You find a superb restaurant, in a superb location, serving superb food in superb surroundings. You feel all your friends need to know about it. What do you do?
This question is the result of some rather mischievous reflections on the words of a recent hymn. Personally, I'd go off and tell them. I might go out and tell them. Or I might just go and tell them. But I don't think I'd go forth and tell.
Ah, you may well say, but "go forth and tell" is hymn language. A little later comes the line "your ransomed powers for his sole glory use" - more hymn language, and we can pick out the message without much difficulty - Christ died for our sins, and we should use all our talents in the service of his kingdom and not of anything else.
Other hymns require more thought. John Newton's "Glorious things of thee are spoken" begins clearly enough. But I remember as a schoolboy being puzzled by the lines "Who can faint while such a river / ever flows their thirst to assuage". Nevertheless, you can work out what it means. (In fact, the line before, "And all fear of want remove" is much more difficult, since it has nothing to do with poverty and the War on Want, but is to do with the boundlessness of God's love!).
And when at the end of the verse which begins "Dear Lord and Father of mankind, / forgive our foolish ways" we read the lines "in purer lives thy service find, in deeper reverence praise", how many of us could actually explain what they mean?
Religious language has always been a bit different. Just as we use different language to talk to our friends from the expressions we use with our parents, our boss, those in authority, so we use other words in praising and praying to God.
This is nothing new. In Jesus' day, the entire Bible, except for a few chapters in the books of Ezra and Daniel, was written and read out in Hebrew. But after the Exile, the Jews had returned to a land where the spoken language was Aramaic, and by the second century BC, people everywhere spoke Aramaic. Hebrew was reserved for scholarship and worship - not unlike the position of High German in Switzerland.
The language of worship is slow to change. Greeks continue to use the language of the fourth century, and elsewhere churches still worship in fossilized forms of Slavonic, Syriac, Coptic and Ge'ez which are hardly comprehensible to the everyday passer-by. In Western Europe, services were conducted and the Bible was read in Latin for centuries after the last Latin speakers had vanished.
Even when Latin gave way to English, the first "official" Bible (published in 1539) and the first Book of Common Prayer (published ten years later) used language which was consciously archaic, and which became more and more old-fashioned as the centuries progressed.
Perhaps we feel that using language which is deliberately outdated is more dignified. And it is certainly true that the language of the 1611 Bible and the 1662 Prayer Book has both beauty and familiarity. "Traditional" language, like majestic architecture, powerful music, or the use of incense, can add an extra intensity to worship.
But at the same time, it can set up a barrier. If you are reading this, you are probably "one of us", an insider, one who already knows and values the way we worship at St Ursula's. But what of the outsiders, the people whom we seek to bring to God, to count among our fellow-worshippers?
As people grow less familiar with coming to church, we should pay more attention to their needs when they do come. They may come out of curiosity. They may be visiting friends. They may be here for a baptism or a wedding. If they feel that our worship is little more than mumbo jumbo and hocus pocus, they will not come again.
Our task is to find a middle way, between worship which transports us into God's presence, and worship which speaks to others too. We need to keep a constant eye on our order of service, our readings from the Bible, the hymns and songs we use, to make sure that they are helpful for all. And you can help here - if something is hard to understand, tell someone about it. You are probably not the only one!
HD