Galilean Accent                                                                                 3/31/46

 

Scripture:  Matthew 26: 57, 58, 69-75

 

Text:  Matthew 26: 73;  “Your accent betrays you.”

 

On a train speeding between New York City and Washington DC sat a man facing two others.  They had never met before, but they found it pleasant to talk with each other then; for it helped to pass the time; and anyway they were enjoying the conversation - the two others especially!  They had come from the South, while the first man was from Boston.  Nothing particularly eventful was discussed, it seemed, but the talk proceeded for some time, until the Bostonian realized that he was doing most of the talking in answer to the skillful suggestions and questions of the other two.  Before another five minutes had gone by, he became convinced that they had some motive, undiscerned by himself, for keeping him in conversation.  And so he began a little maneuvering of his own to try to find out what it was.  At length he cornered them with a direct question and got the laughing reply: “We are interested in your Boston accent and we have wanted to keep you talking, partly so that we could hear how the Bostonians accent many of the words you have used.”  They all had a good laugh, and the conversation proceeded thereafter with each kidding the other now and then about the accent with which he spoke.

 

Raised and educated in South Dakota, I was 22 years of age when I first went East.  Then, for a year, I studied in a New England community with men from all over the nation.  I soon learned that the men who spoke in a certain way were from New York.  My roommate hailed from Georgia.  The man  who took the year’s prize for the best preaching among the students was a senior from Virginia.  In spite of his parent’s mournful assertion that his speech had been corrupted by his stay in the North, his accent seemed to my ear unmistakably Virginian.

 

I was coolly objective in my appraisal of the accents of the other men, from the South, and from abroad, until one day a fellow interrupted a conversation to say to me, “You must be from the Midwest.”  Interested, I said that I was, and asked how he had guessed it.  “Why you talk like a Midwesterner,” he replied.  That was perhaps the first time in my life that I realized that there could be anything distinctive about Midwestern talk.  To me, that is just the way for regular people to talk!  Others have their noticeable peculiarities.  Tardily, I learned lesson number one in the study of human communication - an awareness of the other fellow’s point of view.

 

Children may adapt their accent and idiom readily to the manner of speaking in any new locality.  I recall two boys who went from a home in Virginia to the Territory of Hawaii.  Their broad Southern drawl, very much like that of their parents and of the Mammy who had doubtless helped care for them, could hardly be understood by the youngsters of the new community, whose combination of Yankee accent and pidgin idiom must in turn have puzzled the Virginian kids at first.  It took only a short time, however, for the new youngsters to adapt their pronunciation to the local ear so that they ceased to seem peculiar to their new friends.

 

With mature people it is often different.  My father’s cousin, born and bred in the Devonshire countryside of England, even after years in Canada, spoke, when visiting my father’s family in Dakota, with an accent that seemed quite foreign to the ears of us who were then children.  But Grandmother obviously reveled in the old familiar sound.  The unconscious reminder of her own youthful years in Devon warmed Grandma’s ears and heart!

 

Our accent is so well fixed, especially in adult life, that it is possible for it to lead us into trouble, if it be trouble that pursues us.

 

Palestinian Jews of 2,000 years ago could tell readily enough whether a stranger came from Judea in the south, or from Galilee in the north, or from Samaria in between, by the stranger’s manner of speech.  Jesus was born in the south, in Bethlehem of Judea, because Joseph, descended from the lineage of David, had had to return there with his wife to the city of his fathers in order to register in obedience to one of Caesar’s tax decrees.  But after birth there and only a brief period in a foreign country yet farther to the south - Egypt - the little family returned to the north of Palestine and lived in Nazareth of Galilee.  The children with whom Jesus played, the rabbi from whom he learned in the synagogue, the customers who came to the carpenter shop, the merchants from whom the family bought supplies, were Galileans.  And so Jesus grew up speaking the Jewish language with a Galilean accent.  That was the accent which marked his speech when at the age of 30, he began his three-year public ministry of healing and teaching.

 

There came the time when a friend ceased to be friend and betrayed him into the hands of certain determined and powerful enemies, who rushed him through a quick night-time trial to a morning-time execution.  As he was questioned and humiliated at the home of the high priest, one of his most faithful followers, the elderly fisherman Peter, having followed at a distance in order to remain undetected in the crowd, warmed his hands over a little fire in the courtyard.  A servant girl moving through the crowded courtyard heard him say something.  Immediately she pointed to him as one of the friends of the prisoner who was being accused inside.  “This man was with Jesus, the Galilean,” she said.  Poor Peter, as provincial a Jew in 33 AD as the young South Dakotan in 1926 AD, instantly denied the accusation, not realizing that there was anything distinctive in his speech that would mark him.  In his usual impulsive way, this time confused by fear, he blurted out: “I don’t know what you are saying,” and went out on the porch.  There, another servant girl saw him and heard his accent.  “This fellow was with Jesus!” she said.  Again he denied it - with an oath - saying, “I don’t know the man.”  Picking up the possibility of discovering a friend or accomplice of the prisoner inside, some of the men now began to crowd around Peter.  Someone shouted, “Surely you are one of them!”

 

Peter, still fearful, lost his temper and his judgment entirely.  Cursing and swearing, he exclaimed, “I don’t know the man!”  Dawn was near.  A rooster crowed.  Peter, still not realizing that his Galilean accent had given him away, remembered that he had now thrice denied his best friend, his Lord.  Since no one laid any hand on him, he went out and slipped away, weeping bitterly over his own moral failure.

 

“Your speech tells of you!”  That condemning fact could have been Peter’s glory.  Later he did reverse his moral position and proudly proclaimed his association with Jesus Christ to the very death.  But the Galilean accent would never hide.

 

Well, there is, and should be, an accent that no one who has lived with Christ can, or should wish to, hide.  There are a great many of us “Peters” who find ourselves frequently in situations where we are a little embarrassed or self-conscious about our connection with the Christ.  Now and again, we try furtively to hide the fact, forgetting all about the accent of which we are not conscious.  Indeed we sometimes become conscious of the accent and try to hide it, certainly with no credit to us or our Lord, in order to avoid some anticipated trouble or embarrassment.

 

The Rev. George Thomas Peters, pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Neenah, repeats the story of a young man who was to spend his summer in the woods of Canada at a lumber camp.  Before he went, his pastor reminded him that many of the men with whom he would be working would not be professing Christians.  He advised the young man not to be ill-at-ease or embarrassed if some of the rough woodsmen should ridicule his Christian devotion.  After a time, the minister received a letter from the young man in which he wrote proudly, “Don’t worry about me; I’ve been here for a month and no one has even guessed that I’m a Christian!”

 

I wonder, uneasily, how many people guess that I am a Christian when I travel outside this city - or even within it, among those who may not have met me!

 

Does anyone guess that you are a Christian - I mean quite apart from the fact that your name may appear on a church roll?  Do we carry around the indelible impression of Him whom we have confessed as Lord and Savior?  How much of the Galilean accent is there about us?  What should there be about a Christian that will immediately make it apparent to anyone else that we have been with Christ?

 

(1)  Our speech ought, literally, to reveal the fact that we are Christian, shouldn’t it?  The ancients said, “Speech is the mirror of the soul: as a man speaks so is he.”  And most of the time the mirror is set at an angle so that it is not we ourselves, but someone else who is looking us over.  The speech of the Christian reveals, mostly all unawares, whether or not we are really familiar with Christ.

 

The Christian will gladly allow his speech to witness to what he believes.  We are not particularly shy in our personal prejudices; the political opinions we have; our egotistical expressions.  Why should we be timid with our tongues when we have opportunity to confess our faith?

 

Endless research has failed to make clear what was meant by the “gift of tongues” in the early church.  But it is clear that at Pentecost a great many people were given the gift of speaking vitally, freely, joyously, their faith in Jesus Christ.  Surely that kind of thrilling, freely-bubbling-over, gift of speech would in our time win others more quickly to the joyous freedom of fellowship in Him!  It has been true in every other century Anno Domini.  There appears no good reason why it should not be true now.  And no day or people ever needed that witness more surely than our day and the people of our time.

 

Bliss Perry once suggested to John Burroughs that Burroughs write an essay on a certain topic.  “I’ll do it,” said Burroughs, “if only I’d get het up enough so’s I could flow.”

 

I imagine the recent need of the Pittsville church folk helped “heat up” the several laymen of our church who went over there so that they could “flow” some.  Perhaps if “some” was good, “more” might be better.

 

But none of us has to wait for the crying emptiness of some neighboring pulpit.  The daily need of people around us for the joyful peace of God ought to be enough “heat” to make us all “flow.”

 

An old Scotch teacher used to end each of his seminary class sessions with the words, “Gentlemen, speak a good word for Jesus Christ.”

 

(2)  Not alone his vocal speech, but a Christian’s attitudes and manner of thought are also his “accent.”  Van Dyke once remarked that most people seem to use their minds like a creeping child uses his mouth - as a receptacle for anything they can pick up!  A lot of things “picked up” these days are apt to be cause for mental and spiritual indigestion!  There is plenty of mental and spiritual “stomach ache” in the shallowness, the “hate, revenge, get even, do the other fellow before he does you” illness which infects our society.  Countless people need some of the salt that Jesus was talking about; the light he mentioned, the judgment of which he spoke.  And you know to whom he spoke - his own followers.  “Ye are the salt of the earth.”  [Matthew 5: 13].  “Let your light shine before men”  [Matthew 5: 16] - don’t hide it, it’s needed!  “As you would that men should do to you, do even so to them” and leave vengeance to the Almighty.  “I will repay, saith the Lord.”  [Romans 12: 19].  Surely He will!  And how is His business.

 

“When the people saw the boldness of Peter and John” [months or years after Peter’s heartbreaking disgrace, and after his own tongue and soul were loosened and set afire] -- “when the people saw the boldness of Peter and John, they took knowledge of them that they had been with Jesus.”  [Acts 4: 13].  And you know how the blessed flame spread!

 

(3)  The accent of the Christian will be one of Joy.  We make too much of Jesus as the “man of sorrows.”  He is not an object of pity.  We are, until we know him well.  Then we need no one’s pity.  In the hour that the world would call His darkest, the Master could and did say: “Let not your heart be troubled.  Ye believe in God!”  What more do you need to know?

 

The very word “gospel” mean “good news.”  You have received it; proclaim it.  “Rejoice, and again I say rejoice.”  That is the Christian accent.

 

(4)  And the Christian accent keeps the perspective of the eternal.  Beyond the fever of the moment’s anxiety and struggle, we are to view the day in the light of the years; and the years in the light of the centuries, and the centuries in the light of the ages.  That may be the only saving grace for this day in which we live.  That must be our hope now.  This is God’s world.  He will redeem it.  Let our very accent proclaim it.

 

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, March 31, 1946.