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