DAY 242

YOU—ME & THE CULTURE

Psalm 126, 127 & 128 and 1 Corinthians 10:19-33

We find ourselves reading again about idols and meat, and it would be easy to think that all this talk just does not apply. It does. Not that we live in world where people offer the meat most of us purchase in grocery stores to idols. It applies in that most of us live in a culture, that while it has a legacy of being Christian, and while there are still remnants of Christian values…it is largely non-Christian. We can think we are in a Christian world, but as I said yesterday, quickly find ourselves lost. So what kind of a world do we live in?

The word to describe our culture nowadays is secular. Secular: meaning that the predominant attitudes and activities of most people have no religious or spiritual basis. In fact when spiritual or religious attitudes and activities seek to enter the culture, especially if they are Christian, there is a rather strong attack against them. Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali calls it aggressive secularism. I would suggest it is also rather narcissistic—we are terribly focused on our pleasure and comfort—I am terribly focused on mine—I am surrounded by messages to do so. It rushes at us.

I am not going to blog about “how bad the culture is” today. That is not the point. The point of 1 Corinthians in Paul’s day is the point for us today. Do not become so enamored with the culture that you think you can somehow have “one foot in both worlds.” Here I need to digress for a moment.

I am not suggesting the things of this world are “bad.” God is the creator and He said it is not just “good” but “very good.” I am not advocating some ascetic model where we withdraw from the world and live in a cave. I am suggesting that we be careful and consider whether or not attitudes and activities of God’s world have been distorted, twisted, into a shape that turn these “good things” of God into idols and worse.

All Paul’s talk about meat sacrificed to idols seems to me Paul’s commentary about how openly and blatantly eating such meat, is to openly participate in a culture that is opposed to God. Furthermore, it can communicate to other members of the Church and to the world something that we as followers of Jesus do not believe. The people in Corinth appear to have been saying that they are “above worrying about all this, they are mature Christians.”

Paul challenges them on two fronts: first he talks a little about demons. Not too much, but a little. In 8:2 he argued the idols, the silver, gold and wood, are no idols at all. True enough. Don’t confuse that with matter of the spiritual world that oppose God—those are real. Just as there is no such thing as “casual sex” (the body is the Lord’s) there is also no such thing as “casual worship. Second he challenges them about culture, about living as if they are somehow above it all.

Are any of us “above the culture?” Can any of us be sure it won’t seep in? Again, I am not “anti-world”—rather I am saying that if we become too prideful or complacent we will find ourselves down a long road that we never intended to walk. In other words just because you are baptized Christians, sharing in the community life where the Spirit is known and present, and eating and drinking the bread and the wine of the Eucharist, don’t think you can act in a manner where you have automatically reached a level that no longer requires moral restraint or effort.

“Living in the world, but not being of it” is what we are called to do, but this call is for a very specific purpose. In John 17:14-19 Jesus, as he is going to the cross, gives us this teaching. His teaching does not culminate with “Living in the world, but not being of it” instead it starts with this phrase and culminates with Jesus saying that He has “sent us into the world.”

We are to be in the culture, but so grounded, so sanctified Jesus says in John 17, that we have a positive effect on the world vice the other way round.