Sermon 34 - Edit, Audit, Prophet
Hebrews 12:11
No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.
Job 5:17
Blessed is the one whom God corrects; so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty.
Micah 6:8
The LORD has shown you what is good. He has told you what he requires of you. You must act with justice. You must love to show mercy. And you must be humble as you live in the sight of your God.
Jeremiah 7:28
Therefore say to them, ‘This is the nation that has not obeyed the Lord its God or responded to correction. Truth has perished; it has vanished from their lips.
Micah 2:11
If a liar and deceiver comes and says, ‘I will prophesy for you plenty of wine and beer,’ that would be just the prophet for this people!
Isaiah 30:10-11
They tell the prophets, "Don’t see dreams about things we should do. Don’t tell us the truth. Say nice things to us and make us feel good. See only good things for us. Stop seeing things that will really happen. Get out of our way. Stop telling us about the Holy One of Israel."
Jeremiah 35:15
Time and time again I have sent you all My servants the prophets, proclaiming: Turn, each one from his evil way of life, and correct your actions. Stop following other gods to serve them. ... But you would not pay attention or obey Me.
We do not like prophets. (Gboard, my main transcribing program, doesn't like prophets either: it just transcribed them as profits.) Oh, we give them lip service: they are supposed to speak for God. They proclaim God and God's words. God's message to us. But we don't like them.
We represent prophets as dour, humorless, angry old men. And, in our age-ist society, that epithet of "old" is about as damning as you can get. Prophets are killjoys. Prophets are there to spoil all of our fun. We don't like prophets.
You know who else doesn't like prophets? Writers, that's who. Only they call them editors. And accountants, and information security specialists. Only they call them auditors.
I am a writer. I have published books. I have not just self-published books, I have been paid, and given advances, and given royalties, by established and reputable publishers. I have written books that have been accepted as national college textbooks. I am a writer. And Gloria was my editor.
So, no, I do not automatically dislike editors. I am well aware of the value of a good editor. When I started publishing books, my colleagues, those of them who thought that they might like to publish books as well, asked me how to do it. My first piece of advice was: when you have actually *written* the book, that's the *easy* part done. I said this in reference to the seemingly endless rounds of editing that happen once your book is accepted. My other standard piece of advice was, when you find a good copy editor, you marry her.
Gloria wasn't just a good copy editor, she was a *great* copy editor. She was the best copy editor I have ever encountered. And she wasn't just a copy editor. There are seven different levels of editors. Gloria encompassed every level, and did all of them supremely well.
I tell a story about editing my first book. At this particular stage, we had already been through three rounds of copy editing. At this stage we were into type setting, and the checking of what are known as galley proofs. Galley proofs are the typeset pages, which are, supposedly, ready to be printed and bound into a book. In reality, of course, typesetters have managed to introduce a completely new and bewildering variety of errors into the text: errors that you never would have considered, and never would have thought possible. In any case, I had received the first third of my book in galley proof form. It was about 140 pages. I sweat blood over it, for eight hours, reading, as far as possible, line by line, and word by word. In the 140 pages, I managed to detect twenty separate errors. Then I gave it to Gloria.
She found four errors on the first *page*.
Now, Gloria had two advantages over me, in pursuing this process. The first is that Gloria was a better editor than I ever was, or ever will be. The second advantage is that Gloria was not me.
You see, the thing is, when you read your own material, you know what you meant to say. You know how you meant to say it. You know what point you wanted to emphasize in saying it that way. And so, when you read your own text, you automatically read it from that perspective. You understand it from that viewpoint. You also automatically, mentally, correct any minor errors, without even noticing them. You know what you meant to say; the fact that the text on the page doesn't say it quite right doesn't even register with you.
But, of course, it doesn't matter what you *intended* to say. What really matters is what you *actually* said. And what it actually turned out like, on the page. And, even more important, is how the reader, who is not you, will actually read, and understand, the text that is there in front of them on the page. You, as a writer, cannot see the text in that way. You are already predisposed to understand the text the way you intended it to come across to someone. You read it, understanding the point that you want a reader to take away from the text. Even if the text is not very clear about that particular point.
So, it is essential, that somebody else, who is not you, read your material. It is absolutely vital that someone else read the text. And tell you, what they understood the text to say. Or, even more importantly, tell you that they cannot understand what this text means at all.
That actually is one of the higher levels of editing; not the basic copy editing part. But copy editing, proper copy editing, certainly helps.
Generally speaking, I do not tell this story to writers. I don't teach an awful lot of writing workshops. What I *do* teach is information security. And I tell this story to prove a point about auditors.
Information security practitioners, and administrators, and managers, and specialists, and consultants, all hate auditors. They consider auditors to be the enemy. Auditors, so the saying goes, are people who go through the battlefield, after the battle is over, and bayonet the wounded. Nobody likes auditors.
I understand this point of view. It is not fun to sweat blood over your plans to defend the enterprise that you have been hired to defend, and then have some stranger come along and poke holes in your beautiful security plan. It is even more annoying when you have to admit that they are right. So it is no wonder that so many information security specialist, my colleagues, consider auditors to be the enemy.
But auditors are not the enemy. Auditors are, in fact, your best friends.
Auditors will write a report, pointing out all the holes and flaws in your beautiful plan. They do not take account of how much work you have put in. They do not take account of the sleepless nights when you worried about how to defend against this vulnerability surface, or that particular attack. They don't care. They just see a hole, and point it out. Possibly poking at it, rather deeply, and sometimes painfully, along the way. So, when they write a report, not knowing all of the great stuff that you have done, but only noting where you have failed, it is understandable that some people would get upset.
Not me.
No, when I am presented with one of these audit reports, pointing out every single flaw, and every single error, in the plan that I have sent spent six months creating, I thank the auditor kindly. Then I go to the board, slap down a copy of the audit report in front of every board member, and tell them see? I told you I needed more money!
OK, yes, it's a joke. But not really. We don't like people who point out problems. If we don't give them a specific title, like editor, or auditor, we call them complainers. We don't like people who complain. People who complain are whiners, annoyances, and nuisances. We wish they would just shut up. Why don't they just chill? Actually, I just recently realized that the term chill (which we never really define) is kind of a reformulation of a quote by G. K. Chesterton, noting that if a job is worth doing, it is worth doing badly. This is something that many people, even if they have never heard of it, have taken too much to heart. The Christian church, in particular, seems to have almost taken it as a command.
If you want to fix things, you have to be honest about what the problems are. If there is a problem, you have to identify the problem in order to be able to fix it. If you do not know what the problem is, then simply doing random things is not going to fix the problem. And Einstein's famous quote, that it is the very definition of insanity to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result, is the seed of the issue of not identifying the problem before you try and fix it. Therefore, we need complainers. If we don't allow, and even encourage, complaint, we don't let ourselves (and other people) know, number one, that there *is* a problem, and number two, what a perception of the problem is. It is important to have different perceptions. If I complain, this gives other people an opportunity to correct my misapprehensions, if I have misidentified either the problem, or the causes of the problem. If I say nothing, I do not allow people the opportunity, themselves, to see whether or not there is a problem, or, to correct me if what I am seeing as a problem is not, in fact, a problem.
(Of course, there is also the issue that I, in pointing out a problem, may need to have an *editor* to point out that the *way* I am outlining the problem may simply be sounding, to those to whom I am expressing it, like whining and complaining, or even insulting. [Sigh.] Communication is a difficult task.)
As I pointed out above, in talking about editors and auditors, very often it takes an outsider to identify a problem. We grow used to our own problems. We also know that we accept what is acceptable to us, and don't realize that the issues we find acceptable could be a much more serious problem to other people. So, what people see as being "chill," and tolerant of problems or issues, is mostly just that they are tolerant of those particular issues, but strongly resent other ones. The other ones they address, the ones that they are tolerant of they tolerate. But people's resentment and tolerance, of different issues, differ. So, a group of people may have learned, or tacitly agreed, to tolerate a certain group of problems, and don't realize how bad those problems are, until an outsider comes in with a fresh perspective. This is why writers need editors. This is why accountants need auditors. We grow used to what we are used to. When I first went to work at the hospital, I thought that it would be impossible to work there because of the stench. I quickly grew accustomed to it, and within two weeks I didn't even notice it. This is, in fact, a known issue, and is understood as being "nose blind." We elderly are frequently victims of this: bladder leakages may be minor enough not to be a problem, and the elderly quickly grow accustomed to the smell of urine, and don't even smell it anymore. But others that they encounter definitely *do* smell it. So, sometimes you need an outsider to come in and say, this stinks.
Okay, so what does all of this have to do with prophets? Well, if you go through the book of Proverbs, and, in fact, if you go through an awful lot of the other books in the Bible as well, you will find all kinds of passages noting that a fool does not like to be corrected. But a wise man accepts reproof.
When the prophets speak, they aren't, generally speaking, telling us anything new. We already know what God requires of us: to love mercy, and to seek justice, and to walk humbly before our God. Okay, well, as a matter of fact it was a prophet that said that. But it's not new. The Bible is full of references to widows and orphans. This is not, as some people would have it, simply a reference to broken families. No, this is shorthand for the disadvantaged. The poor. Those for whom we should provide mercy. Those for whom we should seek justice. Those who are an example to us, that we'd better be humble, because there but for the grace of God...
So the prophets, even the Major Prophets, even Jeremiah, the father of the term jeremiad (which we tend to use to define something that someone says or complains about, very strongly), are not giving us the word of God anew. They are not telling us anything we didn't already know, going right back to Moses. They are proclaiming the word of God, but it turns out, we already *knew* the word of God. We just needed to be reminded. We needed to be corrected. We needed to be reproved. We needed to have our mistakes, and our flaws, and our holes, and our errors, pointed out. And sometimes poked at. With a stick.
So we don't like prophets.
But we definitely need them.
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