A Model for Sacred Engagement With Culture
A Model for Sacred Engagement With Culture
The Church tends to distinguish itself by its religious, separate-from-the-world nature. But the Kingdom of God—God’s realm—is a reality always connected to and in solidarity with the broken world.
As a boomer, I have childhood memories of the adults looking suspiciously at hippies. Parents had a widespread concern that the devil was in rock and roll music. More recently, kids with gender dysphoria or people with extreme political views are targets of dehumanizing rejection.
The Church tends to distinguish itself by its religious, separate-from-the-world nature. But the Kingdom of God—God’s realm—is a reality always connected to, and in solidarity with the broken world.
We first see this in the garden when God asked, “Adam, where are you?” This rhetorical question did not imply a lack of knowledge of God’s part, as if he had lost Adam and could not find him. The question was meant to enable Adam to see that he had separated himself from his Maker. The question expressed the loving desire of God to be near his fallen creation.
God was with, proximate to, and in solidarity with the first humans even when they were banished from the garden. God’s purposeful interaction with humans never quit or gave up. It continued through the flood and Tower of Babel, through the ups and downs of patriarchs, judges, kings and prophets up to John the Baptist. It continued through the coming of Jesus, who called and sent the Twelve, through the sending of the Spirit (John 20:22, Luke 24:49, Acts 1, 2) that fills, empowers and engifts the whole historic, catholic Church and sends us into the world as ambassadors of the kingdom. God’s great story alerts us to the truth that, as Lesslie Newbigin puts it, God’s people are not elected for special privilege, but for special responsibility.
Through this biblical story, we recognize God’s core personality—his sacred connection to brokenness. Jesus' invitation to “come follow me” is fundamentally a summons to become his cooperative friends, taking on his Kingdom agenda in the world. This is what Jesus has in mind when he asserts:
You are my friends when you do the things I command you. I'm no longer calling you servant because servants don't understand what their master is thinking and planning. No, I've named you friends because I've let you in on everything I've heard from the Father.
John 15:14,15 MSG
Paul picks up the essence of Jesus’ Kingdom movement, saying:
Christ has set us free to live a free life...use your freedom to serve one another in love (Galatians 5, MSG).
Use your heads as you live and work among outsiders. Don’t miss a trick. Make the most of every opportunity (Colossians 4, MSG).
The Challenge of Cultural Engagement
Those Pauline imperatives bring before us a challenge. At all times and in all places, as an unavoidable aspect of being human, parts of culture seem foreign, unattractive, maybe even scary. In our view, some people are weird or sinful in a way that is particularly offensive to us. It is hard to love people, to desire the good of those we don’t like, whose behaviors or belief systems are off-putting to us.
However, the Church cannot wake up every morning hating half of America because they belong to the other political party. Furthermore, we must refuse to fear people having an identity crisis. Following the example of the world's one, true creator God, I refuse to discard people who are rejecting a traditional sexual ethic or who are stuck in some other pattern of sin. God is not stumped by the sexual revolution of the last 60 years. Our political crises are not “Checkmate!” against God’s love, wisdom and power.
From the original fall of humanity to 2022, God has been present to, and has sought the redemption and healing of his broken creation. Jesus modeled this for the Church. The role of the Church is to fully differentiate as followers of Jesus while staying connected to non-Christian culture as a non-anxious, healing, justice-seeking presence.
That vision makes the Church’s proximity to, and interaction with the people and events of our culture, sacred. It gets us off our high horse. It banishes pride. It creates servants in the way of Jesus (Mark 10:45; John 13:1-17). It frees the church to take Jesus-movement risks by being with the wrong people (sinners), working for their good at the wrong times (for Jesus on the Sabbath), or upsetting merely religious purity laws (Jesus touching a leper or letting a woman touch him to effect healing).
Being with the bad can be good. Loving proximity to unbelief is a hallmark of belief. God is most noted as the Being-with-God. The Church fails to follow God—in fact, contradicts his model—when she finds her whole meaning in being separate-from. Sometimes the Church misunderstands passages like 2 Corinthians 6:17, in which Paul exhorts the church at Corinth to “come out from them and be separate.” Paul is calling for the Church to leave behind idolatry and the sexual brokenness so prevalent at the time, and to do so precisely for the purpose of joining with God’s work in the world, by the Spirit, through the Church.
There is a way to be in touch with the real events of our lives and times—it is to take Jesus as our model. Jesus, though eternally and intrinsically connected to the Holy Trinity, gave his life in close proximity to pain, suffering and sin in order to be Savior, Healer and Redeemer.
That is our model for a sacred engagement with culture.
This is a helpful line of reflection especially for the YMCA as we recover our grasp of the Kingdom of God and how our members can participate in it, whether as ones involved in a local church or not (or at least not yet).