Why Christians Should Stop Saying “Amen”
7th January, 2019 // in The Coffeehouse Cleric // by Alex Rowe
I used silently to judge those people who, during religious ceremonies, proudly refused to say amen at the end of prayers. How boorish and insensitive of them, I thought, refusing to participate. They may not believe but they could at least play along. God’s house, God’s rules. But now my opinion has changed. In fact, I think more of us should stop saying amen.
What does amen mean? It is a word well-known but mostly misunderstood. My concern is that saying amen is, for many, so formulaic as to have become meaningless. We are so familiar with the word but do not wrestle with its radical implications.
Let me draw an analogy. Imagine you are attending a friend’s wedding. You take your place in the pew, and seated next to you is a man who has flown from far away especially for the occasion. He speaks no English and has never been to the country before, but due to long acquaintance with the groom has come to join the celebration.
The ceremony proceeds until that final moment where the priest says loudly and gladly, “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” and turning to the groom exclaims, “You may now kiss the bride.” The building fills with happy sighs, with cheering and rounds of applause. The newly-married couple then exit, with the bridal party, and everyone else then follows.
What did the man from far away see? He has watched the ceremony, heard and observed the exchanging of vows and rings. Then the priest uttering his final few words, the couple kissing, and all leaving. The man grasps the overall significance of the occasion — he’s at a wedding, he knows that much, and has been to weddings in his own country — but because he speaks no English, has never been to England before, and has not seen an English wedding ceremony until now, he cannot understand each particular moment or appreciate every peculiar detail.
It seems fair to say, in this hypothetical scenario, that the man from far away could not have known just how important was that kiss the bride and groom shared; how it symbolised the sealing of the marriage vows, marking the crescendo of the whole ceremony. To him, reasoning from observation, the kiss was simply the last thing you ‘did’ before the ceremony came to an end and everybody left.
The man’s ignorance of the kiss’s significance is like our ignorance of the significance of amen. Many of us understand amen only to mean “the prayer is over,” as though it were a word we append to our prayers like a kind of liturgical punctuation. But as the kiss does not function to mark the end of the ceremony, neither does amen function to mark the end of our prayers. The word amen occurs at the end, as does the kiss, but this is not what amen means.
Amen originates from the Hebrew word āmēn (אָמֵן), transliterated into Greek (ἀμήν), passed on into Latin and then other languages like English. It is often untranslated, instead only transliterated, as it is difficult to capture its nuance in one English word. Dictionaries and lexicons go into great detail, but fundamentally, amen is used to mark agreement, to confirm what has been said before by way of response.
The word amen is response-seeking and self-involving. When we pray and say amen, when we invoke God to act, at the same time we call upon ourselves to act with Him. We say “Yes!” to God’s invitation to partner with Him in bringing about the change we seek. And when we pray and say amen with others, the implication of the word is that we bind ourselves to one another and together commit to living in such a way that takes seriously this partnership we share with God.
When we say amen after we have cried out to God that justice be accomplished around the world, we challenge ourselves to take responsibility to fight injustice in our own lives. When we say amen after we have interceded for governments and their leaders, we call upon ourselves to live as good citizens with all the responsibilities as well as privileges that involves. When we say amen after we have asked God to heal and bring wholeness to our sick friends, maybe we ought to visit them and offer to lay on hands and pray for them in person.
You see, those people I used to judge, now I think they truly understood. They realised, were they to say amen, that they would only be acting hypocritically. They realised that by saying amen they would be involving themselves with a God they otherwise tried to avoid and a people in which they otherwise took little interest.
If you say amen regularly, allow this reflection on the word’s meaning to unsettle you. It is not merely a word of liturgical punctuation; it contains a challenge, an invitation, to live in a new way, to truly partner with God and his people. Before you say amen, think about what you are saying, with what you are choosing to agree, and with whom you are choosing to involve yourself. Amen is a small word of profound significance.
Thank you for reading this post. If you liked it, please do share it with your friends and family. The Coffeehouse Cleric is a weekly blog on spirituality and simple living by Alex Rowe.
