A culture of love

“Culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, encompassing language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts,” Cristina De Rossi, an anthropologist at Barnet and Southgate College in London, told Live Science.

Culture encompasses religion, food, what we wear, how we wear it, our language, marriage, music, what we believe is right or wrong, how we sit at the table, how we greet visitors, how we behave with loved ones, and a million other things.

Culture is what anthropologists study, and they look at the differences between cultures: what makes each culture unique. Sociologists look at the structure of groups and societies. While a sociologist and an anthropologist both study people collectively, anthropologists focus on culture, and what makes it different and unique.

The term “Western culture” has come to define the culture of European countries, as well as those that have been heavily influenced by European immigration, such as Canada and the United States. You may have heard terms like Eastern culture, Latin culture, Middle Eastern culture, African culture, Aboriginal culture. Cultural groups can be very large, and within a cultural group there can be a variety of cultures, sometimes called subcultures, and within each of those cultures there can be cultures, and so on and so on. All organizations, institutions, groups, countries, communities, extended families and nuclear families have their own culture.

Our congregation has a culture: its own unique way of being together. It has its rules, formal and informal; its way of worshipping; its rituals; its way of socially interacting; its favourite music; its special events. Even the food we eat after church — when we’re allowed to eat food after church — is unique to us. And while it may be similar to other churches, or to other Presbyterian churches, we have our own unique culture.

Different parts of Canada have different cultures. If you’re from Edmonton and you move to Newfoundland, or PEI, or Cape Breton, or Quebec, it can be a profound culture shock to find out they do things quite differently there. When I moved to PEI, one of the first questions people would ask me was, “Who’s your father?” That seemed to be very important in PEI.

And another difference: when I was in PEI as a minister, I would wear dress pants and a clergy shirt every day. When I’m in the office here, I wear jeans, except on Sundays. Expectations of ministers vary widely: from denomination to denomination; from congregation to congregation; whether you’re urban or suburban or rural; from large congregation to small congregation; and with the particular theology of the congregation, or the part of Canada in which you live. Because all of those have their own cultures.

In 1956, Horace Mitchell Miner wrote and published a paper entitled “Body Ritual among the Nacirema.” He described a little-known tribe living in North America, and the curious practices this group performs. He talked about medicine men and women, a charm box, the mouth ritual. Who were the Nacirema? “American,” spelled backwards. It was about the average North American, and particularly the mouth ritual of brushing their teeth. It was a fun way, basically, to use anthropology to look at one’s own society.

In 1998 the movie Krippendorf’s Tribe was released, starring Richard Dreyfuss. Krippendorf is an anthropologist who’s given a hundred thousand dollars to look for the last lost tribe in New Guinea, and he can’t find it. His wife gets sick and dies, and he spends most of the money looking after his children. With the money gone and a deadline approaching, he creates a mythical tribe, and films his own children, himself, and a fellow anthropologist played by Jenna Elfman, in increasingly imaginative rituals. There are a couple of funny scenes in the movie, which is really pretty over the top and unrealistic and stupid. But he creates his own culture.

Culture is important, and I wanted to talk about culture today because I think it’s germane to our scripture texts. When Jesus says to Simon and Andrew, “Come after me, and I will teach you to fish for people,” and when Jesus calls James and John to follow him, what Jesus was doing was inviting them to leave one culture and enter another culture: a culture that scholars have often called the kingdom of God.

The book of Jonah is a kind of comedic parable about the resistance to this culture, the kingdom of God. And our brief epistle text mentions that “the present form of this world is passing away.” It’s about the fact that the culture of Christ and the culture of this world are different.

Culture might actually be a better word for us than kingdom. In Jesus’ day the world was mostly ruled by kings — mostly male — who had kingdoms. Mostly they were dictators, and sometimes these dictators were propped up and supported by, and in league with, the religious institutions. And the kingdom of God was an alternative to these kingdoms of autocratic rulers. This new kingdom was about love, where everyone was valued and important and loved. The values of the kingdom were non-violence, peace, sharing, equality, love and compassion, and these values were the values of God. That’s what God was about.

Today the word kingdom may not be quite as applicable. It’s a masculine term; we don’t say “queendom.” Most countries now are not ruled by kings and queens, and in those that have them, the laws are not made by them; they’re not autocrats. More democratic processes are in effect. And the word kingdom might imply that God is autocratic, a dictator, when God invites and loves and doesn’t control or force. And the word kingdom is a masculine term, and many scholars now do not think of God as exclusively masculine.

So maybe this term could be used: a culture of love. When Jesus said “Follow me,” he was inviting people into a culture of love.

What would it be like to live in a culture of love? Where everyone in that culture listened to you, loved you, appreciated your unique differences, respected you; didn’t get angry when you made a mistake; talked things through; freely shared; where somebody always understood what you were going through; where you weren’t put down; where no one intentionally hurt you or said bad things about you; and where food and money and resources were all shared, so everybody had enough.

All of this was implied in some way when Jesus said that Simon and Andrew would fish for people. Much is made of the term “fish for people,” and I don’t know; it may be just a play on words, and the fishing metaphor is more incidental than the focus on the people. Maybe the people are more important than the fishing metaphor. Because maybe Jesus said to the tax collector, “Come with me, and I’ll teach you to collect people”; or to the farmer, “Come with me, and I’ll teach you to nurture and grow people”; or to the carpenter, “Come with me, and I’ll teach you to build up people.” I’m not sure what he said to Simon the Zealot, the nationalist who believed in violence: “Come with me, and I’ll teach you to fight peaceably for people”?

But I do want you to note that Jesus calls his disciples after this phrase: “after John was arrested.” Jesus calls his disciples after John was arrested. The King James Version has “after that John was put in prison,” and the Good News also has “after John had been put in prison.” But if you go back to the Greek, the Greek word is not “prison” at all, and it’s not “arrested” at all. The Greek word is paradothēnai: literally, after John was delivered, or after John was handed over.

This same Greek word is the word that Mark uses to describe Judas in chapter 3, who will hand over or deliver Jesus. It’s the same word Mark uses in chapters 8, 9 and 10 of the gospel, when Jesus says repeatedly that he will be handed over, or delivered, and killed. And it’s the same word in chapter 15, when Jesus is delivered to Pilate.

And I hope you can see the significance. To preach a culture of love, to follow a culture of love, is dangerous. This world, for all it talks about love and sings about love, does not want a culture of unconditional love for all people, and it will kill those who actually follow it. It’s not dangerous to talk of love, or to talk of romantic love. It’s dangerous to talk of love for everyone — including the poor, including enemies, including the disenfranchised.

And one other thing I want to point out. When Jesus asks them to believe, he doesn’t say here, “Believe in me,” or “Believe this doctrine.” He says, “Believe in the good news.” He wants them to believe in this culture of love: that God loves everyone; that God is not here to get us, but to save us from hurting each other; that there’s another way to be in this world, a different culture. And in order to get there, to this culture of love, we literally have to repent — that is, turn around and go in a new direction, the direction of love for everyone.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes it bothers me when people say, “I believe in Jesus,” or “I believe in the resurrection,” or “I believe in the Bible,” or “I believe in the virgin birth,” but they don’t seem to believe in the gospel. They don’t believe in love for all, and for enemies. If we really believe in Jesus — if I really believe in Jesus — we have to believe in this good news for all people, and trust Jesus enough to do what Jesus asked us to do.

Jesus invites us into a new culture, where our interactions, our groups, our faith, our morals and our ethics — maybe even the way we share food, and do arts and music, and do family, and do justice — are all guided by love.

And just to put a concrete point to entering a culture of love, we have the story of Jonah in the lectionary today.

Scholars argue over the book of Jonah: over its genre, and whether there was ever really a historical Jonah. There’s no record of anybody ever going to Nineveh to preach, or of Nineveh ever repenting. Is this a made-up story? Is it a parable? Did it actually happen? We don’t really know how much is historical or not. But it does have the function of a parable: a story that has levels and depths, that makes us think; a story with a surprise twist at the end. And it’s told kind of like a tall tale. Several things in the story are very hard to believe. Being swallowed by a whale, or a fish, is one of them. The fact that he runs away and goes in a different direction when God calls him. The size of the city, which is roughly sixty miles wide, with a hundred thousand people. It’s just very different.

But the story goes that Jonah is called to Nineveh. Now, Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, and Assyria was like the great evil empire that completely decimated the northern kingdom of Israel and killed hundreds of thousands of Jews, so that really there was nothing left there; no northern kingdom remained. To go to Nineveh to preach would be like a Jew going to Berlin during World War Two to preach.

And Jonah gets in a boat and heads the other way. And we all think he’s scared; that’s why he doesn’t want to go to Nineveh. Who’d want to go there? You’d be crazy to go there.

God sends a storm, a storm so bad that the sailors realize it must be sent by God. They cast lots to figure out who the bad guy is, and the lot falls to Jonah. “Fess up,” they say. And Jonah fesses up and says it’s his fault; he’s running away from God. So they throw him overboard, as Jonah tells them to, and the storm ceases. A fish comes to rescue Jonah and swallows him, and for three days and nights — like someone else who spent three days and nights in the belly of the earth — Jonah is in the belly of the fish. And then he’s spat up on the shore, and Jonah decides to go to Nineveh.

The city is humongous. He walks twenty miles into the city, a day’s journey, and he preaches that if they don’t change, if they don’t repent, God’s going to do something terrible to them. And a miracle happens: every single last one of them repents. Even the animals repent.

And Jonah is mad. He didn’t want them to be saved. He wanted God to send fire on them. They were the enemy. And then he says the real reason: “I didn’t want to come, God, because I knew you were going to forgive them. I didn’t want them to be forgiven. I wanted them to burn.”

And then he goes up on a hill to sulk. It’s hot and dry, and God makes a plant grow up really super quick and give him shade, and it cools Jonah, and he likes it. And then God causes a worm to get the plant, and the plant dies, and Jonah is angry. And God says to Jonah: “You’re so angry over one plant, but you don’t give a hoot about a hundred and twenty thousand people and their animals. But I care about them.”

It’s one of the most amazing books in the Bible. The enemy is loved by God. God’s grace goes out to all. The culture of love is for everyone.

But not everyone can stand a culture of love. We sometimes can’t stand love for everyone. We want people to be punished. We want the people who hurt us to be hurt. We think it’s justice when the bad guy gets killed, or wiped out, or exterminated, or pays, or suffers. Yet Jesus says that’s not a culture of love. From the cross he says, “Father, forgive them.” And we have trouble with that sometimes.

The interesting thing about Jonah: Jonah, the good Jew, believes in the commandments. He believes there is only one God. He believes in not making idols or graven images. He believes that one should not take the Lord God’s name in vain. And one of the reasons he can’t forgive the Assyrians is not just their violence, but that they don’t know the commandments. They don’t accept the law of Moses. How can people be forgiven, or shown mercy, who don’t know about worshipping the only God; who aren’t keeping from making idols or images, or from taking the Lord’s name in vain?

But when he doubts that God could show mercy to these idolaters, he becomes an idolater himself. Instead of worshipping God, he has now raised the law and the commandments as his idol, instead of God.

And religious groups and Christians do it all the time. The Bible, or the law, or our rules, or our beliefs become more important than the God we worship, and we use the Bible, or the law, or the rules, or our beliefs to get the bad guy: to hurt, to punish or exclude people. When we do that, we stop worshipping the God of love, and take God’s name in vain. When we use God for other than love, other than peace, other than reconciliation — when we use God’s name, or the Bible, or the rules, or our faith, or our beliefs to hurt — we’re creating our own idol, blaspheming the Holy Spirit. We’re saying that our culture is more important than God’s culture of love.

And that is why God’s culture is different from the world’s culture. Human culture nearly always wants to find the bad guy, and ignore the beam in our own eye. And the church as an institution, and we as individuals, have to confess that so-called Christian culture has not always been the same as God’s culture of love.

Yes, it’s true. Very few churches, very few Christian communities, are a total culture of love, following Jesus: leaving a culture of punishment for unlimited grace. Entering a culture of love doesn’t make us perfect, and we all struggle with Jesus and his culture of love — a culture that takes Jesus to the cross. And we hesitate. I hesitate, to love so deeply, so unreservedly, so completely, that I risk my life.

You know, when Jesus found James and John, do you know what they were doing? They were mending nets.

It is yet another metaphor. “Come and follow me,” Jesus says, “and I will teach you to mend. I will teach you to mend and heal relationships, to mend and heal souls, to mend and heal a broken world.” And it’s by following, and entering, and living a culture of unconditional love.

Amen.