What’s in a word?

When I didn’t take communion my wife thought I was being silly.

“Such a fuss about a few words,” she said.

It all started when we attended a wedding at a high church – not an all-out smells and bells church, but high enough for capes and gowns and stentorian chants and a lot of up-and-down-in-the-pew liturgical readings.

Then came communion, and for the first time in many years I actually listened closely to the words being spoken. I remembered enough from seminary to know this church believed something magical happened to the wine. It actually became the blood – hemoglobin and all – of Christ. We Anabaptists didn’t believe that. For us this ritual was a remembrance of Jesus’ final hours and a commitment to one another in the community, hence the commingled juice of mashed grapes and the flour of ground grain, baked in a crucible of suffering.

In this church, communion was the means of passing on God’s grace to us; in our tradition, the grace had already been passed, and we were now commemorating and reinvigorating its implications. In our history, people had died over this difference.

As I watched others line up at the front I felt uneasy. Wouldn’t I be accepting the wafer and wine under false pretenses when I didn’t buy what the priest was saying? Moreover, wouldn’t I give offence to the members of this historic church by going through their ritual without believing it? (I remembered how some in my church had been offended when a known non-Christian had partaken of the Lord’s Table.)

So I stayed seated when others, including the president of a Mennonite college for whom this dissonance apparently posed no obstacle, went up to have grace administered to them.

After that I paid more heed to the words being uttered at my own congregation’s communion services. Increasingly I heard something different than I was used to. I heard the language of sacrament – “come forward to receive the grace of God.” The change had been subtle. It occurred to me that I had not bargained for this when I became an Anabaptist.

I grew up in a home where words were important.

My father was fond of Victorian literature and a lay expert on Samuel Johnson who in 1755 compiled the first English dictionary. He couldn’t abide lazy usage. He bristled when writers mistakenly used affect instead of effect. My mother, an immigrant, adopted English fully and prided herself on proper usage, constantly correcting my lapses.

In ninth grade our teachers gave us vocabulary drills based on a manual titled Words Are Important.

From youth on, my church conveyed the message that the Word was important. It taught me to say I believe, I’m sorry, I love you. The actual utterance, not just the thought, was critical.

As a young journalist I learned precise language. Even in mundane news stories it was important to know the difference between infer and imply, to distinguish between a burglar, who stole, and a robber, who stole with violence. A story’s meaning could be skewed if it used refute (to prove wrong) when it meant dispute (to contest a point).

When I became editor of The Christian Leader a new set of distinctions came into play. I found that fundamentalist and evangelical were close but not interchangeable. Relatedly, there even could be a difference between Christ and Jesus. A fundamentalist would seldom use Jesus by itself. It had to be Jesus Christ, or Christ, a title that bespoke an entire theology of redemption. Liberals might use Jesus; conservatives preferred Christ.

During debates on Scripture we learned the subtle difference between infallible and inerrant. They sound close, but inerrant carried different hermeneutical freight, and often became a shibboleth (Judges 12:6) in the battle for the Bible. Conference leaders told me infallible was sufficient, and more closely represented our denominational position.

I learned there was a subtle distinction between nonresistance and pacifism, though both were generally thought well of in Anabaptist circles.

When our children went to school in the U.S. they faced the issue of whether, as resident aliens, they should or could recite the pledge of allegiance or sing the national anthem. The easiest path was to blend in and recite the words, foreign as they may be to our religious and national sensibilities. But in our household we suggested to our children that no good was served by glibly uttering words, fraught with certain meaning to their hosts, if they didn’t mean them.

The wrong word can create offence.

As an editor I had to choose, many years ago, whether to use Mexican–American or Chicano in an article on Latin American Mennonite Brethren churches. Some younger Latinos in the 1970s were offended by the hyphenated Mexican–American; they wore Chicano with pride, though their elder counterparts in South Texas found that troubling. For a time we used Hispanic, but that didn’t please everyone either. I was never sure which was the right word, but I knew that to some it was important.

We have become more conscious of using the right words for disabilities, but even there it’s hard to please everyone. Handicapped and disabled fell out of fashion, replaced by physically challenged. But one senior who was bound to a wheelchair complained, “Don’t call me physically challenged. Walking is not a challenge, for me it’s an impossibility.”

And then there’s gender. I was an early adapter on this score, helped by my employer, The Winnipeg Tribune. Back in the early 1970s we were forbidden to use exclusive male language in newspaper copy. One advertiser refused to pay for an ad because someone had changed the headline to “Foreperson wanted.”

I am quick to notice when someone reads from a Bible version using masculine pronouns. Male-only language can be like fingernails on a chalkboard. For some, the whole message is contaminated by exclusive language.

Words are important.

I mentioned my concern of rising sacramentalism to a Mennonite Brethren theologian. He rolled his eyes and said he had little appetite for “dogma.” It’s a word I don’t hear often, though only weeks earlier another friend had used it to disparage someone’s concern that the meaning of salvation was undergoing some erosion, or at least revision, in Mennonite circles. The term “dogma” itself has undergone revision. It has become a slur, though it means “something held as an established opinion,” or “an authoritative tenet.” I’d like to think one doesn’t have to be a theological dinosaur to regard salvation as central to Christian belief.

Maybe I have become one of those I once jousted with – an arch conservative. As I age I find my footing is not what it used to be. I step more carefully onto curbs and take baby steps on icy sidewalks. Ideologically, too, I find it more difficult to find a place to stand on today’s queasy foundations.

There’s a fair bit of high-church drift in parts of the Mennonite world. Some of it, like attention to the church year and use of the lectionary, is enriching. But I wonder if the meaning of the Lord’s Table is a place we Anabaptists should be giving up ground easily.

Some friends think I’m being uptight, that the words aren’t really that important.

Then why bother saying them at all? Why not dispense with the words, enjoy a silent ritual together, let everyone invest the event with the meaning precious to them? Maybe the Quakers are on to something.

Our society has enough meaningless prattle. We don’t need more of it in church.

Wally Kroeker is editor of Marketplace and a member of River East MB Church, Winnipeg.