Immigrant or Native

August 26, 2007                                                                                                                                                                      Rev. William “Buck” Day

We want to turn to our scripture now; and our scripture is much along the same lines.  We are going to look at the story of Paul and his visit to Athens.  That part of Acts 17 is fairly lengthy, so I wanted to just hit the highlights of it for us regarding what we are going to talk about today – that’s not to say that there are not other parts we are not going to read that are valuable; but we want to read a part of it to set the stage for what we want to talk about today.  There are selected verses from Paul’s visit to Athens from Acts 17 and I invite you to follow along as I read God’s word for us this day. (Acts 17:16-34)

While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols…Some of the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers debated with him.  Some said, “What does this babbler want to say?”  Others said, “He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign divinities.”  This was because he was telling the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.  So they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, and asked him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting?

            ……Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said:  “Athenians!  I can see how extremely religious you are in every way.  For as I went through the city and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription:  TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.  What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.

            “The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands.  He himself gives to all mortals, life, breath and all things.  From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth…. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’  As even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’

            “…..  Now he commands all people everywhere to repent….He will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he appointed and for this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

            When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed, but others said, “We will hear from you again about this.” At that point, Paul left them but some of them joined him and became believers.

This is the word of God.

Thanks be to God!

Would you join me in prayer?

Oh Lord, How good you are and how much you want for us to be faithful to your call in our lives.  Lord we ask that you would quicken our spirits to not only hear what you have to say, but then to give us the courage to act on it.  We ask it in your name.  Amen.

Well in 1995 Bill Gates logged onto the internet for the very first time.  He had bad-mouthed it up to that point, but he quickly realized the significance of it and the amazing changes it would bring to Microsoft.  So he sent an internal email to everyone in the company that was both repentant and prophetic, talking about the upcoming chaotic change that the internet would bring for his company and for all of us.  No doubt that is the case.  I think I read somewhere that in the last five years the amount of information that is available to us has doubled.  We have the internet to thank for all of that.  Now we might say our world is changing.  I think that would be a pretty generic statement to say that our world is changing and we typically think about technology and how it has changed, but we are also talking about other changes than just technology.  We are talking about, I think, what might be also called a cultural shift that is coming into our world and it affects everything that we do.  It affects our buying habits.  It affects the food we eat.  It affects the way we view our world around us.  It also affects how the world looks at the church; even how we look at the church.  I want to give you an example of how much the world has changed in the last forty or fifty years.  I am going to show you two television commercials.  These are television commercials – one from 1956 and then one from 1993.  They are for the same company and I want you to look at just how much things have changed from ’56 to ’93.  O.K.  Just sit back and enjoy.

….Let’s leave the home of this happy breed for a moment and follow a modern American family that isn’t at home.   And no wonder!  The weather is just right for a trip and so is their car, a new Ford, custom-lined Victoria, a new and lower priced Victoria.  It is powered by the mighty Ford V-8 engine.  The road is long but miles don’t matter because this is a car for the open road, and the longer the trip the more they realize what a comfortable and easy handling car Ford is.  This is the first stop they made in 200 miles.  Let’s see how the trip’s going.  “Good afternoon, sir.  Fill her up?”  “If you will, please.  Boy, that’s quite a road.”  “Well you have the car for it.  Every Ford owner that comes in here tells you that.  Hi son.  Tired after that long drive?”  “Nope, I like to ride in our new car.”  “Who doesn’t?  You know, I used to think you needed an expensive car for long distance driving.  We think the ride is just as comfortable in our new Ford.”  “Well you should.  A Ford is engineered like the expensive cars.  I have seen them all up on the grease line; and, believe me, in a Ford you got a lot of car here.”  “What are you doing, Jimmy.”  “I’m watching the man check the oil, Mandy.  You wouldn’t be interested.”  “That’s alright son, she’ll be driving a Ford just like you someday too, probably.  Young lady, how are you enjoying yourself?”  “Fine, thank you!”  “How do you know, you’ve been asleep all the way?  Hey Mister, what’s this in here for?”  “ Well son, that’s extra sound insulation.  That’s one of the reason’s your sister’s been sleeping so soundly.  You won’t find that on other low priced cars.  Well, you don’t need any oil tonight.”  “Good.  O.K. kids, climb aboard.  Thank you very much.”  “Don’t forget your change sir. You’ll be getting plenty of extra change back in this baby.  You know, in a Ford like yours, you win every time you pull up to a gas line.” “Well thank you.  So long.”  “So long. Have a nice trip.”

            When you go in a ’56 Ford, you go first in economy, first in performance and first in safety.  See your Ford Dealer soon.

Do we have anybody that actually owned a car like that?  Alright!  Very good.  O.K.  This commercial was made almost forty years later.  See what the differences are.

(Music and singing)  

Today’s your time; made you look;

made you ask what, what’s that?

 Searching for, what you need;

 trying to find it in that gap;

all going on nearly meets the eye,

try to get your life; just want to get by.

 Life will be around every bend,

just take a look;

come on and look again;

come on and look again,

if you haven’t looked at Ford lately, look again.

A little different.  We could probably spend the next twenty minutes talking about all the differences between those two and what that means and why they’ve been doing it; but I wanted to show you that just to say things are changing.  Things are changing and the changes I think are actually accelerating in some cases.  It is not just me that is making this.., experts are continually telling us that this change, this cultural change, is sweeping over all of our Western culture.  I want to read you a couple points because they are saying that we are actually at a critical point in history of the world.  One of the ones that say that is a theologian by the name of Stanley Grenz and he says this, “Many social observers agree that the Western world is in the midst of change.  In fact, we are apparently experiencing a cultural shift that rivals the innovation that marked the birth of modernity out of the decay of the middle ages.  We are in the midst of a transition from a modern to a post-modern era.  We see signs that monumental changes are engulfing all aspects of contemporary culture.”  Then business guru, Peter Drucker, says this, “Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation.  Within a few short decades society rearranges itself.  Fifty years later there is a new world and the people born then cannot even imagine the world into which their grandparents lived and into which their parents were born.  We are currently living through just such a transition.”  I’m guessing that the young folks of Czechoslovakia are very much in tune with that.  They have no idea what it was like to live under communism.  But that is also happening here in the Western world too.  In the midst of all of these changes, the church many times finds itself on the outside looking in.  So I think the church needs to ask itself, “How does God want us to be involved in this culture, in the midst of all of these changes?”  Because historically the church has not done a very good job in keeping pace with the changes it finds around it.  The result is that the church, probably in the ‘50’s, was very much in the center of culture; but now the church has been pushed to the fringes of culture and marginalized to a great degree.  So people who are outside of the church look at the church and they go, “It’s got nothing to say to me.  It has no relevance in my life.”  I think that could be one of the reasons that we see so many churches closing, and why we see so many mainline denominations losing multiple, multiple millions of members. 

Did you know that today the United States is the third largest mission field for non-believers in the world; it’s third behind China and India.  George Barna who spent a lot of time researching the church, says there is one hundred and twenty million people fourteen years and older who would claim not to be Christians.  So what is the church to do?  What are we to do with the changes in this culture that we find ourselves in?  Usually there are four major ways to respond that churches have done over the years and continue to do even to this day.  The first one is not to acknowledge that there is any change going on at all.  There’s no difference.  We have what we have; we are going to go forward with the way it is; and we will just turn a blind eye to the world around us.  They are putting their proverbial head in the sand.  Another one of those approaches would be to acknowledge the changes that are coming upon us, but to look at those changes and go “these are bad.  These are not good for us, so we have to protect ourselves from these changes because they might somehow infect us.”  So we protect ourselves and make the wall mentality or the bunker mentality.  Another way to think about how churches have responded to this is they see the changes; they look at them and they go, “Oh no, things are changing.  We must go back to the way it was.  So we must pick up our sword and we must fight to restore to the way it was when the church was at the center of culture.  We must do whatever it takes.”  Then there is another way.  There is another way that I think also acknowledges that there are changes in our world and not turning away from them.  It also says that we are not only seeing those changes, we acknowledge that they are not always good; but we also acknowledge there are great opportunities for us, opportunities that did not exist even twenty years ago.  So it is in that notion and with that perspective we wade into this water of this new culture and try to find our way.  I call it taking on the mindset of an immigrant.  We become like an immigrant who goes into a new country for a first time.  As we become an immigrant, then as followers of Christ, we add one more layer on that and we say we become an immigrant in this new culture but we go into it with a missionary mindset.  In other words we go in thinking how can I bring Christ into this world that I really don’t know very well?  We need to learn ways to make Christ relevant in our culture, that’s what a missionary does.  They go in and they scout out what is going on and figure out how they can bring Christ into that world.  That’s where I think our church should be, moving forward.  I believe that is a biblical approach, that’s a biblical approach and we will talk about that in the context of the scripture we just read.  But I want to add one more thing to that before we talk about our text today; and that is because of the fast changing nature in which we find ourselves, this notion of changing our thinking from that of a native to an immigrant needs to be focused on a specific group of people.   That group of people that needs to begin to think like an immigrant is anyone over the age of 38.  Because if you are under 38, and you can give or take a couple of years there, if you are under the age of 38, this is the only world you have ever known.  You’ve been born into this world; you’ve grown up in this fast changing world where everything is up for grabs; and it is very natural for you.  You work in it, you live in it, you know how to bring Christ to it.  But for those of us over 38 it means we need to reorient our thinking.  We need to think about how do we reach this culture that we are very much out of touch with.  What does that mean for the church?  How can we make better connections with our culture?  Because we are immigrants, we are immigrants and we need to figure out how to do that. 

So with that as a backdrop, let’s take a look at Paul and ask, “How did Paul do that and what lessons might that have for us?”  Now Paul was in Athens, he was on his second missionary tour, and he stops in Athens while he is waiting for Silas and Timothy to join him.  He is there for a while and Athens at that point had lost some of its stature as a commercial trading center to Corinth.  It still had lots of culture and was a place of understanding.  So Paul had never been to Athens before and as far as we know he never goes back.  As he enters Athens he enters it as a stranger in a foreign land.  Sound familiar?  Look at what he does from our text today.  He doesn’t walk in and bring his Jewish and Roman understanding and begin to wave it in the face of the Athenians.  Instead he spends time trying to understand this Greek world that he finds himself in.  He spends time walking through the city looking at the idols.  He doesn’t stay in the synagogue but he goes out into the market place, into their world, an important point for us to remember.  As he is walking around interacting with the people in the marketplace, he reads some of their writers, all with the intent of better understanding who these people are that live in Athens.  He takes the time to understand them, who they are; but he doesn’t just stop with the intellectual understanding, he moves on then to the next step.  He begins to look for points where he can connect with people in that culture.  So what does he do?  He goes to the local philosophers which was right up Paul’s alley.  He goes and engages them which opens up other doors which leads to the Areopagus.  He interacts with them and he begins to talk with them about this unknown god that they worship.  He uses it as a jumping off point to talk about Christ.  But if you notice in the text he never uses the word ‘Jesus’; he never quotes scripture, because he knows if he did that that would automatically dismiss his message.  So he looks for another way to try to connect with them, that’s why he quotes their poets; so that it builds some commonality, some connection with them; also that they might hear the message of Christ, which is redemption and adoption.

Paul is looking for those connection points in this new culture.  But then he goes beyond even that and he begins to show them God’s love in the midst of that as well.  We said that he walked through the city and he looked at the idols and it says “he was troubled by what he saw.”  Why?  Because he knows what idols do to the human heart; he knows that idols draw us away from the living God who Paul knew was in his heart.  He knew that stones and metal images had no affect of bringing life into the heart the way Paul knew his life was alive in Christ.  So he sees this idolatry but he doesn’t blast them for this idolatry.  You could look through the other places where Paul talks about it and he does do that; but he usually, I think, does that in the context of the community of faith, but here he takes a different track.  He meets them where they are and talks to them without belittling them, without putting them down.  He is living out what he later writes to the Corinthians, in 1 Corinthians 9, where he says, “I have become all things to all people that I might by all means save some.”  Why?....To do it all for the sake of the gospel.  Paul walks into this kind of cross-cultural situation and becomes an immigrant in their midst.  He doesn’t fall back into his native ways of reaching them.  He looks around and says, “O.K. What is going to connect with the people here?  What is their understanding and how can I bring connection to them?”  He uses the culture as a part and as a way to reach them while showing them the love of Christ in action.  Again I think that is an important point to know. 

So what must a church do?  Let’s bring that home.  What must a church do in our culture to change the cultural shift that we find ourselves in?  We need to begin to think like an immigrant, think like Paul.  We must not be afraid to change our native ways, native ways that have worked before.  We know the fruit that has been born; but as we go longer and longer in time forward those methods will work less and less, I believe.  So we must become like those in our culture in order to win some.  We need to look for those connection points and then love their socks off in the midst of that.

You’re probably thinking, “O.K.” and going “Oh man.”  I will be the first to tell you that what we are talking about is no easy undertaking.  It is not going to be easy.  It’s not going to be comfortable for us who are over that 38 mark, because it means that we are going to have to change sometimes how we do things.  It is not always going to be fun but that is what I think needs to happen if we are going to engage our culture.  We’re not talking about some tweaks in our program, I don’t think.  I think we are talking about trying to ask some hard questions of us as a community of faith.  Questions like:  Who are we as a church?  What are we trying to do?  How do we accomplish that?  How and what are those niches that God has placed in our little corner in the world, you know the Hopkins, Minnetonka, Eden Prairie, Chanhassen, the western suburb area?  What are those places where we can engage the culture effectively for Christ?  What does that mean?  What does that look like?  As we think about those, let me just add this caveat.  It’s not just nice thinking, going, “You know we need to talk about that in the future.”  Because it is not a future thing; it’s a present thing.  In fact, experts tell us how the church answers that question will determine the future of the church.  They tell us that the native generation, those folks under 38, should make up 25% of a congregation if it’s going to have a good chance to survive beyond twenty years.  What does that mean for us at Faith?  We ask that question.  I know you are right now, in your head. What are we going to do about that?  That’s the question we have to wrestle with.  That’s the question we need to talk about.  That’s the question we need to kind of engage.  So I invite you to start on your knees, start by praying about it, saying “God what do you want us to do?  Where would you be leading us?”  Then talk with your friends; talk with staff members; talk with Chris; talk with myself.  That’s what we are about, that’s what we want to be engaging as we move forward.  So I invite you, I invite you to begin to think like Paul, think like Paul and become an immigrant.  Amen.

Let me pray for us and I will also pray for our offering too.

Mighty and holy God, we ask that you would give us wisdom, you would give us discernment, you would allow us to think deeply about your bride called the church and how it could bring your kingdom to this earth.  Lord, help us to live as immigrants, faithful, holy.  Lord we thank you for this offering.  We thank you for it and we ask that you use it and bless it for the ministry of this church and beyond.  We give this all to you in your name.  Amen.