Transcription
Hello. I want to talk with you, too, a little bit today about the wild, wonderful world of culture. It's amazing when people decide to maybe serve the Lord and cross a cultural barrier in their hometown, or or campus, or maybe, maybe across the whole planet. It's amazing how much work we do to get our luggage ready and ourself ready and our shots and our, our, you know, all of our money and our little cameras and things, but how little work we do to understand the culture where we're going. And sometimes, even when we're there, how little we've noticed of what's going on around us. That's why I want to talk about today, and it's quite biblical.
Psalm 96:3 says, "Declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all peoples." We're instructed to do that, and the Word of God, to declare his glory to different cultures and peoples. And you can't communicate if you're not thinking about the understandings of the other people. It really just doesn't work. God has created this hunger in people all around the world. Psalm 66 says, "Make a joyful noise to God, all the earth; seeing the glory of his name, give to him glorious praise." It's funny, again, sometimes when we say, "Sing that make a joyful noise to the God all of you earth," we just put in the name of our town or state, and that's the whole the earth to us. Actually, all the earth means all the earth: the places that know God, places that don't know a little bit about God, the places that know nothing about God. All the earth, make a joyful song to the Lord, it says, and it keeps on going. It tells that these people sing the glory of his name, give him glorious praise, say to God how awesome are your deeds. How are the people of the earth going to know that if we haven't communicated who God is to them? It doesn't come pre-packaged—it isn't get downloaded on the web. This somehow has to be communicated by guys and girls, men and women who will share who God is with others. And you have to think about those people when you're doing that. Finally, it says, "All the earth worships you; they sing praises to you; they sing praises to your name." And that's what we're hoping for; that's what we're aiming for. I love 66: "For all the earth sings praises to you."
Well, how can we actually do that? How long ago I actually watched a really interesting research project film, way deep beneath the sea. It was just an incredible view of something happening at a hundred feet down. Now, a hundred feet down in the water makes me a little scared to think of being there, but a hundred feet down in the water, the light starts to dissipate and disappear, and there's very little light left, and it's very hard to detect things down there. And there's life there, though; there's fish and octopi and all the different little, "What's it? It's like, what on earth is that?" you know, and they're moving around, and they have shapes, and they have little dots and zigzags on some of them, and they have odd patterns. But it's all sort of a drab gray-green-blue; you know, it's just a very drab thing. And I've been watching films of divers for a long time. I love watching people going around the world and exploring, and and and I always felt there was a certain point at which it just got spooky and weird, you know, and and it wasn't very interesting. Turns out, turns out that these, the color of the lens in our eyes affects what we see down there. And what do I mean by that? Well, these divers that were filming, they sighted, for some reason, to pass a different lens, a yellow lens, over the lens of their picked camera. And I don't remember at the moment why they decided to do that, but when they did, it was like a world exploded into the light right before them. And all of a sudden there were bright phosphorescent neon colors and dots and zigzags and shapes going on on all these animals. There is a certain kind of phosphorescent light that can only be seen through a yellow-lidded eye, and humans don't have it. And we had no idea. Was there a hundred years of scuba diving and no idea that it was like that? But these guys put that lens on; it suddenly they're seeing. And then they looked at these animals and realized almost every creature down at that depth has a yellow-lensed eye. They were living in a bright, vibrant, communicating world, brighter than Tokyo at midnight, and we had no idea.
And that's a lot like going to another culture. Where I grew up in another culture in West Africa, Nigeria, and there was a proverb some of those Nigerians had, and it was, "The stranger's eyes are wide open, but don't worry, he doesn't see anything." Culture is a wonderful world, and a crazy world for communicators of the gospel, because we got to pay attention to this, or we won't not know what happens next. There's many stories in the Bible of this. Daniel is a great one, taken off as a captive and enrolled in the university against his will, but nevertheless, and he had to learn Babylonian culture. The whole story of Daniel: he is expert at approaching people much more powerful than him. There's no way to do that without Hamlet studying the culture in depth and mastering more than one culture, actually, because he served more than one kind of King from different backgrounds. So here we have Daniel doing it. It's interesting in the New Testament; there's a crazy story about Paul and Barnabas. They're going on a missionary trip, and they're going through what's Turkey today, and it kind of made a curve and came around to area after what the two cities were called, Lystra and Derbe. When they got to Lystra, a crowd gathered to see them, and they called, they called one of them Zeus, at Barnabas, the second guy, because he didn't talk much, and they called Paul Hermes, who was the little God, because he was the talkative God. Funny thing about culture: we would have made the talkative one the important God, but not these people; they had a different culture, okay? And so they're calling him gods, and then there's this guy that was, it was sick, and they look inside, and he had some faith, and he said, "Stretch out your hand," and the heel Disgaea. Suddenly the whole place is uproar; yeah, there's a huge crowd; it's a wonderful day for missions, right? Well, not really, because Paul and Barnabas hadn't really thought through the culture of where they were going yet. The people knew what to do when gods came down from Mount Olympus, had showed up in their town. Their culture told them what to do with that happened: bring out the animals, sacrifice it, and have a giant barbecue. And they were pulling out this, this cow there, but it came within an inch of losing its life that day. They, they're, they're gonna sacrifice to Paul and to Barnabas, and they're, and and they're like, "No," see these Christian missionaries came within seconds of being the greatest encouragement to pagan religion that that town had ever had in their history. You know, the gods showed up, and we got to, and they did a miracle, and we gave a real sacrifice to the real gods. Oh, go Mount Olympus, you know, go Zeus. And they're like, "No, no," because they hadn't thought through how it would be received or what it would look like. When they finally persuaded them not to do this act, they beat Paul up and left him for dead. He actually came, came back to life, but they left. And when they came back, they did plant a church in Lystra, but they planted it quietly by doing in-depth communication with a few people who were very hungry. And you and I are sent to be like Paul and Barnabas, to learn the right way to communicate. Sometimes a big crowd might work, but very often, almost always now, it's gonna be one-on-one, one-on-two, one-on-three with hungry people the Spirit leads you to, and you looking at them and pondering, "What does the world look like through their lens?" so that you can see the incredible, incredible world of culture. God has called us not to hate our culture, not to despise it, but to be willing to leave it, to branch into the cultures of others, so the gospel can go there, too.