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

How Much Is It Going to Cost Me? (Rejoicing in God’s Justice)

Do you ever feel frustrated with the problems around us? Think of the way that Churchill has been cut off from the rest of Manitoba until the railway was finally repaired. For over a year, the community had no rail or other land link to the rest of the world, while the other stakeholders in the railroad argued over who should pay for repairs to the rail line. How unfair! How unjust – that the residents of Churchill should suffer because the owners of the rail line prioritize their own profits over the people they should be serving.

Perhaps you have experienced unfair family dynamics. Sometimes, when a beloved older member of the family dies, the younger relatives fall out over … who knows what? Behind the falling out, the breaking of relationships, there lies a perceived injustice. Someone has acted unfairly, and someone else feels the injustice deeply. My Dad experienced this dynamic when he lost his relationship with his sister for some years, following my grandfather’s death and the execution of the estate. They reconciled, but not everyone does.

Perception of injustice is a powerful force. We respond to many problems around us with a yawn, but when we see someone treated unfairly, when we see a manifest injustice, we often respond with outrage. One notes this dynamic in the way that companies respond to customer complaints. Consider the recent CBC headline: “Bell sorry for $788 bill sent to man displaced by Parliament Street apartment fire.” Bell billed the man for their equipment, because he could not return it after the apartment he lived in caught fire. He was not at fault in any way, but Bell only reached out to cancel the bill after CBC broke the story. This happens often: People respond with outrage to perceived injustice, and then the offender tries to make things right.

Why is this? Not just why do people respond with outrage – the answer to that is, I think, that a fundamental sense of fairness and decency is a deeply human trait, placed there by God. But why does the company wait until everyone knows about it to (as we say) “do the right thing”? I suspect that there are many reasons, not least among them is the awareness that not every customer who claims they have been wronged speaks the truth. That the customer is not always right! I think that a deeper reason (this is an unresearched hunch) is that acting justly may cost us. We wonder, “How much is this rail line going to cost me, the owner? How much is covering this customer’s loss to cost me?” In fact, the move towards justice is also itself the result of a cost-benefit analysis. For example, Stella’s Restaurants are revamping their corporate culture to become more just. Why? Because failing to do so will cost them more than doing so.

What about God’s justice? Do we struggle in the same way with issues of peace and justice around the world? Do we shy away from right actions, because we recognize they are going to cost us? Perhaps so, but our response should not just be to suck it up and do the right thing. Rather our response to our failures should be to seek God’s face and to be renewed by God’s Spirit within us. True justice flows out from the heart of God.  With these thoughts in mind we turn to Zephaniah 3 and to Luke 3.

Zephaniah 3: 14 to 20

Zephaniah was probably an early contemporary of Jeremiah. He sounds a lot like Isaiah and may have prophesied in the Southern Kingdom of Judah during the reign of Josiah. There still seemed to be hope that Judah would repent and follow God, a hope that had faded by the end of Jeremiah’s life. Listen again to the basic thoughts in the text.

•  In verse 14, the prophet calls on Israel to celebrate and rejoice.
• Verse 15 gives the reason for their joy – their punishment is over; God is with them, and nothing bad will happen to them.
• Then verse 16 signals that the anticipated freedom and joy has a decidedly future shape to it. The phrase “in that day” lets us know that the fulfillment of this word of hope belongs to “the day of the Lord”, the end of all things. In Christian thinking, we connect this day of the Lord with the second coming of Christ.
• Verse 17 connects their salvation with the Warrior God who delivers them from their enemies. We can hear echoes of Moses’ song after the crossing of the Sea, “Yahweh is a Warrior! Yahweh is his name!”
• God’s judgment is now ended, and therefore Israel’s grief and mourning is also ended. This linkage suggests that at least some of the misfortune in their lives is the consequence of their rebellion. Applied to ourselves, this suggests two points: 1) Our troubles do not necessarily come directly from our rebellion – sometimes illness or job loss or other misfortune comes as part of life in a fallen world. 2) Sometimes our troubles are our own fault. As the proverb puts it, “Sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind” (from Hosea 8:7). We are responsible for the choices we make in life – good and bad.
• The reference to festivals suggests that a basic problem in the lives of the Israelites was connected to religious festivals. They worshipped God, and they also observed festivals and sacrifices to the gods of the land in which they lived (Baal, Asherah, and so on). Divided loyalties bring God’s judgment, and God’s judgment brings God’s grace.
• The last two verses remind us that final judgment and grace come “at that time”, when God inaugurates God’s reign in power and great glory. Zephaniah states that the Israelites are to live in their own time by the justice and peace of God that comes at the end of all things. God will come at the End, and God wants us to live now in light of the End.

As we hear the prophet today, I remind you of this basic truth: God will restore all things at the End, when Jesus returns, and God gives both judgment and grace as we show God’s justice and mercy in our lives, in anticipation of Christ’s Return.

Luke 3: 7 to 18.

The Gospel reading comes from the ministry of John the Baptist, as he preached in the dry desert-like countryside through which the Jordan River flowed. People came out from Jerusalem to hear and see this remarkable preacher; he seemed to them like one of the old prophets come to life. John gave a baptism of repentance to those who repented, and more and more came to him.

In the verses we read, he asks the people who came to him, “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” He calls them a “brood of vipers”, which suggests that for many of them he was sceptical of their repentance. He adds, confirming this impression – “Produce fruits in keeping with repentance.”

The people recognize their shallowness and ask what they should do. John replies, with words that sound a lot like Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount:

• Tax collectors: “Don’t collect any more than you are required to.”
• Soldiers: “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely – be content with your pay.
• If we knew what he said to each group, we would probably find the same basic theme. Live justly, in whatever you do.

 John continues with words looking ahead to the coming of the Messiah, one who brings the Holy Spirit and who also brings grace and judgment. His description sounds like Zephaniah’s description of the end of all things. In his first coming, Jesus inaugurates the Reign of God, even as we wait for the Second Coming to see the fullness of God’s Reign.

Two other points from John’s preaching: 1) He asks them, “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” This is a curious question, and it suggests that God’s message comes to us through a variety of sources. 2) He reminds them that their Jewish ancestry counts for nothing in God’s Reign. “Do not say, ‘We have Abraham for our father.’” More than one person has thought that the commitments made in their past mean that they don’t have to do anything. John makes it clear that each one there must repent for himself/herself.

The same is true for us. My parents’ commitment to Christ was a good thing and has been good for me. But in the end, it is my own relationship with Christ that matters. My father’s obedience is good; but now God requires my obedience.

Our Sense of Fairness

Bring these two passages back to the question of fairness with which we began. We see that life is unfair, and that bothers us, as it should. We want things to be fair. We want life to be right. We want injustice and corruption to be rooted out and destroyed. What do our passages tell us in light of these deep human desires for justice? Further, what do these passages say to us in the season of Advent, when we remember the theme of justice as we wait for the coming of Christ?

One of the repeated themes of the Advent Season is that we are waiting: Waiting for justice, waiting for light, waiting in hope, waiting for God to come. One of my favourite Advent hymns expresses this waiting for God to come (#175 in the Mennonite Hymnal)):

O Saviour, rend the heavens wide!

Come down, come down with mighty stride.

Unbar the gates, the doors break down;

Unbar the way to heaven’s crown.

The fact that we are waiting means that we know full justice will not come today. Or tomorrow. When we complain that something is unfair, someone will remind us that life isn’t fair. The reminder is good: Life is not fair – neither now nor in Zephaniah’s time nor in the first century. This bit of simple realism can set us free from becoming bitter. We know that life is not fair, even as we work for justice. And we know that God will come and that when God comes, everything will be made right. This is not “pie in the sky by and by”; this is simple reality. Within this awareness this Advent Season, then, I make several simple suggestions for how we act as we wait:

•  Listen to John the Baptist. Our first step towards justice is to repent of our own injustice and live justly. If we want others to act fairly towards us, we must act fairly towards others. “Do the right thing” is a simple rule to live by; it’s also something we rarely do. We recognize that acting justly sometimes means that we are going to pay the price of justice. It’s hard to do the right thing when doing it actually hurts us. That’s why I asked the question in last week’s bulletin: “Living justly – is this going to hurt?” So this simple rule: If you want a just world, live justly, even when doing so hurts you.
• Depend on God for true justice. I can guarantee that, when you enter the political arena and fight for justice, you will lose even when you win. For example, when I was younger, the United States took steps to provide for poor people by building housing projects (nice apartments) for them to live. In the summer of 1969, I worked in some of those housing projects, holding Daily Vacation Bible Schools for the children. It quickly became clear that the political victory of providing housing led to longer-term failure, as the people in the projects had not learned how to care for the apartments. This basic factor – that even political victories lead to failure – has led many activists to give up. Instead, put your trust in God. Keep on working for true justice, but trust God; don’t trust your efforts or any other human efforts.
• Put these two together: Expecting and working for justice in world begins and ends in worshipping God. This brings us back to Advent. We wait for the Messiah. We pray and sing and worship, and we wait. This worship in waiting is the most profound action towards justice that we can take. Live lives of prayer. Live lives of hope. Live lives of anticipation for God’s coming. The old saying runs like this in Latin: Laborare est orare. In English: To work is to pray. [Compare the Benedictines: Ora et laborare (work and pray).]

I have told you in the past about our family’s time in a place of great peace: The Taizé Community in the village of Taizé, near Macon, France. The rhythm of life at Taizé centres on three times of prayer daily – at 8 am just before breakfast, at about noon just before lunch, and at 8 in the evening after supper. Each prayer time includes singing together, the reading of Scripture, sometimes a short word on the Scripture (the shortest homilies I have ever heard!), and then, most importantly, a ten-minute silence. When our family was there, I wondered how we could sit silently for ten minutes. By our last day, ten minutes felt like too short a time! The grounds and conversations were drenched in peace and prayer. It is truly the most peaceful place I have ever been to.

I don’t recommend the theology that the Brothers of Taizé have constructed; there is some good and some bad there. I do recommend their life of prayer, as well as the lifestyle that has grown out of that life of prayer. The Taizé Community is invested in justice ministries around the world. The community was born in Brother Roger’s vision. In the 1940s, he sheltered Jews caught in France during World War Two. Following the war, he sheltered former German prisoners who found themselves trapped in a France that was now hostile against them. Over the years, Brother Roger developed friendships with people like Mother Teresa, supporting the cause of God’s Reign wherever injustice was found.

A scan of the Taizé website reveals a surprising list of justice efforts that have grown out of their life of prayer:

•          Relief and reconciliation in Northern Lebanon and in Syria;
•          Working with war-affected children in Ukraine;
•          Working in Haiti;
•          Assisting refugees in Europe;
•          An eye-clinic in the Congo;
•          Schools in Bangladesh;
•          Caring for the sick in Cambodia;
•          Medicine for Cuba;
•          Humanitarian aid for North Korea;
•          Medical treatment in South Sudan;
•          One million Bibles printed in China;
•          Clean water and milk in Burkina Faso.

Wow! Several hundred brothers gathered together at Taizé have generated all that!

As Mennonites, we have a good track record working for justice. I fear that we do not have as good a record of grounding our work in worship. This Advent, I am reminding us all that “to work is to pray and to pray is to work”. We ground our search for justice in a patient waiting for God to come in. We ground our desire for justice in our desire for God’s Spirit to live among us. What I am describing is a complete re-orientation of our lives around the person of Jesus Christ, whatever that looks like for you:

•          Revival services and altar calls (as were important to me in my youth);
•          Prayer and meditation à la Taizé;
•          Personal devotions in the morning or evening;
•          Praying while driving your car – or your tractor.

We ground our very lives in the presence and worship of God who comes from Heaven in the baby of Bethlehem.

Steinbach Mennonite Church

16 December 2018, Third Sunday in Advent

Texts:

Zephaniah 3: 14-20

¹⁴ Sing, Daughter Zion; shout aloud, Israel! Be glad and rejoice with all your heart, Daughter Jerusalem! ¹⁵ The Lord has taken away your punishment, he has turned back your enemy. The Lord, the King of Israel, is with you; never again will you fear any harm.

¹⁶ On that day they will say to Jerusalem, “Do not fear, Zion; do not let your hands hang limp. ¹⁷ The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing. ¹⁸ I will remove from you all who mourn over the loss of your appointed festivals, which is a burden and reproach for you.

¹⁹ “At that time I will deal with all who oppressed you. I will rescue the lame; I will gather the exiles. I will give them praise and honour in every land where they have suffered shame. ²⁰ “At that time I will gather you; at that time I will bring you home. I will give you honour and praise among all the peoples of the earth when I restore your fortunes before your very eyes,” says the Lord.

Luke 3: 7-18

⁷ John said to the crowds coming out to be baptised by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? ⁸ Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. ⁹ The axe has been laid to the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.”

¹⁰ “What should we do then?” the crowd asked. ¹¹ John answered, “Anyone who has two shirts should share with the one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same.”

¹² Even tax collectors came to be baptised. “Teacher,” they asked, “what should we do?” ¹³ “Don’t collect any more than you are required to,” he told them. ¹⁴ Then some soldiers asked him, “And what should we do?” He replied, “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely – be content with your pay.”

¹⁵ The people were waiting expectantly and were all wondering in their hearts if John might possibly be the Messiah. ¹⁶ John answered them all, “I baptise you with water. But one who is more powerful than I will come, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and fire. ¹⁷ His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing-floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” ¹⁸ And with many other words John exhorted the people and proclaimed the good news to them.

Colonialism Lives! (Part Four)

Parts one, two, and three preceded this conclusion. Here I bring my thoughts together, and the meaning of the title of the series becomes clear.

Part Four

To summarize my argument so far:

Colonialism in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries included the assumption that the values of the Colonials were absolute, and that all subject peoples could and should be judged by them. We rightly rebelled against such totalitarianism and also rejected the idea of absolute values. [I think that these two steps moved in tandem, but I am not arguing that case here. I welcome the insights of those who can combine the field of social change with the field of philosophy and tell me if I am right or not – and to what extent.]

This relativism works when we apply it to the use of language. We must take the meanings of the speaker and hearer into account in order to communicate successfully. Such relativism does not work when we apply it to values, because we tend to elevate our own values to an absolute standard for all people. This is the movement that I have been describing with the image of leaving by the front door and re-entering by the back door. [I did not make the case for this elevation, except by implying it in the example of “Baby, it’s cold outside”.]

The song banned by the CBC serves as a case study of this failure. At one level, it is a simple miscommunication. It is caused by hearing the lyrics as if they were written in 2018, with the meanings that would apply had it been written today. At one level, it is as trivial as someone imposing the meaning of homosexuality on someone 100 years ago referring to a gay time. If all that happened was that people misunderstood the song, I would not have written this column. It is the further colonial move of imposing our values that leads to these reflections.

The odd thing is that postmodernism seeks to set us free from such impositions of one group's values on another group, but it has actually served to force the values of the politically strongest group on the whole of society. Colonialism returns under the guise of doing away with colonialism.

I will not analyze this problem further here, but rather I make a few suggestions of what I would like to see (whether or not it ever happens).

1. I believe in absolute values. I suggest that the best way to establish what they are is to look for the values that cultures and religions in general have accepted. [What C.S. Lewis called the Tao, in his essay The Abolition of Man.] TheJosephson Institute of Ethics has worked at this kind of project for many years now.

2. Such a project will not validate any one culture. Our own society’s conviction that individual rights trump all other rights will not make the cut. A society such as China’s conviction that the right of the collective trumps individual rights will not make the cut. The bedrock shared values of societies in general – what we can call the Dao (to use a modern form of Tao) – is more basic than the specific forms people use to construct their own societies. [I add here that my own understanding of these absolute values relies also on reading and interpreting the Christian Scriptures. I do not make the search for Dao rely on any one religion, but acknowledge where I stand among the religions of the world.]

3. A general relativism that looks for what things mean in context is generally good. Making absolute values too broad is a quick road to totalitarianism. Chinese collectivism and Canadian individualism can both express the general values of the Dao.

4. When we condemn the words or actions of another person quickly, we are likely to have taken a colonial-imperialistic action. The problem with the conversation around “Baby it’s cold” is not the questions it raises – those questions and concerns lead to interesting and fruitful learning. The problem is rather the way that some people shut down both the song and conversation about the song by appealing to “Me Too” and date rape. Both issues are serious issues, and they deserve better treatment than restricting DJs from playing a 1940s song about sex.

5. Rather than condemning quickly – whether the conversation is about transgender rights, or Me Too, or missionaries in Africa, or Black Lives Matter, or any other of our current issues – our first step should always be to understand. There is a strong likelihood that when we dislike the other person’s statement (and therefore begin to dislike the person as well), we have not yet really understood the other. Miscommunication is amazingly easy, and imposing our values based on that misunderstanding is one way that colonial lives today.

In the above comments, when I refer to “we”, I mean all of us. We – all of us – engage in this kind of behaviour, and the winner gets to be the biggest colonialist. Which means that the winner loses along with all the rest of us.

Colonialism Lives! (Part Three)

Part One recounted my own beginnings in the colonial era and wander into the present). See part one here.

Part Two noted how miscommunication happens between cultures quite regularly. See part two here.

The problem, I argue, is that we carry the necessary relativism that applies to language over into values at the level of our stated philosophy, but then act on the basis of a new absolutism in practice.

Part Three

I have been considering these reflections for many years. A recent controversy sparked me to put these brief reflections in writing.

This past week CBC announced that it would not include “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” in its Christmas play list, following the lead of a number of other radio stations. “Baby” is a call and response song, in which the woman sings and the man responds. Here are the lyrics, with man’s voice in parentheses:

I really can’t stay (but baby, it’s cold outside)

I’ve got to go away (but baby, it’s cold outside)

This evening has been (been hoping that you’d drop in)

So very nice (I’ll hold your hands, they’re just like ice)

My mother will start to worry (beautiful what’s your hurry?)

My father will be pacing the floor (listen to the fireplace roar)

So really I’d better scurry (beautiful please don’t hurry)

But maybe just a half a drink more (put some records on while I pour)

The neighbors might think (baby, it’s bad out there)

Say what’s in this drink? (no cabs to be had out there)

I wish I knew how (your eyes are like starlight now)

To break this spell (I’ll take your hat, your hair looks swell)

I ought to say, no, no, no sir (mind if I move in closer?)

At least…

Heard today, the lyrics are problematic in several ways. I highlight two:

1) She said “No”. No means No. In the era of “Me too”, the man’s voice is asking for trouble.

2) “What’s in this drink?” sounds creepy in the aftermath of so many date rape situations.

A bit of internet surfing, however, turns up women’s voices, warning us that in banning the song we may have overstepped the bounds of reason. They point out that she appears to have surprised him by dropping in on him in his apartment. They observe that her protests sound a bit like someone covering themselves from “slut shaming”, even as she makes it clear that she is as willing as he is. As one column [not by a woman writer, at least I don't think so] put it, “These legends of song skillfully and melodically wrung such laughs out of the song’s doth-protest-too-much dance of foreplay that it was surely clear even to a 1940s listener that these two characters were about to have a long night of fireplace-hot and — yes! — deeply consensual sex.” (From Variety)

The problematic line “What’s in this drink?” turns out to be a common line people used when getting ready to do something they weren’t supposed to do. (Although I heard another explanation: that women were often served alcohol-free alcohol and might protest at what is left out of the drink.)

Slut-shaming is bad, and I do not advocate consensual sex outside of a lifelong committed relationship. Those values, however, speak against a great deal of popular music, both from the last century and from our own time. Not to mention much-loved madrigal music from Elizabethan England: “Now is the month of maying, when merry lads are playing ….”

Where did the instant condemnation come from, leading CBC to ban the song from its playlist? I suggest that we have fallen into a habit of judging others by our standards – and, fatally, assuming that our standards are absolute. Colonialism and Imperialism redux. We expelled them through the front door, and they have returned through the back.

[To be concluded.]
Part Four brings a preliminary conclusion to these musings.

Colonialism Lives! (Part Two)

Read Part One (in which I recall my own beginnings in the colonial era and wander into the present) Here.

The rejection of absolutes, then, helped enable the setting aside of authorities and colonial structures. The divine right of kings from an earlier stage in English political history was replaced by the power of nobles, which in turn gave way to a broader democracy, elevating the right of individuals to decide for themselves what is right and what is wrong. [I note here that I am positing a link between a political movement and a philosophical position. I invite those who know these fields better than I to evaluate that link, if it indeed exists.]

I take this broader political movement to be mostly good. Totalitarianism is, I believe, evil (at least on the stage of human relations). But I take the accompanying (and perhaps enabling) philosophical movement to be unsustainable. It opens the front door for us to expel the tyrant, and then opens the back door for us to put on the tyrant’s mask and re-enter the room.

To make my case, I consider the field of communications. We know that communication between people requires a speaker, a medium, and a hearer. [Of course, there are other forms of communication than speaking, but I must narrow the field to describe what I see happening.] Many problems in communication come from the communicator having one meaning in mind when he/she speaks, while the hearer has a different understanding of the same symbols.

We recognize such miscommunication when people speak from two different cultural perspectives. In colonial Rhodesia, one can see a situation in which an Ndebele worker might ask his European (English) boss for time off to go to a funeral, “because my father has died.” The employer gives the worker leave to go to the funeral. Two years later, the same thing happens again. The employer may assume that he misunderstood the last time, but he is surprised. When the worker asks for time off to go to his father’s funeral for a third time, the employer assumes that the worker has been lying.

Consider the meaning of father in Ndebele and English culture. Among the Ndebele, one uses the term “father” for one’s biological father and his brothers. In English usage, we use “father” and “uncles” to describe the same group of people. Because the Ndebele learned that the English colonialists did not understand Ndebele usage, they accommodated to our intellectual weakness and learned to say, “My father died” and then “my Uncle died”. But there is in the original scenario no necessary intent to deceive. The disjunction between Ndebele culture and English culture was responsible for the original miscommunication.

As evidence that my scenario above is not fanciful, I recall a conversation in 1992. I had asked an Ndebele elder in the church about the history of the Brethren in Christ Church in Bulawayo, my home town. He said, “Well, when your father Arthur was Bishop, we began the work there. Then when your father David was Bishop, we added more new churches.” He knew well enough that Arthur is my Uncle and David my father, but he used traditional categories – which would have confused me if I had not known what he meant.

Another simple example – quite trivial. When we read that someone in the 1920s “had a gay old time”, we do not assume homosexuality. Rather we recognize that language changes, and that “gay” has taken on a meaning today it did not have in earlier times.

Language is one obvious place in which meaning is relative. Relativism is a good doctrine in linguistics. Meaning is contextual – created within the time and place and community in which the text was created and interpreted within the time and place and community of the hearer. The problem begins when we assume that this same relativism works in relation to values.

[To be continued]

Colonialism Lives! (Part One)

The title is not quite fair. I want to discuss colonialism only tangentially, but the headline, “Colonialism Lives” is a fair one. My thesis is simple: Like almost everyone before us, we measure other people and cultures throughout space and time by our own values and on our own terms, however unfair that evaluation is, and we would understand our world better and that each other more rightly if we would stop doing so.

I understand Colonialism as a political construct in which technologically stronger societies occupy technologically weaker societies and force the latter to live on the former’s terms. I grew up in a British Colony, Southern Rhodesia as it was then called. I was born in its near neighbour, Northern Rhodesia. Today these countries are Zambia and Zimbabwe. They run their own affairs, free of the colonial yoke, but they are not free of their colonial past. One can observe the negative results of colonization in modern Zambia and Zimbabwe in a variety of ways.

We live in a post-colonial age. I am not sure all the implications of this statement. I take it to be a reversal of the Euro-centric view of the world common to the North American academy of my youth. In my high school days, we were taught history as a construct of White European society, and especially a construct of White men. Today, we view history more fully, seeking perspectives from a variety of ethnic and political sources, and looking again at the old stories to discern women’s voices as well as other voices that were ignored in the old tellings of those stories.

I remember the way that the stories of the founding of Rhodesia were told in my youth. Because I am a White male, I heard stories about how “Europeans” and especially European men settled Rhodesia in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The stories assumed that European society – which meant especially English society – was the pinnacle of progress within the evolutionary scheme. It was taken for granted that Black Zimbabweans (whom we called “Africans”) would want to become like us. Those White politicians of the 1950s who thought that Africans could join White society were seen as liberal, but of course their liberalism still assumed that White European Men should run the whole show.

The story of how the colonial period came to an end is a long story, which we can read in many other places. I note just one small piece of what helped to bring it to an end. The biggest piece, of course, was the fact that Black Zimbabweans knew that their country needed to be liberated from White dominance. Others have told that story at length, throughout the countries of what was British Africa.[1]

The smaller piece I refer to is the rise of what we call postmodernism, and especially the way that modernism and postmodernism combined to undermine belief in absolutes.[2] When I was a university student, the rejection of absolutes was in full flow. I went to a Christian College (Messiah College), which stood against that flow, but we all lived fully in the events of the 1960s, when the Baby Boomers sought to put the era of wars behind and to usher in the Age of Aquarius.

We sang songs like “All you need is love”. We marched against authority figures, feeling that they were destroying the earth. We preached an ethics of relativity, in which the seeking self stood above the fray of absolute values and absolute authorities, synonyms in our mind with totalitarianism. [All of this is, of course, potted history – my own impressions of living through that time – and I hope that I am not misrepresenting the picture too much.]

In the early days of the 1960s, John Kennedy could say, in his inaugural address, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” There was a great deal of idealism in our rebellion, and we responded – in the Peace Corps, for example. But there was also a great deal of simple self-centeredness in our rebellion. In the 1970s and 1980s, the call for love gave way to getting married (and divorced), pursuing careers, raising our own children, and generally living out the implications of having rejected absolute values.

Jean Twenge has described the results in Generation Me. Her concern is less with my note of absolute and relative values and more with the loss of other-centeredness in a self-centered age. My contention, however, is that, by abandoning absolutes in our worldviews, we have escorted imperialism and colonialism out the front door and they have sneaked again by the back door.

[To be continued]

[1] See the work of people like Eliakim Sibanda writing on the history of ZAPU, or Wendy Urban-Mead on the history of the BIC in Zimbabwe, or the writings more generally of Terence Ranger (as a historian of Zimbabwe) and of John and Jean Comaroff (social historians, setting missionary work in southern Africa in its colonial setting). I assume that the reader can google these sources and do not give further information here.

[2] There are many sources for understanding modernism and postmodernism. Within my own discipline, I can recommend Paul Hiebert in Transforming Worldviews.