Reading Jesus Across Cultures

Transcript

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[0:00] Well, I'd like to invite you to find Luke chapter 10, verse 38. That's our sermon text for today. But before we even get to the text, let's just do a few words of introduction. Again, we're in our Many Colors book study. The whole church is studying this book over the course of six weeks, and this is week two. You can still join a discussion group. There's one that meets today at noon here at the church in the fireside room, and you're welcome to join that, or you can run home and join it. And the email address that I sent yesterday with the link, it's the same link for all of those, so you can join that discussion group from home if you haven't joined one yet. But you could also join one on Monday at 10, Thursday at 7 p.m., or next Saturday at 10. So there's four choices during the course of the week. Today we're looking at chapter four of the book, and the title of this chapter is A Multicultural Worldview. Now we know from our previous readings that culture is ordained by God, and we know that we're not going to be able to know that cultures are not better than each other, but we're left with the reality when we pay close attention that there are many different cultures, right? And I say when we pay attention,

[1:09] that's key, right? Because this is a theme that we're going to come back to often is, do we need to actually pay attention to other cultures? And that's harder for some of us than others. Some people have to notice the difference of cultures all the time because they have a culture at home, and the minute they walk out their door and go to school or work, they face a different culture. And so they have to be fluent in more than one culture, and they're aware all the time that they're in a culture that's not the majority culture. Other people, and this would probably be people like me that I grew up in, my culture at home was only vaguely different from the regular culture. Last week I said I grew up Norwegian-American, but mostly I was American. So I left the home, and it really wasn't all that different going to school. Other people that looked like me, talked like me, acted like me. And so for people like me, it was much harder to really appreciate other cultures because I didn't need to. I didn't have to function in them. I just had to function in my culture. And so to actually be aware of other cultures is harder for people who are in the majority culture because they can go through life completely incurious about other people and other cultures. So the challenge is for

[2:17] majority culture people to develop an awareness of other cultures. I'm running out of space for all my stuff. All right. So, and like I said, we'll come back to this over and over again, is just to be aware of. And so last week we were trying to be aware of our own cultures, and we talked about what cultures we grew up in, which was very interesting. And today the author is talking about the spectrum, what he calls the spectrum of cultural expressions. And so some of these spectrums you would have on one side, you'd have individual orientation versus group orientation.

[2:55] Guilt as a way of dealing with sin or shame as a way of dealing with sin. Equality in how we order our lives together or hierarchy as how we, or, and these aren't exhaustive either. And these are spectrums or if you want to say the, see the Latin is funny, but I guess the plural of spectrum is spectra. Got that? I don't like that, but I would like to say spectrums, but I want to be correct for all those who are listening. So there's more than three spectra. There's many, many, and we're going to talk about that in a minute.

[3:29] So if you want to get some information for some some some some some some some some some some some some some The women that Jesus is visiting, do they represent ends of a cultural spectrum? Mary is listening at the feet of Jesus. Martha is doing things in the kitchen, and she wants Mary to help her. So they're that opposite ends of the spectrum. And which spectrum is it? Okay.

[4:02] And we can even put that in the chat log. So those of you who at home want to chat, we'll show the chat log later. So if you're willing to start now, because it always takes a little while, is put in the chat log what spectrum are Mary and Martha on, and which ends are each of them at, so to speak, if you want to. And you might have to listen to us read it first before you do that. And since, you know, if you want to, you can actually enter things in the chat from here in the church if you want to. There's a way to do it. Or it might be easier for us just to take your hands, because I want this to be interactive. So we're going to ask you to use the chat a little bit later today for a lot of other things, too. But the first one will be, Mary and Martha, which spectrum are they on, and which ends do each of them occupy of the spectrum? Now let's go to our reading. It's Luke chapter 10.

[4:49] It reads as thus. Now as they went on their way, Jesus entered a certain village where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks. So she came to him and asked, Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me. But the Lord answered her, Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for your word. And we ask that you would add to it. And we ask that you would add your blessing to it. In Jesus' name, amen.

[5:43] All right. And so let's show the chat log now, Caleb, and see if anyone. Oh, my word. Brian Smith put the spectrum of being versus doing. How did you know that? You're just super smart. Oh, my goodness. All right. And which one was which? Well, we know which one was which. I mean, no, no, I'm not talking about your family. I'm talking about Mary and Martha.

[6:09] Martha is doing and Mary is being. And now, yes. So, I mean, there are others. So other people have seen in here a spectrum between Judaism and Christianity. Interesting, right? One doing all the things, the other listening at the Lord's feet. Right? That's possible. I kind of stole some of your thunder. Anyone else? Anyone else in the chat or anyone else here in the room?

[6:33] Now that Brian ruined it for us, though, I just, I don't know where to go with it. Yes, Pam. Well, I think also there's a hint of hierarchy because it would have been expected that the men could have co-existed. Yeah. And the women couldn't. Yep. So Martha is still caught up in that hierarchy. She is. Yeah. Mary decided not to be. Mary decided not to be. And Martha appeals to the hierarchy. She goes to Lord. And even saying the word Lord is saying, I'm telling everybody in the room that you're in charge. And now you who's in charge tell everybody else what their proper role is in this moment. Yeah, that's good. So that is. And actually, these can overlap. There's not like just one right answer. I meant to say that. Yeah, there's not just one right answer. Being versus doing or hierarchy versus equality, potentially. Yeah. What else? Anything else that anyone's seen?

[7:21] All right. If you think about it, just jump in and we can, you can put it in the chat log later. All right. So we're going to go look at the material. You didn't have to bring your book along with you today, but I'm going to highlight a little bit of what's in chapter four. And all of. Not all of the spectra, but four of the spectra that you'll see. There's five of them.

[7:44] And again, the sessions are still open to newcomers if you want to discuss with us. So the first one is the individual versus the group orientation. Right. And American cultures can be very individualistic. Not all American cultures, because America has a lot of subcultures and some of them could be very group oriented. But in general, the ethos of America is individualism. I think we all understand this. Like you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You work hard. You're responsible for getting ahead in life.

[8:12] A lot of personal initiative. A lot of personal responsibility. But the group orientation, there's a stronger emphasis on where do I fit in within the whole. The whole could be the family, the extended family, or the tribe, or the village in certain cultures. And so, yes, I'm important as an individual. But my, the whole of all of us is far more important than any one. I'm not just one person. And so we make decisions together and we take care of each other. Whereas in an individualistic society, I take care of myself because nobody else is going to take care of me. I don't count. You know, that's that's the kind of thing. So put in the chat log now at home if you're at home or even if you're chatting from church, put in which side are you most on? Are you in your understanding of yourself from your own home culture, not the culture you have to live in because you all live in America, but in your own understanding of your home culture? Right. Did you grow up in an individual orientation or a group orientation? And let's take some from the crowd here. What did you grow up with? I grew up with I grew up in an individual kind of orientation, but family was important. Others.

[9:22] Group. OK. Yuki says group. Steve says group. Yeah. Mix. Yeah. Any others? Mixed. Andrea says mixed. OK. Individual says pair. Yep. Yeah. Group. Denise. Group culture. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Nobody's chatting. I feel disappointed. That's OK. You know, not everybody can chat. Not everybody can chat. You could send an email to let me check my emails just in case somebody's doing that. Nobody is. All right. Well, you know, this doesn't always work because actually some people, if they're watching on their TV, there's no chat function. We know this. You have to be using a device like an iPhone. You can't use an iPad or something like that.

[10:10] OK. Good. So that's one spectrum. Another spectrum is guilt versus shame. And this is the question of how do we deal with bad things for an individual. Things that I've done wrong. Right. And so in a guilt orientation, I'm personally responsible. I need to seek personal forgiveness by doing a personal confession. And you're going to see that some of these, they somewhat overlap. Or they follow similar tracks. So that the individual orientation kind of has some mirrors in the guilt orientation. Whereas the group orientation has some mirrors in the shame orientation. OK. You'll kind of see that they're not identical, but they follow. They can kind of group together. Right. So in the guilt orientation, the problem of sin is my problem.

[11:03] And so I need to seek forgiveness by confession and absolution. And it's not fair to blame other people for my sin. You can't blame the devil for it. You can't blame your little brother for it. You can't blame your village for why you're a sinner. You say, I'm a sinner. I'm a bad sinner. It's me. Now the other end of that spectrum is the shame. Is shame. And that is, again, it really is linked to a group. A sin by an individual member reflects on the entire group. And so one person from a village does one bad thing. The other person does one bad thing. The whole village can have some of that shame land on them. And that's why. And that is the corrective then is, don't you know that what you do in your own decisions has an effect on all of us? Now this actually works in families too. I know a story.

[11:57] This is from the Midwest where a parent would tell a child, like a teenager, going out the door on a Friday night to be with their friends. And they said, do you know what your last name is? And the kid's like, yeah, it's Smith, or whatever it is. It's Johnson. Well, you better remember that because everybody else knows it too. Because the Johnsons, well, we can't bring any shame on the Johnsons. And you run out on Friday night in the town, the little Midwest town, and you raise a ruckus, then all of the Johnsons, we know about the Johnsons. They can't control their kids. So it actually does. It does work even in America. So this whole idea of that shame can come on a whole group because of the actions of one. Now the author states that instead of confession and forgiveness, there's transformation of the shame. And I need to ask him more about that. I'm going to try to find a way to ask him about that to understand that better. But here's the interesting thing. So much of Christianity as we practice it in America has derived from Europe. There are other strands of Christianity that derive from the Middle East. There's actually Middle Eastern Christians. There's Arabic Christians. There's Persian Christians. There's Coptic Christians in Egypt.

[13:12] They have different ways of understanding the scriptures. But we come from the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, Martin Luther. Really, it was a lot about individual sin. And for Martin Luther, we preached on this on Reformation Sunday. Really, for him, it was about individual sin, about individual confession, and that sanctification and justification were a personal matter. What would be really interesting and challenging for, and is beginning to happen, is for us to start understanding justification of the sinner to also mean a justification of that sinner's group. And that sometimes we need to apologize for the actions of our larger group, even if we didn't individually commit them. That would be a group orientation to understanding sin. So this is almost baked into at least American Protestant Christianity, is this very much it's more guilt than it is shame. So that's another spectrum. Two more. Equality. Oh, I never asked. I didn't ask you. I got stuck. Who grew up with more of a shame orientation? Just raise your hand. OK, a couple. And who grew up with more of a guilt orientation? That's interesting. And it's not all, yeah, interesting. Good.

[14:35] So I think I got a little bit of a do you know what your last name is thing from my family from time to time. So it could be mixed, right? It could be mixed. And that's the thing about a spectrum. We're not necessarily entirely on one end of it. There's a whole range in between. OK, one more spectrum. Actually, two more, but here's one of them, is equality versus hierarchy. Pam mentioned that. And again, there's some similar lines here. There's overlaps with the individual versus group. OK. Equality would say that everyone has an equal voice. A young person has just as weighty an opinion as an older person. And they have the freedom to challenge and say, I think that's wrong, or I think we should do this a different way. Whereas a hierarchical structure, they have direction coming from leaders who are above. And authority is seldom challenged. It's not often challenged. And there's respect for leaders. And when we look at how our country was founded, sort of this enshrinement of equality, regardless of status, and the ability to challenge our government and to ask for redress for grievances is kind of baked into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. And so I would say America can kind of tilt towards the equality thing.

[15:50] And again, the challenge for us is to not say one is better than the other, but that they're different, and that God can work in each, right? And the right to vote actually was only given to older people and white people and men at the very beginning. But that did expand over time so that now everybody 18 and older can vote.

[16:15] So that's another spectrum. And that could have all sorts of interactions in how we make decisions and things like that. So who grew up with an egalitarian or equality-based structure? Yeah. And who grew up with more of a hierarchical? There were leaders in the family, and we had, OK, there we go. Good. So that's really interesting. So your own self-awareness of the spectrum you're on is very good. Finally, and there's actually I'm going to sort of combine the last two. The author mentions direct versus indirect culture. And I think we got some good feedback that this should actually be maybe put on the category of the next one. Because indirect sometimes has a negative connotation. So a better set of labels would be his last set of his last spectrum, which is a task orientation versus a relationship orientation. And that's the last one that the author mentions. The task orientation is about keeping punctuality, providing accurate information, and using logic. Like the task is the important thing. We need to build a new iPhone. And if we're going to build a new iPhone, we have to do it this way.

[17:29] The relationship orientation is for building better relationships. It's not for building better iPhones or getting tasks done as much. It's for creating a good atmosphere, acknowledging people for what they know, not what they can do or not what they have done. And so it may honor experience a little bit more and will ask how the group is feeling. And I think that could also build an iPhone. It's an interesting question is which one.

[17:57] Building iPhones isn't the most important thing in the world, though, I have to tell you. I'm sorry to say this in Silicon Valley. And we're only a mile from where I'm from, where Apple was founded. But building iPhones is great, but it's not the most important thing in the world. And so there's relationship-oriented cultures that they maybe won't get there quite as fast, but they're going to get there in one piece a little bit more maybe. So who grew up with a task-oriented culture? Who was born an engineer? Yes. No one. And who grew up in a relationship-oriented culture? Yeah, it's what matters is how. Yeah, wow, interesting. See? And even within a family, there's differences. So what happened? Isn't his last name Gatterland? I don't know. His last name is Gatterland, not Hunt. Aha, there we go. Yes. His middle name is Hunt. His middle name is Hunt. So even within families, so one seems like one parent had more influence than the other. That can happen. So that's chapter four. There's a lot to think about. We should also be aware that the culture of Jesus and his disciples was vastly different than our culture. And I think we know this, but I want you to. I just want this to sink in. Like the culture of Jesus, which we call the ancient Near East,

[19:08] where Jesus lived at that time 2,000 years ago, it was so different. And you could probably say that it tended more towards group orientation. It tended more towards shame orientation. It tended more towards hierarchy orientation. And it tended more to relationship orientation. So you could probably say that it was almost exactly the opposite of America, which is interesting, right? Because we're. I mean, we're all kind of. We all live in America. We're not all Americans in that sense. But the dominant culture that we're in is the mirror opposite of the culture that Jesus lived and walked in. And so we should be thinking about that. And so sometimes when people say, well, why did Jesus say that? Why did Jesus do that? That doesn't make any sense. It might make perfect sense for the culture that he was in, right? And so we need to know the difference between our culture and the culture of the ancient Near East. And so when you do that, when you know the differences, then when you read scripture, and not just the narratives, but especially the parables, especially parables, they take on a new and deeper meaning. And so we need to be students of ancient Near East culture. Like one example would be weddings. Weddings are very different.

[20:26] And we had this, the teaching about the first marriage. The first miracle of Jesus. That was a very different type of wedding than we have, right? And so this is one thing that I've tried to do for us. Pastor Victoria tries to do for us. So I filled my library with some really fascinating books. That's why there's, have you wondered why there's a stack of books here? Yes, now you know why.

[20:46] That you are free to borrow. You're free to borrow them. And I'm going to tell you what they are, because this is just a little like a commercial for these books that you can borrow. This one's called Modeling Early Christianity. It's a social scientific study of the New Testament and its context. And so if you like social science or history or sociology, then you'd be like, well, what was the, you know, it's more of a reference book, because there's different papers in it written by different scholars. But you could go, oh, how did early Christians structure themselves? So then when you read the letters of the Apostle Paul, you go, ah, I get what he was at, right? This one's called The First Urban Christians. Christians. Christians lived in cities in the Roman Empire. The Roman city was an amazing culture. And it was very diverse. And it was very amazing. This is called The Cultural World of Jesus. And this is written by a Catholic scholar. And he has a different reading for each Sunday of the lectionary. And I use this often when I prepare my sermons. Here's Jerusalem as Jesus Knew It. You can take a look at that. That's the First Urban Christian second edition. Judaism and Christianity. First century Rome. You can take a look at that one.

[22:01] Tells you a lot. And you read the Book of Romans or the letters, Paul's letter to the Romans. You'll be like, aha. I'm beginning. It's all coming together. Palestine in the time of Jesus. Social structures and social conflicts. So much of culture was conflict at that time. The rise of Christianity. A sociologist reconsiders history. The ancient Roman city.

[22:21] Poverty and leadership in the later Roman Empire. And the Jews. This one is really good. Jews in the time of Jesus. How did Jesus interact with Jews? How did Christians and Jews interact with each other? How did they structure their lives? Then it makes sense. When you start reading the parables, you start reading Jesus's interaction. And Jesus being Jewish, you start to understand. So you can borrow any of these books. Come find me. Or I'll just leave this pile here. You come after the worship service and take one home. Because this is what we need to do to really understand our own faith, is to understand the culture in which our faith was born. OK?

[22:58] Now, one other thing to note is that Jesus's culture had strong preferences for one end. Even though there were strong preferences in his culture for that one end of the cultural spectrum, do you notice that Jesus is often breaking cultural norms? Right? So even though he's in a culture that really, it's probably, more of a guilt, more of an honor-shame culture than a guilt culture. And that's not quite the exact overlay, but it was very much about shame. Jesus did some really shameful things. And he hung out with some really shameful people. He sat at table with tax collectors and prostitutes. And that would bring incredible amounts of shame onto his mother, his family, his village. They'd be like, what is he doing?

[23:58] And that's the other thing that we really need to pay attention to, is that Jesus, even though he was from a culture, and that the best parts of those cultures were good, Jesus also spoke prophetically against his own culture. Because it needed correcting. Right? Usually, and this is usually what was happening, when Jesus spoke against his own culture, it was to prevent the powerful in the culture from exploiting those without power. So that was often the move that Jesus made. Right? The tax collectors and the prostitutes were pushed out to the edges. So they weren't in the group. But they needed to be in the group somehow. They needed to be cared for so that they didn't go into that life. Right? And so there was a failure somewhere. And so instead of shunning them and shaming them, Jesus said, I'm going to bring them in and sit at table with them. And thus, I'm going to actually live into the group and show them that they're not beyond God's love. They're not beyond God's care.

[24:59] Now, let's see. I just got a text message. I'm wondering if that's anybody. No, it's not. It's not. OK. I thought it was somebody sending a prayer request or something on our spectrum. All right. One example is our first reading. Did you hear Jesus yelling at the Pharisees? OK. That's very counter-cultural, to say that directly to somebody else like that and to insult them, particularly, somebody. And the Pharisees were a high honor person. And the Pharisees were high honor people. Why? They were well-learned. They were admired by the people, generally. I mean, we think the word Pharisee is a bad word. But people liked the Pharisees back then. Generally, they liked the Pharisees. The Pharisees were patriots. And we all love patriots, don't we? Right? We love patriots. The Pharisees were patriots because they spoke out against Roman rule. And so here Jesus is insulting, like he was insulting the Pharisees. He called them hypocrites. He called them whitewashed tombs. It's like, that's fighting words. Why is Jesus doing that? Because they're using their power to push down the weak. So he's countering his own culture and saying, normally we would never do this, but we have to do it right now. We have to call these people to account.

[26:16] And so he speaks to them in this really strong language. He condemns them. Because they're not really living into the culture that God has designed. So Jesus is always challenging culture. And again, like I said, a few other examples would be sharing table fellowship with undesirable or shamed people, telling people who wanted to follow him to skip their father's funeral.

[26:41] Isn't that interesting? A would-be follower of Jesus came to him and said, I want to follow you, but first let me go bury my father. A huge cultural group, honor, hierarchy, commitment that this person had that you would never know that you would never miss your father's funeral. In fact, you could travel on the Sabbath and break the Sabbath rule to go to your father's funeral. It was that important. And Jesus said, let the dead bury their own dead, but you come and follow me. So that was like a thunderclap. I mean, we read it and we go, oh, yeah, he's got to think that Jesus is more important than his family obligations. That was a thunderclap that day when Jesus said that. That was like, whoa, who can follow you then?

[27:26] And the person pushing against this is saying, yes, honoring your father is super important, but you're in this moment now where you need to follow me. I'm on my way to Jerusalem. I'm on my way to the cross. I'm on my way to do this work. And if you want to be part of that, you have to drop everything else in this moment, OK?

[27:45] At one point, Jesus says that his disciples are more his family than his actual family. He's like, this is my family. This is my family. Those other people, my mother, my sisters, my brothers, they're not as much my family as these people. Wow, that's like another thunderclap. You don't say that about your own family. When they hear that, they're like, what? How dare you? You're a Nelson or a Johnson or a of Nazareth, whatever Jesus' last name was. We don't know. His last name was of Nazareth. Did you know? You're an of Nazareth, and you talk like that about your own family? Going down to Jerusalem and doing all that crazy stuff? We hear about it up here? No. So that was a big deal.

[28:28] And so a great exercise for us, and something that we try to bake into our sermons from time to time, a really great exercise is, if Jesus were to walk around in our culture right now, who would he yell at? I mean, I have a little list in my mind. I'm not going to say it right now, but I have a little bit of a list. And probably the first one would be me, and I would have to take it. I'm sure I'm doing something wrong. But I'm going to do it. You know, there's a lot of other things in our culture that are not of God that Jesus would push back again. In all the ways that the powerful are exploiting the less powerful in our culture, Jesus would be there. So what would Jesus do? Who would he yell at? Who would he sit at a table with? Who would he touch? Who would he hug? What would Jesus do if he came now? What cultural prophetic word would he bring to us now? And now we'll get, again, we kind of see from our reading from Luke, and we'll ask Caleb to show the one from the sermon, though, the other one. There we go.

[29:36] Jesus is here with Martha and Mary, and there's a strong cultural need for Martha to show hospitality. It's super important. You have a guest in your house. You have to serve them. You have to serve them food. You have to make sure that they're comfortable. That's super important. Her sister Mary is not helping, which is against value, right? And as we already said, she's not helping her sister. There's no mention of who else is there. We presume their brother Lazarus is probably there. Maybe the disciples are there, but we don't know that. But it would be against culture for Jesus to be in a home of two women alone. And it would be against culture for Mary to be in that part of the home where the men do the talking and have their deliberations. But there she is listening to Jesus teach. So there's all sorts of cultural violations going on. And this story at first blush, we don't know if Jesus was there alone with these women. The best bet is that Lazarus at least was there with them. That would have been his cultural obligation to make sure that he's there when another man is in the house. And that's still true in current Near East cultures. It would definitely operate that way. So Martha attempts to get Jesus to put Mary back on task.

[30:48] So here's a task-oriented thing going on a little bit, right? And then an appeal to hierarchy, because she says, as we said earlier, the Lord is here. So the Lord can order and straighten all this out. He can tell her what to do. Now Jesus, in almost every case that I have found where someone wants to communicate through him to somebody else, he never does that. That's what I've seen. I just have never seen him ever do that. He just doesn't go there. Instead, he says, you know what? Mary is actually doing the appropriate thing for the moment that they are in, for the moment that they are in. There are other times when Mary needs to be task-oriented, where Mary needs to be about hospitality, where Mary needs to be about doing. But in this moment, she has to be about being. And in the ancient Near East, they had their own spectrum that Brian mentioned earlier exactly, right? That how you spend your time and maybe a little bit of your free time, you can call it doing versus being. And being is time that's more contemplative and open to the spontaneous moment. It was preferred by men when they could do it. So they would sit at the city gate or the market, and they'd discuss things with their neighbor. But they did actually at times have to go and do,

[32:00] because they had to provide. But doing is task-oriented. It's doing things that are tasks and jobs. Women were expected to be doing almost all the time. And so there's actually a reverse spectrum in that time. Men were supposed to prefer being and then doing was their sort of fallback. Women were expected to be doing. They were expected to be doing. Almost all the time. And if they had a little bit of spare time, they might be being. But they had a whole lot less spare time, because they were expected not only to take care of children, but to clean the house. And it was not an egalitarian culture in that respect at all either, as we know.

[32:41] So Martha is doing. And she thinks that's the right thing to be at that moment. She thinks that's what's expected of her. She notices that her sister is just being in that moment. Which is a man's... She notices that her sister is kind of taking on a man's role. That's kind of uncomfortable. Very interesting. All sorts of things going on. Isn't it interesting? There's just a few verses of scripture. The cult, when we unpack the cultural things that are going on in here, it's really fascinating. Why is Jesus going against type? Why is Mary going against type in this moment? Why is Jesus pushing back? So Jesus... And so Martha wants Jesus to reverse that. He wants to reverse this. Make Mary into a doer instead of a be-er in the moment. And Jesus pushes against culture. And he says, actually, Mary has chosen the better part in this moment. I'm here. She's listening to me. That was the right thing to do in this moment. So that would be the other thing is that our interaction with culture shouldn't just be sort of robotic like we always do what the culture dictates from us. There are moments in time when we're called outside of culture, that we're in or outside of even our preferences, or our baked-in DNA, of how we were raised to actually express ourselves in a different way.

[33:56] And Mary was open to that, and Martha wasn't. But it doesn't mean Mary's better than Martha. It's just that Mary chose the right thing at that moment. Okay? So finally, I want to take a look at our second reading, and we'll put that up there next. And that's, this is the Apostle Paul. And so we realize that we have a culture. We realize there's other cultures. And the big reveal here is that even within a church, there are multiple cultures, right? Our church has multiple cultures. The hands went up differently earlier. It was really interesting. And it won't do for the majority culture to just ignore other cultures that are present in the church or expect them to conform, say, well, if you come to this church and this is the majority culture, and this is how we make decisions, and this is how we talk about things, then you all, you'll just have to learn to adapt, because this is the most comfortable for us, clearly, who are in the majority, whoever that is. No. We need to develop this cultural fluency and find a way to honor all of us, all the cultures in our body, when we make decisions, when we have table fellowship. What do our potlucks look like, right? Right? What does other fellowship look like? What does it look like when we teach?

[35:03] What does it look like when we preach? What does it look like when we care for each other? We need to be culturally fluent in how those things are done in other cultures within our own body, or even within cultures that aren't yet part of our body, because there's a missionary and evangelistic aspect to this, too. So the Apostle Paul talks about this. He says this very quickly. He has a preferred culture, but he's trained himself to speak in the language of other cultures and other people for the sake of the gospel. And so you see right there on the screen, he says, I'm free, I've made myself a slave to all, to the Jews I became as a Jew, to those under the law I became under the law, to those outside the law I became as one outside the law, to the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I've become all things, and it's hard to do, I've become all things to all people, so that I might win the weak. But by all means, save some. So Paul's saying is, my own culture, that's great, it's important, but I can set aside my culture in the moment for something far more important, which is the spread of the gospel to other people. So that, he says, I do this for the sake of the gospel so that I may share in its blessings.

[36:11] And that's going to be, there's going to be more on this, we're done now, there's more on this in the weeks to come, but this is the model for us. We develop an awareness of our own culture, and then we develop an awareness of other cultures, we understand that Jesus speaks prophetically to all cultures, and then we forge a life together that honors all the God-given cultures in our body, and we do that for the sake of the gospel. Let's pray. Father, thank you again for this word, for this book that you've given us to travel together in for a season. Father, help us to both love and enjoy the cultures we're in, but also be able to pivot out of them when you call us to, for the sake of the gospel. And we ask all this in Jesus' name.