Family Service

<a href=www.vheadline.com>Venezuela's Electronic News Posted: Sunday, May 25, 2003 By: The Very Reverend Roger Dawson May 25, Easter 6, 2003 sermon by The Very Reverend Roger Dawson Dean of St. Mary's Anglican Cathedral, Caracas

Coming here to Venezuela was a real culture shock for me. I had traveled about a bit but mostly within Europe. I have been to Africa twice, but only for a short time, and I lived abroad for a few months, but that was in Europe. I visited the USA on a couple of occasions, but nothing really prepared me for Venezuela.

Yet I believe that Venezuela is like many other countries in Latin and South America. It isn't that Venezuela is completely different to anywhere else, but it is very different to anywhere else that I have ever lived for any length of time. People think differently, have different expectations, and have different priorities and most importantly, have different ways of achieving those priorities.

I don't think that I am alone in my first reaction, which was to believe that I was right in my way and they were wrong in theirs. In time we make adaptations and, more than that, we adopt the new ways as being our new norm.

If that were not true, we would not have to experience a reverse culture shock when we return to the place from where we first ventured forth to come and live here. Rick and Ros Reycraft, who lived here in Caracas for six years, and with whom we spent a few days after Easter in Cincinnati, are assisting in a course of encounters for Proctor and Gamble, for whom Rick works, to deal with this special problem of reverse culture shock for people returning to the United States.

What happens is that what we regard as a sacred tradition is suddenly looks as though it is obsolete. I don't mean something found in church. I am talking about a way of doing things that has become so much part of us, we take it for granted that this is the way it is done, and to do it any other way must be wrong, no matter what.

This may actually be true of course ... we may do things in a particular way or come from a country that behaves in a particular fashion, and it could be that this is the very best way to do whatever it is that we do ... but what use is that if suddenly we find ourselves in a place that behaves quite differently.

It is a shock, and our initial response is to say "do it my way" ... but all calls for this fall on deaf ears because the people we would like to address have no idea what our way is. It drives us newcomers to the culture to the point of distraction and after living in a South American country for a year or two years many cannot cope with the culture difference and want to leave in order to get back to the safety of being where there are no great shocks.

Trying to understand the bible is another culture shock. Here we have documents not only written in cultures different to our own, but in times that we hardly can appreciate, because they are so very different.

The New Covenant documents are a whole series of culture shocks as the new faith of the Nazarenes, who were the followers of Jesus, was forged out of the worship of YHWH and pushed into a world beyond its original scope.

Much has been made of Jesus preaching a universal faith, but there is scant evidence for this and his brother James, who took over the running of the new faith after the crucifixion, could not see the possibilities of the faith going beyond the boundaries of Israel. He had a furious argument about circumcision with Paul, who wanted to dispense with this requirement for those who were born into a Roman or Greek culture and who had not been members of the YHWH worshipping community.

In other words, James and the rest of Jesus' brothers and sisters who ruled the Jerusalem church, believed that new converts would either be devout YHWH worshippers already like Philip and Stephen and other converts from the Essenes or like Paul who had been a Pharisee. These people were already circumcised and born what we now call "Jews" ... that is, they followed the religion that came out of Judah. If Gentiles wanted to join the disciples and family of Jesus, then they first had to become "Jews" before becoming Nazarenes, which was just one of the many ways of worshipping the God YHWH.

Last week, I described how the writer of Acts set forth the three point plan by which the world became evangelized. First they went to the Samaritans who were regarded as almost Jews. Second they went to foreigners who had Jewish connections like the Ethiopians and then thirdly they tackled the Gentiles who previously had no Jewish connections. The writer of Acts is an admirer of Paul, and supports his call for the inclusion of Gentiles without circumcision. The result of the dispute between Paul and James is settled by allowing Gentiles to be admitted to the faith without circumcision, but Paul has to make a large financial payment to the church in Jerusalem; something that takes him some years to accomplish. The settlement is based on the theological argument that we are all children of Abraham who came to an agreement with God before the circumcision requirement was introduced.

In today's reading from Acts we discover that the "circumcised believers were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles." My belief is that the circumcised would more than likely have been horrified rather than just plain astounded. Of course the writer is not going to say "horrified" because he is a Pauline argument supporter, but here we have a classic case of culture shock. People who have earnestly believed all their lives that their bodies should be marked out as belonging to God's Covenant by circumcision, now find that, in this outside alien culture, the new converts don't need this mark. The mark has become obsolete.

What does this say about them? We have many modern similarities such as when the liturgists brought the language of the Prayer Book and the Bible into modern times. It made some think that what they had treasured all their lives had been made obsolete and they have clung to the old in the belief that if it were good for them and their fathers it is good for all time. They could not make the break with the past. Yet here in Acts, and in the Letters of Paul, we find that the culture barriers are being broken all the time in order to bring the message of Christ to a wider audience.

Of all the people in the world who should know about culture shock, it is the members of the Christian Church. They broke the barriers to take the gospel into the Gentile world, they split along culture lines of Eastern and Western Christendom, and they broke again to form the Protesting Churches in the 16th Century.

In spite of all this ... in spite of all that, the New Covenant documents scream out about change, people resist the change because they believe that what they first believed must be better.

Here is the evidence before you ... if the church is to grow then sometimes the culture barrier has to be breached.

What we have to learn is that it actually doesn't make the old obsolete; it just shows us that it is different.

According to Acts ... if we resist the change we resist the work of the Holy Spirit.

Is that what we want?