-such secular band, there was a Christian alternative that I should be listening to instead. I tried. Most of these alternatives sounded more like cheap knock-offs than anything else.

It took me years of wrestling to come to peace with the fact that I prefer secular music over Christian music. For a long time this preference felt like a failure of faith or a lack of piety. Such is the guilt that comes with growing up in the (Evangelical) Christian bubble. Through this wrestling though, I’ve come to more fully appreciate God’s wider presence in the world. We say in missions that God goes before us into the world. We say that God is already active among non-Christian peoples. I’ve come to see that good secular music is an example of this reality, for there is simply no source of truth, beauty, and goodness in this universe other than God. (Here is a hilarious SNL skit that makes the same point, though probably unintentionally.)

At bare minimum, listening to secular music is a way of listening to the world. Hearing the pain and anger alive in the world. Finding the vernacular that the world uses to express its frustration and longing.

When I was in high school a new band A Perfect Circle released their first single “Judith”. I loved the song as soon as I heard it. The guitar sound is infectious and the drums are amazing. I had heard the song on the radio dozens of times before a friend of mine lent me the actual album (remember CDs?). I don’t usually pay attention to the lyrics of songs, but the first time I listened to the non-radio edit version of Judith, I was shocked. There is a line early in the song where the singer screams “F*ck your God, your Lord your Christ. He did this.” I had never heard that on the radio.

Immediately I was conflicted. What should I do? My Evangelical impulse was to remove the cd and destroy it so as to save myself and my friend from such blasphemy. But I didn’t do that. I was too curious. Instead, I listened to the song a few more times (the guitar sound really is infectious), this time paying attention to the lyrics. And what I heard was a story, a story of pain and confusion and anger.

The lead singer for A Perfect Circle is a man named Maynard James Keenan. (This the same singer and band whose song “TalkTalk” I referenced a couple weeks ago.) He is also the lead singer of the bands Tool and Puscifer. Keenan was raised in a Christian house by a faithful, pious mother. His father situation was messier. He walked away from the faith at some point, but from the evidence in his lyrics, he has been in tension with Christianity ever since.

Judith is the name of Keenan’s mother. The song is written to her. It is full of pain and anger at God. The reason for this pain is that Judith suffered a debilitating stroke and was confined to a wheelchair. She had lived like this for about 20 years when Keenan wrote this song. Through all that time Judith maintained her faith in God. This baffled her son. He couldn’t make sense of why God would allow this to happen (or why He would do this) to such a pious and faithful woman. He couldn’t understand why a good God could take away so much of his mother’s life and livelihood. The song “Judith” is his unvarnished lament for his mother’s condition.

Essentially what we find here is the problem of pain (as C.S. Lewis called it), or an expression of the question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” This is a problem/question that will accost every person, Christian or not, at some point in their life, probably at multiple points. It is a reality that challenges the simple Deuteronomic formula that if you are faithful to God, good things will happen to you. It is also a reality that is well expressed in Scripture, especially through the book of Job, the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, and in many Psalms. Sadly, it is a reality that the (Evangelical) Christian bubble seems to have little space for. A reality that positive encouraging Christian music seems to want to mask. (That is not to say that all Christian music avoids the topic. Gungor’s Ghosts Upon the Earth album engages the themes of pain, brokenness and redemption well.)

Eventually, after about 27 years in a wheelchair, Judith died. And Keenan wrote an epic, two-track, 17 minute-long, tribute to her. Through the whole song Keenan is wrestling with her faith and his. The feeling is that he desperately wants her faith to be rewarded in heaven, but he doesn’t believe in such a heaven. He is torn, in tension, caught between a desire for hope and the harsh reality of this world.

I think this is where much of our world finds itself. There is a longing for something more, something redemptive, something to hope in. There is a sense that things are not right, that the world is not as it’s supposed to be, that we are not as we are supposed to be. But where can the world look for hope? The Christian answer is, “The Gospel” and I truly believe that it is the right answer. But there seems to be a disconnect between the world’s felt needs and the church’s proclamation of the gospel.

Here is the problem as I see it. The church - groups of Christians - have generally learned to articulate the gospel in one way, be it through John 3:16, Micah 6:8, the Four Spiritual Laws, etc. The group then takes their articulation of the gospel into the world and offers it as the answer people are looking for. The problem is that these articulations of the gospel are expressed in the vernacular of the church, not the world. So when Christians go into the world with their articulation of the gospel, they must first teach the world to view its pain in such a way that their articulation of the gospel can be the solution. If the answer is Jesus dying for our sins, then we have to teach the world what sin is, and convince them that the longing they feel is the result of sin before we can proclaim the gospel to them. This approach seems to fit the paradigm, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” We need a more nuanced approach.

I suggest that instead of going out into the world with one articulation of the gospel and then getting frustrated when it doesn’t resonate with the world, we begin by listening to the world. Begin simply by trying to hear the pain and longing being expressed by the world, in whatever terms they use. (Listen to “Judith” and instead of trying to correct the theology, listen to the pain that is being expressed.) Then do the hard work of finding an articulation of the gospel that speaks to that pain. It is an empty statement to say that the world doesn’t care about our faith just because we don’t care enough about the world to try to speak it to them in their own vernacular. We are arrogant fools with deficient theology if we think that the people around us don’t long to be redeemed and made whole in the same way that we do, just because they don’t express that longing in the same churchy language that Christians do.

The process I propose goes like this.

1. Listen for people’s own expressions of pain and longing. Don’t get defensive when strong language is used or blasphemous statements occur. This is the world, not the church.

2. Ask questions to deepen your understanding. Invite them to tell their story.

3. Wrestle with God and the gospel until you can articulate the good news in response to their expression of pain and longing.

This isn’t new, nor is it anything I created. It is simply the way that pastors and chaplains are taught to actively listen to people. Sadly, it is not the way we always do.

Most importantly, this is a cycle that we need to continually engage. It is not a once-and-done task. This is how the church continually brings the Gospel to the world.

I suspect that the primary roadblock for many Christians in doing this task comes from a deep insecurity in their faith that is rooted in never being allowed to ask the kind of hard questions the world is asking and never being invited to truly wrestle with God.

If that is the case, then the first step is to engage your own pain and your own longing more deeply. Wrestle with God, truly. Is the gospel you’ve learned big enough to address even your own deep desires, your own hidden fears, your own pernicious insecurities? If not, then deepen your understanding of the gospel so that it actually addresses all those feelings and longings that for years your religion has told you to suppress. I recommend the following works: The Sin of Certainty, Your God is Too Small, You Need a Better Gospel, The Problem of Pain, Reframation. There is no point in proclaiming a gospel that doesn’t actually address our deepest needs and the longings that we are afraid to acknowledge. A gospel that we use to mask our own pain has nothing to offer our hurting and broken world. And it is not the Gospel Jesus offers.

In order to effectively reach the world, we must start by listening to our own pain and longing. This is hard work. It is uncomfortable. For many who grew up in the church this is taboo, if not forbidden. But we are embodied people who worship a God who took on flesh, who felt pain and longed for relief. If our gospel isn’t enough to handle our own unvarnished pain and longing, then we have nothing to offer anyone. We need to set aside our idolatry of certainty and our confidence in surface-level answers, and we need to deeply engage the rich and tumultuous life of faith that God invites us into.

The Gospel is better news than you think it is. It is good enough news to speak even to the most angry, painful, despairing, and blasphemous stories the world can tell. It is even good enough to bring light to the darkest corners of your own life. Until we can believe and understand that truth deeply, we are better off not talking, but just listening to the world.