All Sermons

Flirting with Aussie Culture By David Calderwood

It's a very typical Australian culture, isn't it?
They've introduced it really well.
The heart of what I have to say today, or what I want to say today,
is a very simple question.
And the question is, how do you identify yourself?
And closer related to that, part of that question is,
how do you relate to Australia and Australians?
Now, at first thought, at first glance,
that might seem like a question just for people like me,
who I'm one of the 26% of people who are born overseas in Australia
and migrated here for a variety of reasons.
But at another level, that's a question for everyone.
Regardless of where you were born,
and especially it's a question for this morning,
given that a large number of you, at least the ones I know anyway,
would profess to be Christian.
It's a question for Christians especially.
And the answer will say lots about how you relate to Australian culture,
how you relate to the Australian way of life,
how you relate to the Australian worldview.
Because in answering that, you do relate to the Australian worldview.
So, the question then could be rephrased like this.
Do you think of yourself first and foremost as an Australian?
You might add to that one, do you think of yourself first and foremost
as an Australian who also happens to be a Christian?
Or do you think of yourself first and foremost as a Christian
who happens to live in Australia?
The two are quite different, as perhaps we'll see as we go through this.
So, the first thing I want to do this morning
is try and describe what is typical Aussie culture.
Typical Aussie culture.
Well, it's reassuring to know that Australians themselves
can't define typical Aussie culture.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade website notes,
many of the popular stereotypes of the typical Australian
and Australian lifestyle are totally contradictory.
We're supposed to be a leisure-seeking society
and yet we're among the hardest working in terms of ours
of any country in the world.
Doesn't seem to fit, does it?
It's impossible to give a precise definition of what it is
to be Australian or typical Aussie culture.
What we can say is this, that culture is who we are.
Culture is what we do together as a group of people.
And so, Aussie culture is the sum total
of how we think and act collectively as a nation.
So, culture is food, it's dress, it's sport, art, music,
film, theatre, dance, speech, ethnic diversity and lots more besides.
In other words, Aussie culture is the dominant Australian worldview in action.
What we see as our society and our lifestyle
is actually the expression of a worldview, the Aussie worldview.
It's the shared attitudes, the shared values, the shared beliefs,
the practices which are based in our common response
to the big questions of life.
How do we understand our world?
What is our place in our world?
What is important to give our time and energy and effort and resources to?
Those are the big questions of life that together form our Australian worldview.
So, the question then is how should we, as Christians, relate to our culture,
given it is the question of relating to our cultural worldview?
It's really the question that the Bible puts in terms of the world.
So, it's the question of how we relate to the world.
And again, that's been the theme of this series.
It's the question of how to be in the world, but not of it,
when it comes to Aussie culture.
It's about identifying points, therefore, where we, as Christians,
have been flirting, flirting dangerously with Aussie culture.
Now, we need to put a couple of caveats around that,
because what we need to understand straight away, as Christians,
is that we cannot escape our culture.
We relate to our culture every moment of the day.
If you go out your house in the morning, at work, at play,
you relate to your culture.
If you stay at home and watch TV, listen to music, read,
you relate to the culture, our culture, planning a holiday,
eating, dressing.
At every point, you're relating to our culture.
And there's much more besides could add it in there.
But here's the problem.
Generally speaking, we don't realize,
because we don't think about it, because it's so natural to us,
we don't realize, therefore, how much our culture influences us
on any given day, at any given moment, even as Christians.
In fact, evidence would suggest that our culture is so much a part
of our being that most likely it will have more influence on how we act
as Christians than what the Bible does.
Now, that's a bit of a shocking thing, isn't it?
But because it's so instinctive to us, because we're not aware of it,
then the evidence would suggest that, yes, our culture drives us more
as Christians than what the Bible does.
Now, that alone ought to make us quite frightened, I think.
The next thing I want to say is that we can't avoid, therefore,
bringing our culture to church with us.
Each one of us has brought our culture with us this morning
in dozens of different ways.
So the challenge is, therefore, to be thoughtful
so that we can evaluate cultural influences against the Bible,
sorting out those which are quite helpful that we ought to retain
and enjoy and even develop, and make sure that we try and distance ourselves
from those cultural influences that would detract from fellowship
and worship here this morning, and detract from what we ought
to be as Christians.
So, how do we relate practically to this culture that's so much a part of us?
Well, as you see there in the notes, historically, Christians have taken
four major and very different approaches to how we should relate to our culture.
The first one is a separatist idea.
In this world view, the world is deemed to be so bad,
so disconnected from what we are as Christians
that the only option is to withdraw in order that we as Christians
might maintain purity.
That's the idea of monasteries.
Christians withdrawing into separate communities, as we've seen historically.
And we even see a softer version of that in our own day and age,
not so much in Australia, but there are some aspects in Australia,
but we see it particularly in America where there's what you call
Christian-only business groups.
There's a Christian-only Yellow Pages, and so on and so forth.
It's that notion of, well, to be pure we have to separate from the world.
Secondly, then, there's what's called the Reconstructionist model.
In this view, Christians aim to recapture, to take back the culture
by political power and by political means.
And so we've got, say, the Christian Right Group, represented by the Australian Christian Lobby.
Their aim is to use political power to get legislation into place
that forces our nation to maintain and observe and uphold
Christian biblical values.
And thereby we rebuild society into a Christian ideal, ultimately.
The third view, then, is, I wasn't quite sure, I've just picked this,
I'm not sure if this really picks it up, but I'm called an Adventurist model.
And that's where Christians today are deemed to be so culturally irrelevant
that what we need to do is find new ways of expressing ourselves
to sort of engage with a culture that's disengaged from us
because we're so out of it.
Basically, we just need to get with it.
And so what we have to do is rewrite our songs,
rewrite our music, rewrite our gospel message
so that it will be appealing to our modern-day culture.
We need to rewrite how we do church in a massive way.
And so that comes across today in groups like what's called the Missional Church Movement.
And then we've got the Conversionist model, and this is probably the bit broad evangelical view.
And that view runs like this.
As people are converted one by one by the transforming power of the gospel,
then ultimately our society and our culture will be redeemed.
The problem with that for us evangelicals is that we're really confused
because we ask ourselves the question,
well, is it enough just to see hell-bound people redeemed from hell and set a new track?
Isn't there a sense in which we ought to be trying to work to make our culture better
as opposed to just seeing individuals within that culture saved?
And so evangelicals aren't quite sure how much we should be working to make our culture better.
We know about evangelism, but we're not sure about the other point.
Where does that leave us?
Well, typical of me, I'm suggesting there's elements of each of those four
that we ought to take through with us.
Because all four reflect aspects of the person and work of Christ,
and therefore all four give us a grid by which to relate to our culture.
So the Scripture is clear that Christ is diametrically opposed to human culture
and will ultimately judge it.
And he doesn't want us people to be of it, even though we're in it.
Christ is committed ultimately to reconstructing the world so messed up by sin.
And the Bible describes that as the new heavens and the new earth,
the ultimate point of redemption.
So there is a reconstructionist mode in the Scriptures.
That Christ was willingly involved in human culture through his incarnation.
He was culturally adventurous, he was culturally relevant,
refusing to be bound by the strictions of the culture of his day,
as he associated easily and mixed easily with all sorts of people in all sorts of situations.
And Christ is the Lord who not only demands that all must obey him,
but actually works for and in people to facilitate the whole change of life
which begins with conversion and which is so necessary.
But Christ also focused on the implementation of truth and justice and righteousness.
Friends, all of these approaches, and there's aspects of each of them that we need to bring with us,
have in common the idea again of being counter-culture,
the word again that's underpinned this whole series.
In different ways, at different points, we need to be counter-culture.
And in the time remaining I want to look at a case study in being counter-culture as Christians
using Paul's visit to Athens in Acts chapter 17.
So if you want to turn with me to that now.
As we turn to Acts chapter 17 verse 16 to look at this case study of being counter-culture,
we join Paul as he finds himself alone in Athens.
And remember Athens is the cosmopolitan, sophisticated, cultural capital of the world in his day.
And Paul's wandering around taking in the sights.
He sees the magnificent architecture of the Parthenon.
He's dwarfed by the sheer scale of the Acropolis.
He's amazed by the dozens of temples scattered around the city,
all of which combine to display the intellectual, political, literary, military,
and spiritual history of that great civilization founded in Athens.
Must have been a breathtaking scene.
But notice his response in verse 16.
He was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols.
Swamped almost overwhelmed by the grandeur of the place, Paul remained analytical and critical,
seeing with God's eyes and thinking with God's thoughts in the midst of that cultural beauty.
His experience of Greek culture had a powerful impact on him.
Why was he deeply distressed?
Well I take it because he recognized that he was simply seeing in all its beauty
the practical expression of the Greek worldview.
A worldview that was essentially a display of man worshipping himself and his own achievements.
A display of man saying, well with the right military, political, intellectual history,
you can rise to the top of the pile and you will be the most honored of all nations,
the most powerful of all peoples, the most wealthy and prosperous of all.
And Paul was driven to action therefore, determined to challenge the worldview
and restore the Lord to his rightful place in their thinking and living.
And so friends, likewise I think we need to recognize that all human culture is naturally anti-God.
Including our beloved Australian culture.
And for what it's worth I actually do include myself as an Australian.
I've been here 38 years, I just don't sound the same as everybody else.
But I'm an Australian. There you go.
See Genesis makes it clear that the good life that God intended
expressed in Genesis chapter 2 in the picture of the Garden of Eden
which therefore we have to say is the true or ideal culture, God's culture for God's world
was lost, has been lost due to sin and rebellion.
And people now endeavor to build the good life apart from God
and so culture therefore is inherently opposed to God
because it's the means by which nations and groups of people build life,
the good life apart from God.
Jesus himself experienced that right from the very start, John chapter 1.
He was in the world and though the world was made by him,
the world did not recognize him or honor him.
See that's the statement of culture being naturally and instinctively anti-God.
Therefore, and this is the big one probably to get around this morning
and the one that might perhaps alienate me from you,
but I do include myself in Aussie culture,
we must not worship Aussie culture.
Because the underlying world view of Aussie culture
is that Australians can have the good life apart from God.
That Australians can make our nation the best nation in the world
and Australia the best place in the world to live
as we together invest our time and energy and natural abilities to make that nation great.
When our political leaders talk of values,
that's essentially and primarily what they're talking about.
And this world view has many different expressions at the grassroots level in Australia.
It's the self-made hard-working Aussie country battler.
That's a world view.
Equally, it's the sophisticated city-dwelling consumerist driven by pleasure,
Australian world view that perhaps now typifies us
because I think it's something like 75 or 80% of Australians live in urban communities,
large urban communities on the eastern seaboard near the beach in other words.
It's the political left who agitate for supposed equality for all
while demonising those who favour capitalism and a wealth-based economic model.
That's a world view.
And it's the political right who want to be free from any restrictions
on how much money they make and the ethics of how they make that money.
That's a world view.
It's the new religion of Anzac Day and Australia Day
in which these days are now far more than just a celebration of events past.
Anzac Day and Australia Day are the new rituals.
External events trying to achieve something more,
something much deeper and much more symbolic,
something, dare I say, spiritual that gives heart to our nation,
that gives a sense of identity to our nation.
These are now the events that dominate the Australian calendar year
as in the past religious or Christian church events
used to dominate the calendar year.
The battlefields of Gallipoli and Belgium and PNG and Asia,
they've now become the new sacred ground.
The new sacred sites and the new places of annual pilgrimage.
That's the language that's used with respect to Anzac Day and Australia Day.
Now, is it wrong to celebrate Anzac Day and Australia Day?
Absolutely not.
But we need to make sure we're celebrating them as a memorial of events past
and not as a new religion.
That gives us identity as a nation.
Friends, we must be critics of our culture.
We must be able and willing to judge our culture at every point.
We must be prepared to take it apart and weigh it against God's word.
We must be prepared to call it away from disobedience as is required.
And that takes constant analysis
because our culture is constantly changing in its expression.
In the 70s, the song said,
What's Australian meet football, meat pies, kangaroos and holding cars?
Wouldn't be that today, would it?
It's more likely to be sophisticated coffee fashionistas,
sophisticated metrosexuals shopping to the drop dead.
Well, not necessarily the drop dead.
Sorry, that's gone a little bit too far.
Shopping to the drop.
That was a bit of my own bias snuck in there.
So just delete that from your memories, please.
The question is, will I see my culture as Jesus sees it?
As God sees it?
If I'm to be counterculture, which I must be as a Christian,
then I must challenge the system that is opposed to God,
which is our Australian culture.
And to do that, I must challenge the gods of the system.
And to do that, I'm undertaking an all-out cultural war
because it's attacking the icons of our society.
It's to say that our society has been built on the wrong things
and continues to be built on the wrong things.
Will you love Australia as Jesus does?
Will you weep for it as I assume Jesus weeps for it,
seeing our culture for what it is?
Would you be prepared to die for it,
to see it brought back from disobedience and made righteous?
Or are you too busy soaking it all up,
either unable or unwilling to be analytical, to be critical?
Because, after all, we're Australians,
and Australia does have to be the best place to live.
The second point I want to make about Paul in being counterculture
was that he was truly patriotic.
And I've used this word very carefully because it's going to offset
what I think you might be anticipating from my first point.
Paul was patriotic in that he was unashamedly advocating new loyalty to Jesus.
Now, I want to make clear that by patriotism,
I don't mean that sort of shallow nationalistic fervour
that's blind to the faults of a country,
that's openly boastful about a country and says,
you know, there's no better place to live
and everything we do in our country is just Mickey Mouse.
That's not what I'm talking about when I'm talking about being patriotic.
I'm speaking about true patriotism,
which is prepared to defend and promote the good values of a nation
and which is prepared to declare a true loyalty
and follow through in action regardless of the cost.
And so in this sense, Paul, as a citizen of heaven, was a true patriot
because in the midst of the grandeur of Athens,
he courageously took a stand with nothing more than the death
and resurrection of Jesus.
Verse 18.
And as he goes to the Areopagus,
invited to speak there to the meeting of the Areopagus,
which is a group of scholars whose job it was to guard and maintain
the city's morals, the city's education, the city's religion.
And they did that by sort of looking for new ideas
and looking for new gods because the view was in those days that,
well, if you happen to miss out one god,
then potentially that god could bring misfortune to your city,
into your society.
And so all the time they were wanting to make sure
they had covered all the gods and just to make sure they had,
they'd actually put up one statue to the unknown god
just to cover the bases.
And in the face of that philosophy,
Paul stands to speak about the death and resurrection of Jesus
and the implications of that for Greek culture.
In other words, Paul is speaking to those whose job it was
to protect and maintain the Greek worldview.
And as a patriot of Jesus, Paul brings the worldview of Christ
to condemn the worldview of the Greeks.
It's cultural warfare.
And Paul, with great courage and cultural sensitivity,
gently tells them therefore that Jesus stands over every culture
and every subculture, including theirs.
Verse 24, Paul starts by inclusive, by bringing people together.
Everyone and every nation is under the one true creator god.
Verse 25, this creator god is not indebted to us
or in need of us in any shape or form.
But on the contrary, all peoples everywhere are totally dependent on him
for everything from our next breath to every structure of life.
Verse 26, 27, 28, it gets worse for these Greeks.
They have to hear from Paul that that same Lord also determines
the rise and the spread and the collapse of nations,
including the Greek empire as it was,
well, the Greek nation as it was in Paul's day,
that the empire days had gone.
But it was sore in their memory that the empire had fallen.
It was no longer the heyday of Greek culture.
And Paul, I think, uses that as he goes on in those verses
to say that, well, maybe that very impermanence
that you yourselves have experienced as Greeks,
the rising and the falling,
that very impermanence is given by the Lord
to make people and nations find their security and confidence
for the future in God rather than their culture
because cultures come and go.
So learn from your own experience, Paul's saying.
Paul completely knocks out any thought
of hiding behind cultural diversity,
arguing inclusively that all people belong
to one human culture with the Lord
as the defining point of culture.
Now, that becomes really important for us, doesn't it,
as we think of evangelism,
and especially cross-cultural mission.
These days it's normal to speak of cultural differences
in a way that gives opportunity for a nationalism
or cultural arrogance.
People argue for cultural integrity.
And what that means is that every indigenous culture,
every indigenous culture's religious beliefs
are equally credible and to be preserved at all costs.
So the worst thing anybody can do is sort of say anything
that will undermine an indigenous culture
wherever that's found.
And that assumes that any and every indigenous culture
is inherently good and beyond challenge
and beyond challenge by another culture.
We've got to deal with that
if we're going to be counterculture in today's world.
Knowing that, as we take the gospel
either to indigenous culture in Australia
or indigenous culture overseas,
that we're actually declaring that culture essentially,
not in every part, but essentially to be anti-God.
And we're declaring the culture of Jesus
to be the one to replace it.
That's a big call in today's society, isn't it?
But we've not done that well as the Christian church, see,
because historically, and equally wrong,
Christians have equated Western culture with the gospel.
And so you've got the ridiculous situation
as you go around Indonesian places,
you'll see black stone churches in the middle of the jungle.
Western culture.
You'll see Christians from the earliest days
being forced to start wearing Western-style dresses
as soon as they heard the gospel.
The Christian church has been terribly guilty
of making the gospel a part of a form of colonialism.
With those Western-style buildings and dress
being part of the gospel response,
we've got a lot to answer for
and a lot to avoid in the future,
because we still do it.
We cannot separate easily
as we go to missionize people or evangelize people
what is Christian culture.
And we get it all back to front.
So we say, well, okay, if you're going to become a Christian,
then suddenly you have to have clean clothes every day
and suddenly you have to do the ironing
and suddenly you have to have a tidy house
and suddenly you have to have kids whose noses aren't snotty
and stuff like that.
That's all cultural things that we
put into the gospel and confuse it.
The gospel may well have implications for the way you live,
but it's not part of the gospel directly.
And we're still doing it as Christians.
We put pressure on people as they come in here.
And we don't necessarily separate out
what is our cultural expression
versus what is necessity for gospel orientation.
In our own day, part of the growing clash of civilizations
between Christianity and Islam
is down to this very thing.
Lots of Muslims think that
Christianity is a Western lifestyle
with all its awfulness, affluence and promiscuity.
And many of them want no part of it.
But on the other hand, lots of people in the Middle East
do want to come here.
They say it's because they're interested in Christianity,
but it's not.
It's actually they're interested in the Western lifestyle
that they think is Christianity.
We must be sure, you see, that we're patriots of Christ.
And that we take the culture of the kingdom of God with us
as we evangelize and mission people.
And we must realize that we're taking the culture
of the kingdom of God to nations and cultures
who, as the Scripture tells us,
have exchanged the truth of God for a lie, Romans chapter 1.
And that, my friends,
must include Australian culture, I believe.
Our loyalties ought to be to the king and country
of our new citizenship.
That's where we ought to have our primary loyalty.
Therefore, I think we should say
we're Christians who live in Australia,
love to live in Australia, love being in Australia,
being in Australia, but primarily our loyalty is to Christ.
Because the gospel is the answer every culture needs
and every culture seeks.
Every culture, you see, is built on a notion
of how to have a good life, the good life,
security and identity as a people,
how to understand our world, how to live well within it.
That's the basis of which every culture is operating.
And Paul tells the Athenians 29 through to 31
that all that that they're seeking is to be found in Christ.
The Greeks, like every other culture,
had a sense of being connected to something bigger,
a spiritual dimension they were searching for.
Paul now introduces them to the God
that previously they had not known
but had been searching for in that statue to the unknown God.
Paul says, let me tell you about this God,
the one you've ultimately been seeking,
so you might turn your loyalty to Him.
And that God demands repentance and loyalty to the Lord Jesus.
That God is the real King of this world,
shown by His death and ultimately His resurrection.
So Paul sent to the Greek culture,
well, near enough is not good enough.
Yes, I can see your cultural aspirations looking for the good life
and I can see that you've got a spiritual element in your world
and in your lifestyle, but near enough is not good enough.
Religion, tolerance, multiculturalism, secularism,
none of it's good enough to impress God or avoid judgment.
Only repentance and new loyalty to the Lord Jesus
will produce a true and lasting culture.
Therefore, friends, as I wind up, just to say,
we must be selective but relaxed participants in culture.
As members of our culture, we will seek to be involved
adventurously as Jesus was involved with the culture of His day.
Carefully avoiding temptation, recognizing the limitations of culture,
but enjoyably participating in the wholesome parts,
food, art, sport, leisure, entertainment, travel and so on and so forth,
without allowing them to become idols for us.
And then secondly, we'll use the good parts of our culture
opportunistically to be transformers within the culture.
We are to live the good life which we have in Christ.
So that we might demonstrate a counter-culture,
the real culture that comes with the transforming,
the life-changing power of the Gospel,
that we naturally wish to share with Him.
So we have a message ought to be backed up with a lifestyle,
with our own culture, the culture of the Kingdom of God.
We're not trying to take over the culture by force,
nor are we trying to withdraw from it,
but by our faithful, quiet presence within it at every point,
we're both preservatives in our culture,
and agents for renewal, salt and light.
And we need to exploit the best part of our Aussie culture for the Gospel.
And we need to recognize the best part of our Aussie culture,
as I deem it anyway, and the best part of our Aussie heritage,
is the Gospel.
Let's not squander real and lasting culture as citizens of heaven,
by losing ourselves in the false and condemned culture of Australia,
in spite of all its lure and appeal.
Let's pray.
Lord, again, as we've seen right through this series,
thinking about how to be in the world, but not of it,
thinking about how we've actually flirted, dangerously,
we see the same problems again.
Lord, we're so immersed in our own culture,
so much a part of it.
It's the world we live in, and the world that lives in us,
that, Lord, we're often either unwilling or unable
to be analytical and critical.
We often lose sight of the fact that our primary loyalty,
our primary patriotism, is to the country in which we're citizens,
the kingdom of heaven.
Forgive us, Lord, for acting as though we're still citizens,
primarily and only, of Australia.
Help us to be true patriots,
that we might be truly, therefore, influential in our culture.
In Jesus' name I pray. Amen.