The Lord of Culture

Genesis 12

12 The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. ² I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. ³ I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

⁴ So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he set out from Harran. ⁵ He took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, all the possessions they had accumulated and the people they had acquired in Harran, and they set out for the land of Canaan, and they arrived there.

Revelation 7
The Great Multitude in White Robes
⁹ After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. ¹⁰ And they cried out in a loud voice: “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.”

¹¹ All the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures. They fell down on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, ¹² saying: “Amen! Praise and glory and wisdom and thanks and honour and power and strength be to our God for ever and ever. Amen!”

¹³ Then one of the elders asked me, “These in white robes—who are they, and where did they come from?” ¹⁴ I answered, “Sir, you know.” And he said, “These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. ¹⁵ Therefore, “they are before the throne of God and serve him day and night in his temple; and he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence.

^16 “Never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst. The sun will not beat down on them, nor any scorching heat. ¹⁷ For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd; he will lead them to springs of living water. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

I do not plan to exegete these passages, fascinating though they are. Rather, I will ask one simple question of them and talk about how they (and other passages) answer that question: What does God do with culture? You know, of course, that Niebuhr has given us the definitive answer to one form of this question with his typology of “Christ against culture”, “Christ of culture”, “Christ above culture”, “Christ and culture in tension”, and “Christ the transformer of culture”. I do not propose to critique his typology, or to build on it, or to offer something in its place. If you want to know more about it, I recommend that you read his book, Christ in Culture, and you can supplement it with John Stackhouse’s book on the same topic, Making the Best of It: Following Christ in the Real World.

I mention Niebuhr in order to suggest that I will go in a completely different direction. I do not want to ask if culture is good or bad. I do not want to ask if culture serves or hinders the gospel. Rather, I see culture as given in our lives. I see culture as the mental and emotional atmosphere of our society. We can no more live without culture than a fish can live without water or a deer without air. Culture simply is, just as winter is. You can like it or hate it, but it’s there. Someone has said that those who say they don’t like postmodernism might as well say they don’t like Thursday. The same is true of culture. Culture simply is, so I want to know what God does with our culture.

There’s our question: What does God do with culture? The answer is deceptively simple. In Genesis 12, Abram and Sarai and their nephew, Lot, embark on a journey from their home in Harran to find the home that God wants for them. God tells Abram that this journey will be for their benefit: “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.” God tells Abram that this journey will also be for the benefit of all people: “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

The word for “peoples” means “families”. We think of a larger category than simply my family and yours. My Hebrew teacher in seminary (so many years ago) suggested tribes or ethnic groups as one way to think of it. That is, people in a society who have a common culture, find their blessing in God’s call to Abram and Sarai.

In Revelation 7, we have a similar concept. John describes an indescribably scene – people from all over the world gathered before God’s Throne and worshipping the Lamb of God. The scene is one of great joy and unbounded glory. Notice how it begins: “After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.” That fourfold description – every nation, tribe, people, and language – lets us know that God’s promise to Abram and Sarai has been fulfilled more fully than we could have ever hoped. These are indeed the “families” of Genesis 12. All families of the earth are included in this fourfold description of ethnic groups.

Excursus: One could make the same point through a variety of other passages – from the emphasis in the Great Commission “on all people” in Matthew 28 to Paul’s sermon in Athens in Acts [“the unknown God”] to Paul’s description of general revelation in Romans 1 and 2. God has revealed God’s self to all people in every culture throughout space and time.

The Consequence
The common prayer in Judaism refers to God as Melech ha Olam: Eternal King or King of the Universe. God is king of all that is. God is Lord of everything. Jesus is the Lord of culture. The consequence of this truth about God’s nature, combined with the reality of God’s promises to the nations [to all ethnic groups with their diverse cultures] is that God shows the very self of God in every culture.

To say that God is Lord of Culture, then, is to say that God reveals God’s self in every culture of the earth. Don Richardson makes a similar argument in his book, Eternity in Their Hearts, and then he illustrates his case by giving examples from a wide variety of cultures, showing how nuggets of revelation (precursors of the gospel) have been found in many religions.

I want to make a similar case. Two examples – one from my own experience and one from Richardson. If you want a collection of many more, read Eternity in Their Hearts!

Zimbabwe: I have been reading journals of early European settlers travelling to what is today Zimbabwe. One of them, Thomas Leask, was a trader who went to the Ndebele capital where the Mzilikazi, Ndebele King, lived. Another was Robert Moffat, a Scottish missionary to South Africa, who was one of the few White men that Mzilikazi trusted.

I find their accounts fascinating, travelling on foot with oxcarts carrying their goods, 10 to 20 miles a day for 600 miles plus. [Google maps give me 1000 km. for Moffat and 1250 km. for Leask.] When they arrived in Bulawayo, Mzilikazi’s capital, their descriptions show the cultural blindness we might expect of White settlers in an unsettled Africa. Leask is more colonial in his outlook, and the missionary Moffat is more generous. But even after one takes into account their ethnocentrism, one can see problems with Ndebele society.

Mzilikazi had taken 300 or so fighting men with him when he fled north from Tshaka Zulu, the king of the Zulu people in South Africa. He built his people into a kingdom in Zimbabwe whose lives centred on raiding their neighbours for cattle and slaves. Other accounts of his son, Lobengula’s court, describe a cruelty that we can hardly imagine, killing a man caught in adultery by slow stages in front of everyone.

Excursus: Note that my description reveals me also as an outsider to Ndebele culture. Moffat’s contemporaries used such descriptions to conclude that Ndebele society was savage and far inferior to European cultures. A more objective assessment recognizes the differences, but refuses to label the culture as “savage”. As I note below, Ndebele culture is also the bearer of God’s revelation, and it was in its own way as sophisticated and “good” as European culture. My point, as I say in the main text, is that the cultures were completely different, not that one is good and the other bad.

They lived in cultural patterns as different from those we know from Europe and North America as you can imagine. Yet at the heart of those patterns was a proverb that has come down to us today: Umunutu ngumuntu ngabantu – A person becomes fully human in community. There at the heart of Ndebele life one finds a statement that we could have found in the New Testament. Jesus and Paul and John all make it clear that community is the heart of life with God. This mutual love is so important that Paul calls it “the law of Christ” (Galatians 6).

This understanding was present before the missionaries showed up because God was there before the missionaries came. God is the Lord of culture – all cultures.

Papua (Indonesia): The second example comes from a book Richardson wrote about the Yali people in what was then called Irian Jaya, Lords of the Earth. Today it is the province of Papua in Indonesia. Papua New Guinea forms the eastern half of the island and the province of Papua the western half.

There are many questions that we might have about the missionaries who went to these people – an Australian named Stan Dale and a Dutch-Canadian missionary named Bruno Leeuw in 1961. I don’t want to address those questions this morning, but rather ask where the gospel was already present among the Yali. They were what are sometimes called Pygmies. They fought anyone who came near them. Their lives were dominated by fear of spiritual powers around them, and anyone who broke one of their ritual taboos faced instant death. [One notes in passing that such societies, with their focus on taboos and spiritual danger, were often dominated by fear. Again, s cultural outsiders, we are careful to describe rather than to judge.]

Then one day Stan and Bruno saw something new. One of the villagers broke a taboo that meant death, and he knew it. He started running, with the other Yalis close behind. Then he reached a wall of stones built in a small circle. He jumped inside, and everyone else stopped chasing him. Stan and Bruno asked why they stopped. The people explained, “That stone circle is our place of refuge. If you go inside that circle, no one can touch you.”

Deuteronomy 4:41f describes cities of refuge like this:

Then Moses set aside three cities east of the Jordan, to which anyone who had killed a person could flee if they had unintentionally killed a neighbour without malice aforethought. They could flee into one of these cities and save their life. [See also Dt 19 and Joshua 20 for fuller descriptions.]

I have heard preachers talk about Jesus as our place of refuge from the one [Satan] who would kill us. It is not an image that speaks clearly to me, but it is an image that would have communicated clearly to the Yali people. They understood the idea of a place of refuge. In their violent society, separated so far from the gospel in space and time, God was already present as the Lord even of their culture.

Conclusion
This idea is more complex and involved than we have time for here. It means that God is at work in postmodern culture. It means that God is at work in boomer culture and in Millennial culture. It means that God is at work in redneck culture and in communist culture. We are pretty good and pointing out when people don’t measure up to God’s Love and God’s Law, but we forget that God is Lord of every culture and God is always present in every culture.

We have a speaker tomorrow in our community chapel, challenging us to participate in God’s mission to the world. Representatives of different mission agencies will join us on Thursday. This weekend Missionfest Manitoba will be at the Church of the Rock in Winnipeg. A basic principle behind all of this missionary endeavour is that this is God’s world, and that God already is present everywhere we go. This presence does not mean: Don’t Preach! Rather, it means: Preach with confidence, because God is already here!

Closing Prayer
Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace: So clothe us in your Spirit that we, reaching forth our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you; for the honor of your Name. Amen.

PTS Chapel

29 January 2019

The Law of Christ

We live in a world that has forgotten how to disagree without being disagreeable. We draw lines in the sand and dare people to cross them. We make the issue of the day the hill on which we are willing to die. The situation has become bad enough that I can only describe it in clichés. You may have heard the way that Rick Warren has stated it:

Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, you must fear or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.

“You must fear or hate them.” This is the way that people in our world think. We live in so much turmoil with our society changing and heaving beneath our feet, with the result that any disagreement is profoundly threatening. But we are the people of God, whose lives and future belong to God. Do we need to live in such fear? Is there another way? I think there is. Over the next several weeks we want to explore the related ideas of agreement and acceptance, looking for a way to disagree with each other while still accepting each other.

Our Texts

I begin with a few comments on our texts this morning, and then move from the texts to the issue I have raised.

Deuteronomy 6: We have heard the great creed of Judaism many times – the “Shema Yisrael”: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” The creed is then expressed as a command to love: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”

This creed and command stood at the heart of the Jews’ identity, so much so that when Jesus was asked to summarize the Law (Matthew 22), he combined Deuteronomy with Leviticus and said:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.

This combination was well known in Rabbinic circles and expressed well the centre of the Mosaic Law.

In the passage in John 15, Jesus is speaking to his disciples after the Last Supper. The extended passage begins in John 13, and the next action in the drama is Jesus’ arrest. The chapter works out what Jesus means when he says, “I am the vine, and you [the disciples] are the branches.” In doing so, he gives the disciples a command, which Paul later calls “the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2):

As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit – fruit that will last – and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. This is my command: love each other.

“My command is this: love each other as I have loved you.” This passage spells out Jesus’ words at the Last Supper. After he washes the disciples’ feet, he says to them: “A new command I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

What makes this a new command? At one level, it simply restates the great creed from Deuteronomy 6, but Jesus adds a critical piece: “Love … as I have loved you.” Then he says, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” To love with Christ’s love. To love sacrificially, willing to lose everything in order to care for those one loves. This is the new command, the law of Christ.

A Digression to Go Deeper

We began with a quote from Rick Warren. You may also know another famous quote, often attributed to Saint Augustine: “In Essentials Unity, In Non-Essentials Liberty, In All Things Charity.” One internet source tells us that the quote actually “comes from an otherwise undistinguished German Lutheran theologian of the early seventeenth century, Rupertus Meldenius.” Whoever said it, I suggest that this quote gives us a way to understand the passages we have just read and to live against the current of our culture.

In Essentials, Unity. We are united on that which is basic, that which is essential. But what are “the essentials”? What stands at the centre of our faith? This is a more difficult question than it seems. I ask it this way each year in my Worldview and Culture course at Providence: “What is the core of the Christian faith?” We discuss the question, and I have heard many answers. We work at bringing the essential core down to its simplest form. I won’t tell you about all the bits and pieces that we cover; I will simply give you my own conclusion, which comes in two parts.

The Content of Faith. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul begins: “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance”, so we can expect that what follows is essential:

That Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

If we listen to Paul, the central essential affirmation of our faith is that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that Jesus died for us, and that he rose from the dead for us, and that he has appeared to those for whom he died and rose. If we listen to the sermons reported in the book of Acts – clearly summaries rather than full text – the apostles preached Christ, and especially the death and resurrection of Jesus. This is “essential”. On this, there can be no disunity, for Christ alone is the foundation of our lives, and there can be no other (1 Corinthians 3:11).

A Digression. Although we don't pursue the thought here, it is worth recognizing that we are describing the importance of conversion (or the new birth, or commitment to Christ, or whatever you want to call it). All that follows – "ethics", "vitally important nonessentials", and so on – are fruit. They grow when we are grounded in Christ. Without the root of conversion, they cannot grow.

The Ethic of Faith. Jesus made it clear in the verses we read from John 15 that this basic affirmation also results in a particular way of living: “My command is this: love each other as I have loved you.” This also is essential. We live for and in Christ and for and in each other.

This essential truth is absolutely different from the friendship that characterizes our society. Think of our favourite TV, such as “Survivor”. One makes friendships in order to survive. As soon as a friendship no longer helps me survive, one lets it go and forms a new friendship. The goal is to survive, and winning means that other people do not survive. The whole project makes relationships purely transactional, good only as long as they benefit me.

It reminds me of the way that we sometimes approach church. We ask, “What does this church do for me?” That is a transactional question. The right question is, “Do people here love God and love each other? Is the love of Christ present here?” This approach makes relationships a covenant within which we live, a covenant based on the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

In Non-Essentials, Liberty. So we agree to be in unity that our relationships with each other are based on our relationship with Christ, through Christ’s death and resurrection. What does it mean to say that the rest of our faith consists of “non-essentials”? Many of us will struggle with this thought. It sounds like saying that everything else is unimportant. Can we really say that our commitment to peace and non-violence is non-essential and unimportant? If we make our commitment to peace essential, then we declare ourselves out of fellowship with the rest of the Christian Church, who do not make this affirmation.

You see, of course, that non-essential does not mean unimportant. Many non-essentials can be vitally important – so important that our faith requires them. But, however important they are, they are not the means of and basis for our salvation. We can be in fellowship with others who are in Christ, who also disagree with us on some vitally important implication of Christian faith. What does it mean, then, when we say, “In non-essentials, liberty”? What does “liberty” mean? Understanding this point is basic to discovering how to disagree in love.

Sometimes, we say: “I suppose we will have to agree to disagree.” This sounds good, but conceals a real problem. We may actually mean, “I don’t want to argue with you, but we will never speak of this matter again.” Afterwards, we not only don’t speak about the matter again, we don’t speak nearly as much with the person again. In fact, if we decide to avoid important issues with our friends, we may make those relationships shallow and less important.

We may mean something else – that our conversations do not need to lead to agreement in order to continue. For example, if I am a friend of someone who demonstrates their commitment to peace through a “just war position”, then we can discuss our disagreement without requiring agreement at the end. When I was a pastor in Pennsylvania 35 years ago, a young couple came to our church. The husband was a member of the Pennsylvania National Guard. When he discovered we were a “Peace Church”, he asked me, “Do I have to leave the National Guard to come to your church?” I replied, “No. All you have to do is commit yourself to listen to what we believe, and I promise to be willing to listen to what you believe?” In the BIC, we call this “being open to more light” – recognizing that what we believe and do is vitally important, but remaining in fellowship and refusing to break fellowship as we discuss the important, but not fundamental, issue.

In All Things Charity. Charity, of course, means “love”. The love of God; the love Christ has for us; the love we give back to God and to each other; agape love; love that is willing to die if necessary for our brother and sister. It is only such love that makes us able to live with disagreement and continue accepting and loving each other. It is only such love that creates the space within which we can discern truth. This is a covenant love, which is not dissolved when someone moves from one congregation to another. This is covenant love, which builds up the other. This is covenant love, which comes to us only as a gift of the Spirit. As Paul puts it, “Now remain faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love.” This love is itself the fundamental foundation, the essential core of Christian faith. Without this love, I wonder if we can even call ourselves Christian. With this love, we can face anything that comes to us in this life, in the hope that God gives us for an eternity lived in God’s presence, whose essence is perfect love.

Conclusion

Wendy Peterson taught at Providence, as well as in Metis and First Nations settings. She died last year, and we lost a loved and wise mother in our community. Some years ago, she described a practice at a gathering of First Nations, in which the youth were upset with their elders for the lack of progress they had made in some issues closely affecting the youth. As they spoke, the elders stood up and walked around behind the young people. As the youth continued to speak, the elders stood behind them. The gathering understood what the elders were saying as they stood there silently. Something like this: “As you criticize what we have done, we want you to know that we have your backs. You can speak strongly, and you can speak safely, because we support you whatever you have to say.”

That is accepting while disagreeing. There was no commitment to agree, but there was a commitment to listen and to hear. There was a commitment to support each other whatever happened. There is much more to say as we work this idea out, but this is my challenge to you as we begin – to love and accept the other, even when we disagree; to love and hold in the unity of our common commitment to Christ, even while disagreeing on how to live out that commitment.

13 January 2019

Steinbach Mennonite Church

Deuteronomy 6: 4-9

John 15: 9-17 and 13: 34-35