Growing up, I always was an avid reader of all kinds: fairy tales, fantasy, adventure, classics, murder mysteries, westerns, history. Probably my special favorite was science-fiction.
I was always drawn to science and its discoveries, and I really liked good science-fiction—that is, solid speculative projections based on what we already know. (Not fantasy at all.)
That’s why I loved the science-fiction TV series, Star Trek. It was engaging, realistic, had interesting character development, and was fundamentally optimistic about the future.
Many of its plots were almost parables. It was a very value-rooted show, basically imagining how, in spite of human weaknesses, humanity was gradually growing up and getting better and better.
Among its many successor TV series, Star Trek: The Next Generation really stood out for me. Although with an entirely new cast of characters, it continued in the same spirit and with the same challenging originality of the first series.
An episode in its fifth year was especially original and challenging: Darmok.
The plot line was unique: The crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise encounters an alien civilization and, no matter what, can’t communicate with them.
Their language appears to be unintelligible —it seems to be constructed of historical references to episodes and events of their unknown history and culture.
The two captains meet on a mutually unknown planet, are faced with common deadly threats, and ultimately begin to understand and collaborate with one another, even though the alien captain dies.
The Enterprise Captain Picard discovered why it was so hard to communicate—the aliens spoke entirely with metaphors.
We face a similar challenge in our religious communication. We use metaphors and references to episodes and events in religious history and culture that are becoming less and less familiar to the majority of people of our day. Our religious language can be almost unintelligible.
Here’s an example: St. Paul wrote to the Romans (6:3), “. . . are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” To understand what he means, you need to know that:
– “baptize”, originally a Greek word, means to immerse or bathe.
– John, called the Baptist, preached the need for a spiritual cleansing and renewal in preparation for the coming restoration and establishment of the kingdom of God that was symbolized by a ritual immersion and washing in the Jordan river.
– The early Christians retained a similar symbolic immersion and washing ceremony as part of rite of initiation to celebrate the decision of new recruits who had embraced the teachings of Jesus and wished to become part of the community of his disciples, the church.
– The plunging under water and rising from the immersion anew is also symbolic of Jesus’s having been plunged into death and rising from death anew.
Paul is communicating that a disciple of Jesus symbolically has been washed from and died to a former worldly way of life and now shares in the hope of resurrection to a new and eternal fullness of life.
We’re used to using many such religious metaphors—and we don’t always realize how hard it is for others to understand us!
16 August 2020