By Jorge Láscar from Australia – West walls of the medieval city of Rhodes, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31948199

“You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.” – Matthew 5:14, 16 (NRSV)

“You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?…” – Matthew 5:13 (NRSV)

“By you I can crush a troop, and by my God I can leap over a wall.” – Psalms 18:29 (NRSV)

The more I study and learn about communication, language, and witness, the more frustrated and concerned I become. In the midst of reading some of the thoughts of the French philosopher/psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (not an easy read, for sure…), I discovered a concept he named the “wall of language.” While not totally lined up with his definition of this idea, I have appropriated it to describe what, to me, is the biggest challenge to clear communication on the planet, and, as a result, a serious concern to all y’all living to express God’s grace and love into this broken old world.

Here’s the problem: Not only is there no real universal definition for every word (although Webster’s gives it a shot for English…), but even between just two people, the best agreed-upon definition of something that these two people can see or experience (say, “spoon”, for example…) will likely conjure up slightly different, or wildly different, pictures in each of their memories and experiences of spoons. While some of the time that might not make that much of a difference, it can accumulate a number of minor misapprehensions in a conversation that add up to a greater and greater chance of misunderstanding. Now, if “spoon” has the potential to do that, you can well imagine what the thoughts, ideas and experiences of God, Father, Son, Spirit, grace, love, faith, trust, salvation, (and to add a few more words that can go a lot of different ways in today’s American society…), acceptance, justice, evangelical, poor, forgiveness, sin, compassion, “woke”, and so on. It can get really messy…

We only really have language to speak and write with, so we’re kind of stuck. The old marketing saying of “know your audience” only goes so far, especially since language has so many strong and ill-defined words by which we communicate and can be manipulated.

So, what can we do, as God’s people, to communicate who God is into this world? Well, using language the clearest way I can, I recall the scriptures posted at the top of this post. The old saying that “actions speak louder than words” doesn’t preclude speaking or writing, of course. However, the verses in Matthew emphasize BEING (” You ARE the light…” and “You ARE the salt…”) and the verse from Psalms points out that action directed by God gives us the strength and direction to “leap over a wall”! The wall of language isn’t going to go away and will likely not get any easier to leap over, but God guides and strengthens us to live who He is into the world. Words can be valuable, but the life of God lived and expressed into the world can make some of these words make sense to others.