What kind of accent do you have?
What kind of accent do you have? I didn’t used to know I had an accent. Compared to my cousins, I don’t. I learned I have a bit of a twang when I went to seminary at the age of 24 and a friend said, “I just love your accent.” I looked back at them horrified and said, “What accent?”
I loved the way my friend from Wisconsin said “ba-gel” and she loved the way I said, “right” as one long syllable instead of “right” with two clipped syllables. There was a bit of confusion when we cooked a meal in the common room kitchen and I asked her for some metal food wrap. I asked her to pass me the “tin foil” and she had to ask three times what I meant, until she finally said, “Oh, you mean the aluminum foil.”
What kind of accent do you have?
It’s not an idle question. Your authority partly arises from your voice, from the particularity of your life and your experience: the truth that only you can speak into the world, in the way that only you can speak it, the signs of the kingdom that only you are going to be able to see from your vantage point! That’s how we extend our partnership with God beyond the Lord’s Prayer. That’s how we see the kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven — right here in our real lives.
Nathan Evans Fox is a country singer and songwriter from western North Carolina. He’s from the deep hollers of Appalachia; I’m from the red-clay foothills of east Alabama and northwest Georgia. I want to share his words about proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom in your own peculiar accent. He calls it “Jubilee,” that moment when the Lord returns and everything starts looking the way it was always supposed to look.
Jubilee But Back Home
What has always most endeared me to country music is its dedication to the vernacular. The inescapability of my own vernacular is part of what dead-ended me into the genre in the first place. The poetic building blocks of country music have always been the bits and pieces of the world we know. Regardless of how inaccessible it may be to the uninitiated, country music is built on the poetic power of homegrown tomatoes, country slang, fiddle, and (yes, even) trucks.
(I understand) that for most of the people I love, Jubilee will have to have a little twang to it. It will have to be a little playful and experimental. It cannot be too self-serious though it will have to be sincere... It will have to fit in at the flea market, and it will have to suit an audience accustomed to watching Jerry Springer immediately after the 700 Club.
Truth be told, Jubilee can’t be anything other than vernacular. Jubilee is not a cul de sac – it is not monocropped, it is not annihilationist, it is not one-size-fits-all. Jubilee doesn’t deal in bulldozers; it deals in seedbeds. Jubilee occurs in the places and communities we inhabit, enfleshed in the parts of our worlds that need relief and room to grow. It’s abolitionist in the way that it is concerned with rendering every carceral tool useless by unconditionally empowering the things that make life livable. So Jubilee will always have to start with what we’ve got, with the roots and soil and sun and rain that help us grow where we’re planted.
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My question, before you go off into the rest of your day, is this: What VERY SPECIFIC thing will be different when the Lord comes back? What’s something that ONLY YOU would notice?
It doesn’t have to be something that changes the world for everybody. In fact, it can’t be. Only God can change the world for everybody. You can only change the world for the people you can see and reach and hug. And those people will need to hear about it in YOUR accent!
When the Lord comes back – what’s that gonna look like? And what surprising thing will mean that he’s closer than ever before?