Shane

Posting is irregular now due to law school workload. Will try to post when I get a spare moment from slaying the law beast.

One of my rather eccentric law professors recently introduced me to the concept of 'sermon cricket'. He was telling us an anecdote from his days as a young boy in boarding school. "Oh the memories," he began as his eyes glazed over with that look of nostalgia. His school would hold compulsory weekly assemblies. Assembly would be like going to a church (or "going to chapel" as I have heard some boys describe). There would the usual hymns, followed by a long sermon by "some grey haired fellow" (my professor's words). Few of the boys payed much attention, and what my professor did to pass the time was to play 'sermon cricket'.

The rules of 'sermon cricket' are as follows. Runs are scored whenever the preacher says a particular word. One run for 'Jesus', 'God' or the 'Holy Spirit'. Two runs for 'grace', 'salvation' and 'faith'. Four runs for 'sin', 'judgement' (or other derivatives). Six runs for some obscure words like 'propitiation', 'incarnation', etc. You lose a wicket whenever the word 'apostle' or 'follower' is used. The run-scoring words could of course be altered depending on the sermon series. It would take 4 weeks to get through any whole match, since each side would need to have 2 innings each.

For the most part, this kept my professor entertained for 6 years of schooling. He took much pride in explaining to us the details of the game. The moral of the story, or its application for us law students, was of course that lawyers must learn to use legal jargon to preserve the mystification and elitism of the legal profession. We score 6 runs (or marks) whenever we use words that no one else has ever heard of, like 'otiose' (see the irony?).

Suffice to say, I took very little away from that lecture, apart from pondering the question of whether Christians use way too much jargon. Here is an example, whenever I explain the gospel to someone, I can hardly escape using the word 'grace'. But when I say that God is gracious, am I just making the other person think of dancing ballerinas? This will be particularly at issue when conversing with non-english background speakers. Paticularly with non-Christians, I think much more care needs to be taken when explaining concepts such as salvation, sacrifice, forgiveness, faith and even the jargon of all jargons 'propitiation' or 'penal substitution theory', which has become a flash word at the university Christian society/group I am part of.

Here's a conversation I had about cricket and jargon:

I was coming home from uni and it was late in the afternoon. I had skipped lunch because of a meeting. I was ridiculously famished so out of desperation wandered into a pub to get some quick 'pub grub'. This pub was not your average indie city bar with alternative music, quirky seats, patrons dressed in smart-casual vests and leather shoes, and people drink 'red corvettes' and 'brazilian peach hoo-has' (or some other bizarre cocktail concoction). Rather, this was your traditional pub, where they serve beer and bangers and mash. The patrons wear singlet-tops and work boots. There are several TVs all set to various sport stations. On this particular day the cricket was on. I was watching it as I ate my pepper steak.

There was a guy sitting nearby, eating fish and chips and also watching the cricket. We made light conversation at first. Who do you think will win, Australia or New Zealand? Probably New Zealand, he said. Not optimistic? Don't want to get my hopes up. That Daniel Vettori guy is pretty good, I said. Yeah most women say that, he replied. I asked him whether he played cricket. He said sometimes, more when he was young, but he didn't have the fitness or time for it now. It's also diffcult to find enough people to play with, he said.

Bingo, perfect segueway opportunity. I started telling Shane that some of the blokes at my church started a weekly touch football/cricket social on weekends. I wasn't sure of the specifics, but he was welcome to join if he wanted to. He said he would think about it. Then he asked me where my church was, what kind of things we do there and how involved I was. Eventually, he got around to telling me that he didn't have much to do with God or church. He knew about Christianity from school, he knew the Christmas story and the Easter story roughly and about some guy called Jesus, but wasn't particularly interested in it. If there were a God, he supposed he would find out later when he died. He asked me what I thought about God.

So there I was, presented with a golden opportunity to proclaim the gospel then and there. I started explaining. I had the 'Two Ways to Live' framework in my head as I attempted to communicate some central truths. As I continued to talk about terms like sin, judgement, grace and salvation, I quickly realised that some of what I was saying was going over his head and I was boring him. You can always tell when the other person loses interest when they stop making eye contact and start glancing around (to the TV screen to check the cricket score). The conversation was going downhill fast.

I tried a different track. I asked him to tell me what he thought Christians believed. The suggestion was unwelcomed. Shane said he he couldn't do that. It'd be probably all wrong, he said. And explaining it to a Christian would probably be embarrassing. He said it would be like, someone who didn't know much cricket explaining how an LBW works to a committed cricket fan. I cut him a deal. I confessed to not knowing much about cricket. I would attempt to explain to him what I thought an LBW was and he'd explain to me what he thought Christians believed. It was a trade off. So there I was was saying something about if the ball hadn't hit the batsmen, it would have hit the wicket (in less clear terms than that). Shane corrected me several times. Then Shane explained Christianity, and I corrected him by clarifying what Christians actually thought. There were a lot of laughs as we both struggled to describe concepts that were difficult to us.

Soon we both finished eating. I departed, thanking him for the conversation. I left him with some of my church's contact details and bid him farewell. I left the pub and walked home jovially, thinking that conversation wasn't so otiose after all. At the very least, I learnt that LBW actually stands for 'leg before wicket'.