Preached at The Plains United Methodist Church on October 16, 2022
Scriptures: Psalm 23, Ezekiel 20:18-31

Our first reading this morning was Psalm 23, and it was a version that I know I wasn’t used to.  When it comes to classic Scriptures, my mind just expects the King James version.  When I hear the NIV, it catches me off guard!  Here’s yet another translation of Psalm 23 that’s worth hearing:

The Great Boss is the one who takes care of my sheep;
I don’t want to own anything.
The Great Boss wants me to lie down in the field.
He wants me to go to the lake.
He makes my good spirit come back.
Even though I walk through something the missionary calls the valley of the shadow of death,
I do not care.  You are with me.
You use a stick and a club to make me comfortable. 
You manufacture a piece of furniture right in front of my eyes while my enemies watch. 
You pour car grease on my head.
My cup has too much water in it and therefore overflows. 
Goodness and kindness will walk single file behind me all of my life. 
And I will live in the Hut of the great boss until I die and am forgotten by my tribe.

(Richards and O’Brien, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, 91)

This psalm was translated by missionaries from Hebrew into the language of the Khmus tribe of Laos and then to English.  It’s always fun to find something that’s been through several translations because certain ideas inevitably get lost in the process. You get to see the limitations of language and just how hard it is to capture the essence of something in a tongue that might not might not even have words for certain things.  I mean, just look at verse five!  “You manufacture a piece of furniture right in front of my eyes.  You pour car grease on my head.” God preparing a table in the presence of our enemies also becomes a more literal task than we usually assume.  And I’m guessing olive oil isn’t common in that region, so instead of that, we end up with car grease on our heads.  We also have the confusion in verse four where it reads, “Even though I walk through something the missionary calls ‘the valley of the shadow of death.’” They were so confused by what that missionary was trying to talk about that they just gave up on translating the idea entirely. “‘Even though I walk through…’ oh geeze.  I don’t know. Whatever that thing was that the missionary was going on about!  That!”  But the part I really want to hone in on is the last line “and I will live in the hut of the Great Boss until I die and am forgotten by my tribe.” That’s a lot grimmer than what it is in English, “I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” That’s distinctly more positive than being forgotten.  Why is it so negative?

One of the biggest reasons for that negative tone is the Khmus tribe’s culture.  They live in a collectivist culture.  People in collectivist cultures tend to think of themselves as one piece of a larger cohesive social unit.  When they’re asked to describe themselves, they tend to explain the social relationships that they play a part in: “I’m a father,” “I’m a nurse,” “I’m a sister.”  Their self-identity is built on the relationships that they participate in and the obligations they have towards others.  That’s a very different outlook from us people in individualist cultures.  Individualist cultures tend to focus on how each individual is unique and has their own goals and purpose.  If we were asked to describe ourselves, our descriptors would probably point out the ways that we’re different from the people around us: “I’m smart,” “I’m hard-working,” “I’m strong.”  Our self-identity is wrapped up in the ways they’re unique from other people.  There can be hesitance about the idea of Heaven from people in collectivist cultures.  It sounds like they have to be torn away from the social network that defines who they are.  That’s no good! 

On top of that, the Khmus people think about death in a very different way than your average Westerner.  If you go back to ancient Greece, you can see some of the very early ways that Westerners started to think about death.  In Greek mythology, when you died, you had to pay the boatman, Charon, so that you could cross the river Styx and go on to the land of the dead.  You went from here to there.  We’re hardwired to be comfortable with the idea that death is going from here to there.  In Khmus culture, there’s no sense that death involves going anywhere.  When you die, nobody can see you, but you’re still there with your people.  Going somewhere after you die seems bizarre to them.  Between the collectivist urge to find identity in relationships and the sense that leaving after death is odd, you end up with a disappointing end to a classic psalm.

That being said, it is interesting that missionaries have found that there are parts of Scripture that resonate with them that we have trouble with.  For example, Revelation 21 says that God will recreate everything in the end.  He’ll make a new Heaven and a new Earth, and that new Earth is where all of his people will go.  We don’t just stay in Heaven forever!  We go to a perfect, sinless, recreated Earth.  Then and only then will everything finally be as God would have it.  I don’t know how many times I’ve told this to churchgoers and they’ve looked at me like I’m crazy.  To the average Westerner, death is going from here to there.  That just makes sense.  You don’t go from here to there and then back to a new form of here again.  That’s counterintuitive!  But the Khmus people heard about this passage and were incredibly excited.  Finally, something that made some sense!  You get to come back to a new Earth in the long term.  That was a reasonable sort of plan in their eyes.

Cultures make such a difference in the way we perceive the world.  They’re these collections of ancestral ideas that are tweaked and passed down time and time again.  They’re critical to understanding the world.  All too often, in modern Western culture, there’s this temptation to see someone’s culture as little more than window dressing.  It determines whether you wear a sari or a dress.  It determines whether you celebrate Christmas or Kwanza.  Things like that.  Underneath our clothes and our celebrations, it’s assumed that we’re all decent secular citizens that broadly share the same ideas.  Culture appears to be little more than some seasoning for our otherwise flavorless lives.  But it is so much more than that. 

When we reduce culture to window dressing, we fail to capture the essence of it.  Cultures pass on more than clothes; they pass on ideas.  Tremendously good ideas and tremendously bad ones can both be passed on!  The ancient Spartans would kill children with any deformities.  Why?  Because they needed to be a strong, warrior society.  To them, that was a good idea.  It was a natural idea.  But what seems logical to them seems horrifying to us!  The Aztecs believed in human sacrifice.  If things weren’t going so well, they assumed that sacrificing someone might perk things up.  To us?  Horrifying.  To them?  Logical.  Some may resist calling this culture.  No, this is a matter of morality!  But consider that in Japan only 200 years ago, cultural tradition dictated that someone who made a big, humiliating mistake ought to kill themselves.  That showed that they had some shred of honor left in them.  To live after your mistake?  That was shameful.  To modern Westerners, that seems nightmarish!  If you make a mistake, even a horrible one, you’re expected to build back!  It happens to everybody.  You hear folk wisdom about how it’s not the number of times you get knocked down that matters; it’s the number of times you get back up.  To a 17th century samurai, that would have been the height of cowardice.  Culture is not just window dressing.  It changes our perception of the world itself. It affects what ideas we accept as good ideas, and what ideas we’re wary of.

Now, why do I keep talking about culture?  Because I think we need to address our own culture.  A few weeks back, I was having a conversation with some of the people over in the contemporary service.  Some of the band members were around my age (30-something), and we were just shocked at how much things have changed in the religious sphere since we were young.  It hasn’t even been that long!  We’re not that old!  But it’s changed so much.  When we were young, being Christian was pretty normal.  It’s what you did.  Of course we went to church.  That was pretty reasonable.  Most people did.  You could wear a “What Would Jesus Do” wristband and that was considered reasonably cool.  You watched VeggieTales because of course you watched Veggie Tales.  VeggieTales was awesome!  We couldn’t imagine any of that being popular today.

Christianity is no longer seen as something mainstream.  It’s seen as something odd. Something weird.  Something that’s hard to swallow.  And you can see that in the statistics. Someone that goes into undergrad as a confessing Christian has lower than a 30 percent chance of remaining a Christian over the next four years.  Depending on the poll, you can get as low as 18%.  30% is the high.  I spoke with some people in campus ministry at Ohio University this past week and they confirmed that it was incredibly tough to work in campus ministry.  They said that God’s Not Dead was a little too cheesy to be a reasonable comparison, but the natural cultural environment on a campus made Christianity really hard to practice for the average student.

College campuses aren’t the only place we can turn to for sobering statistics.  If we look at our own denomination, the United Methodist Church lost a net total of 180,000 active members from their lists last year.  The year before that, they lost 220,000 total active members.  We’re only a few million big!  We can’t take losses like this year after year, but people are dying faster than we can make new disciples.

A lot of us may be initially disheartened by these statistics, but we need to fight that reaction. I remember talking to a friend from England.  England is much further along in the process of secularization in the United States.  The number of confessing Christians there is even lower than the number here, and he was wrestling with that.  I got to hear one of his very early sermons and, man, it was just depressing.  His through line was, “The church is dying, and there’s nothing we can do.” He said that throughout the sermon, time and time and time again.  That was the line he ended on!   I left church that morning thinking, well shoot, how am I supposed to go enjoy brunch after that?  Right?  That’s grim!  I’m not one who believes that  sermons have an obligation to be peppy, but the gloom and doom approach is the wrong approach.  We shouldn’t count all of this as some sort of grand failure.  There’s more than that in front of us: there’s opportunity.  We have the opportunity to serve God at a historic moment!  We get to witness to a Western culture that has forgotten the most important thing there is.  That is new ground!  There have always been missionaries called to share the Gospel in challenging places, but the post-Christian West is still brand new on the world stage, and we’re the first ones called to spread the Gospel here.

Just look at how new this whole thing is!  There was obviously a time in Western nations for initial conversions.  We wouldn’t be here without those.  There were also times where individual people and even whole people groups were called back to the faith, but that’s just the thing!  They were called back to faith.  That cultural Christianity from the initial conversion was still strong in their minds.  People didn’t have to argue about whether or not Christianity was good or explain what its most basic premises were.  That was obvious!  The average citizen literally learned in schools that the goal of life was to love God and to glorify him forever.  That was a logical fact that even a child could tell you!  Evangelization wasn’t built on education or argument; it was built on convicting people to live out what they already knew was true.  That’s the history of Methodism.  How did Methodism get so big?  Because when America was a young nation, Methodist pastors had maximum enthusiasm, minimal educational requirements, and were willing to travel.  Baptists were the same way.  Those groups could get new pastors to frontier regions really quickly to convict people with a classic evangelistic sell: “You should be worshiping the God you know exists and live a life that’s pleasing to him.”  That’s why there are so many Methodist and Baptist churches across the United States.  They did so well because they were experts at reaching people that were already Christians that lived beyond the reach of established churches.  It doesn’t work like that anymore. We are now missionaries in a culture the likes of which we’ve never seen.  If we want to share the word of God with people, we can’t call them back to the faith they already know.  Culturally, it’s no longer dominant.  It doesn’t seem true or intuitive.  A lot of people may not even fully understand what it is!  We have to change the way we think about outreach if we want to be effective.

I’m sure some of you are thinking to yourselves, “Hold on now, pastor, you’re saying we have to change the way that we go about doing things if we want to reach people with the word of God?  Not so!  I’ve seen some of the big churches around here and I know there’s three timeless things you need to grow a church: better preaching, better music, programs for families.  Do those three things your church will grow.  That’s what the big churches do!  If we do those three things, that’ll work.  Simple as that.”

 To that I respond: you’re not completely wrong.  You can do that… for now.  It kind of works.  Some large area churches do use that methodology.  They’re primarily reaching out to people that are already interested; people that I will call “cultural conservatives.” Of course, that doesn’t necessarily correspond to political conservatism.  That’s neither here nor there. In this instance, cultural conservatives are people that just like things from the past.  They might live in an area where they grew up, just because their family has roots there.  They might take up certain hobbies or historic styles of dress that aren’t particularly trendy anymore.  They might even explore Christianity!  And why?  Because they just have a certain affinity with the past. They enjoy things that connect them with their roots.  In the case of religion, this pull to the past is a massive blessing for them.  In following their inclination, they may stumble onto the beauty of the Gospel  But not everyone is going to do that.  Not everyone is a cultural conservative.  A lot of people will be looking at what is popular, rather than looking at things that have faded from popular imagination.  They’re not naturally interested in Christianity.  That’s their grandparents’ religion!  They went to a few services at Christmas to make ‘ol grandma happy, but it wasn’t trendy.  They think they know Christianity enough from cultural osmosis that it’s safe to dismiss it  They’d prefer engaging with something that has more of a contemporary buzz around it.

If we only reach out to people who are already interested, the group we’re reaching is going to get smaller and smaller.  Maybe we’ll get some cultural conservatives to join us, but will their children also be cultural conservatives?  What about their children’s children?  You get diminishing returns over time.  God doesn’t want us to just reach out to people that are easy to talk to.  We have to reach people beyond the reach of our safe, cultural boundaries!

We are people at the dawn of a new era.  We have the privilege of sharing the good news of Jesus with people who think they know it when they don’t. And the best part is God hasn’t demanded that we just keep grinding away with the same programs, the same slogans, and the same outreach opportunities year after year after year.  He did not tell his church we had already achieved the ideal final form and we’re obligated to keep it for all time.  He said something more exciting than that!  He said, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation,” (Mk 16:15).  And what is that good news?  Christ died so that we could live. This is a life-altering truth, and we have the opportunity to take that to people.  That’s exciting.  It’s not all gloom and doom.  We’ve got something amazing to share.

I know that some people are intimidated about sharing their faith.  It’s been built up as this big, frightening, socially-awkward thing, and it shouldn’t be any of that.  I think C.S Lewis gives a helpful corrective for that fear of evangelism.  He asks, what do you do when you find a really good restaurant?  You tell people about it!  What about if you find a scenic vista?  You tell people about it!  That’s how we’re built!  When we find something that’s good, we want to share it.  And what greater good is there than the truth at the center of all things?  We should naturally want to reach out! 

That’s a passion that you have shared with me since I arrived at this church.  You’ve told me that you want more people in this church.  If you want to do that, you have to be missionaries in this new era.  You have to learn how to reach out in spite of a resistant culture.  Not every missionary shares our unique challenges!  There are some places where Christianity is growing rapidly, like Asia and Africa.  North America and Europe?  Not so much.  This place is a challenge.  If we want to reach out well, we have to learn the culture.  That’s what missionaries do!  That’s not the totality of evangelism, of course. You can’t deal with people in abstract.  The heart of it is always personal relationships, but how can you communicate well in those relationships?  By knowing a person’s culture.  You need to know what ideas will excite them, what they’ll freak out about, and what will likely feel natural to them.  That’s not to say you tailor the gospel to suit them.  Of course not.  You do, however, need to know how to share the truth compellingly with the person you want to share it with.

The advantages of a cultural study extend beyond evangelism.  Even if that were the only benefit, it would be worth doing, but there’s more than that.  As we study our culture for the sake of others, we learn about ways in which it’s impacted our vision of God.  Some of the things that we assume are godly are not in alignment with God’s will!  When we sit down and see how the philosophies of the day have impacted us, we get to learn about our own blind spots and learn how we can follow God better.  This second Scripture shows the Israelites experiencing this second benefit.  God is showing them the ways that they have been blinded because of cultural norms that seemed intuitive, but were wrong.  It starts in Ezekial chapter 20 verse 18:

I said to their children in the wilderness, “Do not follow the statutes of your parents or keep their laws or defile yourselves with their idols. I am the Lord your God; follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

From the beginning of this passage, God is reminding the Israelites that he’s given them something so precious: the truth.  It’s not just an abstract, theoretical truth.  It’s a whole way of being.  He’s given that truth to them to keep, but repeatedly they’ve walked away from it to take on the accepted norms of the day.  As we continue on, we’ll see three different disobedient cultural practices that the Israelites always seem to come back around to.  They do these things throughout the Old Testament.  When you read the prophetic books or make your way through Kings or Chronicles, you’re sure to come across these three sooner or later.  The Israelites can’t seem to leave them alone!  They naturally assume these are reasonable practices, even though they’re repeatedly warned against them.  

First, we have the high places.  God asks them in verse 29, “What is this high place you go to?”  He didn’t want them revering these particular places!  But they sure seem to think he does!  Now, a high place is not necessarily literally high up off the ground.  It might be!  Verse 28 reads that any high hills or leafy trees were tempting for the Israelites to make a big deal out of, but throughout the whole of Scripture, not all of them are so elevated in a literal sense.  High places are often metaphorically high up.  These are places of all types that people saw and thought, “That’s close to Heaven!  God would like it if I worshiped there.”  Now, what makes them think that certain places are holier than others?  Associations with past Gods that they worshiped.  Can you imagine how insulting that is for God?  Imagine if you told your spouse that for your anniversary, you were going to a special spot: the place where you first kissed.  They get all excited and you drive them out there that evening and as you pull up they tell you… it’s the wrong place.  You never kissed them there!  That was some other person!  But rather than back down, you double down!  If it was good enough for someone else, it ought to be good enough for them!  You park the car and try to keep celebrating the anniversary.  How do you think that would go over?  They want to worship God in a place that was special… to some other god!  It’s insulting!

But it’s worse than that.  These other gods were not like God.  They demanded different ways of worshiping, and these ways were profane.  They wanted human sacrifice, ritual prostitution, and other such things at their high places.  The true God doesn’t want anything to do with that!  He hates things like that!  He has no historically special relationship with these high places and he knows the associations they have with them are often impure, so he repeatedly tells them to stay away from them.  But whenever the Israelites get the chance, they think to themselves, “You know what God would really like?  The high places!  He’d love those!  He says he doesn’t, but someone must have misinterpreted him.  We’ve had such good memories in those places!  Good enough for other gods, good enough for this one.  Let’s go worship there!”  Not good.

You also see idolatry mentioned several times.  Verse 24 says that “their eyes lusted after their parents’ idols.”  The Israelites were very physical people.  They liked things that they could see and touch.  That made them feel more real.  Now, did they always worship the idol directly?  Not always.  Sometimes they were stand-ins for the god in question.  People thought that if they worshiped the image, they could grow closer to the god in whose image that idol was created.  God always commanded people not to do this!  If they were worshiping the idol in and of itself, they were worshiping something that was not real.  And if they were worshiping a God beyond the idol… that was still not real!  God is infinitely bigger than anything our minds can come up with.  When an idol is created, it’s always something less than the real thing.  Something more limited.  When you really think about it, the process of creating an idol for God is blasphemous.  It fundamentally reverses the order of creation.  God created us in his image.  When we make an idol of him, we turn around and try to make him in our image.  God wants nothing to do with the shallowness of our idols and tells us to avoid them.  But what did the Isralites do?  They get to thinking, “You know what God would like?  Some idols.  That’s the sort of thing gods like! It’s just a fact.  Everyone knows it!”  But God doesn’t actually like them.

Now we have what may be the most dramatic instance of disobedience in the Bible: child sacrifice.  Verse 31 reads, “When you offer your gifts—the sacrifice of your children in the fire—you continue to defile yourselves with all your idols to this day.”  Child sacrifice would have been something that the rival god Molech would have enjoyed.  Some of the groups around the Israelites worshiped Molech.  They would burn up their child, literally, in fire.  That was a good thing in the eyes of Molech.  That’s how you pleased him.  And the Israelites thought, child sacrifice?  I bet God would like that.”  Now, God has explicitly said not to do that.  There is a sacrifice necessary to make things right, but he will make it himself.  He will be the ultimate sacrifice on our behalf.  Our sacrifices are not good.  God doesn’t want people to sacrifice their children.  But the Israelites ignore God and do what is right in their own eyes.

You can see repeatedly that the Israelites are influenced by the trends of the people around them.  The tribes in their region lead them to make choices that are bad!  That fundamentally warp their view of who God is so far that God says, “That’s that’s not even me anymore!  You’re doing something horrible!  Stop!”

Taking the time to think about the culture that we’re in is not just for the sake of people outside the Church.  It’s for us!  When we critique culture, it’s not something we get to do at a distance.  It’s not us looking out at the outside world and seeing how they think.  It’s uncovering some of the assumptions we make too.  Culture is something we live and breathe.  We are inevitably affected by anything that we can point out and consider.  So as we look through this series, we’re not just seeing things that can help us be good missionaries in this new post-modern era.  We’ll learn things that can help us know God better and worship him rightly.  Remember, his thoughts are not our thoughts, and his ways are not our ways.

If we want to understand the nuances of God, our neighbor, and ourselves, this is the task we have before us.  In the coming weeks, we’ll look piece by piece at our postmodern Western culture.  How was it shaped?  What are the assumptions that it presses on us?  In what ways does it help us, and in what ways does it challenge us?  And in spite of its challenges, how can we be effective at making disciples?  I hope that each of us gets the opportunity to think about the way we can reach others with this precious truth we’ve been gifted with, and that we ourselves grow to recognize that truth even more perfectly.  Amen.