Ephesians 5:8-14
April 6, 2014
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Only two days ago, I along with 32 others returned from Italy—viewing and learning from the religious art created during the medieval, renaissance and post-reformation times. Before we left, our passports were checked that we were from the US. Before we were allowed to enter Italy, the Italian authorities verified that we were US citizens.
Where are you from? It’s a common question asked when you want to travel outside of your home country. It’s a common question asked at parties or anytime strangers get together. For us Asian Americans, we are often asked that question when people are uninformed that Americans are not just Anglo-Saxon Caucasians.
In a world that’s increasingly mobile and increasingly global, it’s a question that is a lot more complex than it used to be. While our Italy group had people who were white and African American, most of us were Asian Americans. Probably the Italians thought that we were really Chinese from the economic powerhouse of affluent China.
According to a Pew Research study, 6 out of 10 Americans have moved to a new community at least once in their lives, and the definition of where one’s “home” is has become more fluid. We have moved 4 times and “home” could be New York, Boston, Philadelphia or San Francisco.
38% of Americans do not consider the place they are now living to be “home.” Some consider “home” to be where they were born and raised. Others say it’s where they lived the longest, where their family comes from or where they went to high school.
And if there’s domestic confusion about “home,” it’s even more apparent in the highly globalized world where international travel and living abroad is now quite common. My cousin’s daughter lives in Scotland. Pauline Tom’s daughter lives in Canada. Dick and Anna Wong’s daughter Karina lives in Italy and we met her and their baby Matteo in Florence. Whereas previous generations tended to stay put unless someone was in the military, the foreign service or on the mission field, emerging generations are now increasingly more likely to spend at least part of their lives living in a completely different culture in another country. The children growing up in these cultures are being observed to have different characteristics from any past generations.
Third Culture
Sociologists and anthropologists call these young nomads, “Third Culture Kids.” These kids are people who have spent significant parts of their developmental years outside of their parents’ culture. They are able to frequently build relationships to all of the cultures while not having full ownership in any. Although elements from each culture may be assimilated into these Third Culture kids, the sense of belonging is in relationship to others of similar background. That’s why Karina brought along her friend, Christine to help her travel to Florence because there are only 3 Americans in Cinque Terre.
If the “first culture” is the parent’s home culture, and the “second culture” is the new culture in which they are now living, then the “third culture” is a kind of hybrid of the two, leading these children to pause a minute or two when asked the question, “Where are you from?”
These “Third Culture Kids” often don’t call any place “home,” they call it their “passport country.”
Apostle Paul
When we read the letters by Paul, you get the sense that he is like a “third culture guy.” He was born in Tarsus in Cilicia, a Roman center for trade, and educated in Jerusalem, a thoroughly Jewish culture. After his conversion on the road to Damascus, Paul winds up traveling throughout the Mediterranean world to a myriad of other cultures from Asia Minor, to Greece, to Rome. We were there just three days ago! In each place, he learns how to communicate using the symbols and conventions of that particular culture in order to bring the good news about Jesus to them.
Paul’s passport would certainly have looked like it had been stamped with many visas and probably including some blood-stained and torn pages from all of the beatings, water damage from shipwrecks and maybe a few government notations to put him on a watch list as a potential troublemaker. Paul never had TSA Pre-Check.
But even as he moved from place to place, Paul recognized that the three cultures he was dealing with weren’t really about where one was born, what borders one crossed or what accent one used. Instead Paul was looking at culture through the lens of Christ and the kingdom of God, which gave him a very clear sense of home as well as a way of relating to whatever culture he found himself in.
As he wrote to the Ephesians, Paul gave them a lesson on what it means to be Christ-followers who live in the world but aren’t actually from it. He gives us a look at the three cultures in which every follower of Jesus lives.
1st Culture—Relationship
For those who follow Christ, the first culture, our “home,” isn’t as much about location as it is about relationship. In Ephesians 3:14, Paul reminds his readers that it is God the Father “from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name.” From Genesis we learn that we are created in God’s image, to be in relationship with God and reflect his glory through our life and work. As such, Paul says, we are made to be “children of light” (v. 7).
Our home is in God, and wherever we find ourselves we recognize that God is already there. For Paul, being at “home” is to be “filled with the Spirit” of God. It’s a place where the custom is to sing songs of praise and thanksgiving to God (vv. 19-20). It’s this “home” that produces in us the “fruit of the light”—all that is “good and right and true” (v. 9) and “pleasing to the Lord” (v. 10).
This is the way we were meant to live—at home with God. Notice that Paul doesn’t say here that heaven is our permanent home and that we are just passing through this world to get to heaven. We were created to live with God within creation—a home that’s both our past and our future.
2nd Culture—Darkness
But the problem is that from the beginning, human have wanted to move away from home and away from God. The rebellious nature of sin invites us to look elsewhere for a home where we can be autonomous and create a name for ourselves. When that happens we become “darkened in our understanding, alienated from the life of God because of our ignorance and hardness of heart” (4:18).
Sin moves us from “light” to “darkness” and to a culture that is really a form of exile from home. The second culture of sin has its own language and customs as well. Paul calls them the “unfruitful works of darkness” (v.11) and lists some of the accents they take on: fornication, impurity, obscene, silly and vulgar talk, drunkenness, and debauchery (vv. 3-4, 18).
It’s pretty easy for us to pick up the way of life in this second culture. We can begin to make our home there to the point that we forget from where it is we came and to what family we belong. We can become confused and muddled to the point that we no longer know who we are. Like the Ephesians, we can become so much “in darkness” that we forget that we are actually children of light (v. 8).
But here’s another thing: these two cultures are so delineated or different from each other that it’s possible to be so entrenched in one that we never engage the other. Take the first culture when those who only stay spiritually at home. If all I’m focused on is my personal home with God, for example, then I’ll never reach out to those in the second culture who need to hear the good news and need a new life. We can wind up having a worldview that’s all about our own isolationist, stay-at-home, Jesus-and-me way of life. This is the purpose of the Reception Ministry that will take place this afternoon—to reach out to the people who may be in the second culture.
Instead, we need to live in a third culture that’s more like the one that Jesus describes for his disciples—a culture that is always on the go into the world. One of the great misquotes of Jesus concerns what he said about the relationship of his kingdom of light to the present world of darkness. Most often, Jesus gets quoted as saying to Pontius Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). The Greek, however, clearly has Jesus saying, “My kingdom is not from this world.”
It’s not that Jesus is focused on a heavenly kingdom somewhere far away that’s our permanent home address. Instead, Jesus says his kingdom isn’t the kind of second culture kingdom that the present world or Pontius Pilate makes its home in—it’s not from this world—but it is a kingdom that is certainly for this world. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have taught us to pray, “your kingdom come, you will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10).
3rd Culture—Engagement
So, according to Jesus and Paul, we need to become “Third Culture Christians.” Our citizenship, our passport country, may be heavenly in nature, but our job is to colonize a dark world with the light of Christ, the Savior who is coming into the world to dwell with us forever and to finally make all cultures one in his kingdom (Phil. 3:20). It’s the light of his kingdom that makes everything “visible, for everything that becomes visible is light” (Eph. 5:13), a kingdom where those who were dead in darkness will be raised again because the light of Christ shines on them (V. 14).
“Sounds good, pastor,” you might be saying but how do we do it? You say, “We have ‘culture shock’.” Culture shock is “a state of bewilderment and distress experienced by an individual who is suddenly exposed to a new, strange or foreign social and cultural environment.”
Before we traveled to Italy, we had three orientation sessions followed by an Italian dinner at Stinking Rose in North Beach. We read about Italy and the places we’ll be visiting. We went online to see what is the weather like. We exchanged dollars for Euros and tried to figure out what the exchange rate is. For us to enjoy Italy, we went through a series of discoveries and orientations in order for us to survive the culture of Italy.
If the first culture is the way we are meant to be as children of light at home with God and the second culture is the place we can’t seem to resist to live where there’s the sin of darkness, then it’s this third culture that requires us to live with a foot in both worlds.
Paul cautions the Ephesians not to associate with people in the second culture, to not be like them, but that doesn’t mean we don’t engage second culture people with the good news (v. 7). We identify with second culture sinners because we’ve been there ourselves, but we also remember where we’ve come from and that our real home is with God in God’s new creation, a home made possible by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
We aren’t from the world of darkness, but we are certainly made to do Christ’s work for that world—a world that Christ loves enough to die for—For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that whosoever believes in him shall never die but have everlasting life (John 3:16).
What does living in that third culture mean for us? We take our accents of love, compassion and forgiveness rather than condemnation to people in the second culture. We expand our circle of friends to not just include other Christians, but to those who may come to know Christ through us. We take our passports going anywhere God sends us with the possibilities that our passports will become worn out, blood-stained, tattered and torn because God has sent us out. We go out to places like Italy, Thailand, being visible as light because Christ has shined on us. And after we have come home we know that God is already here.
The phrase, “There’s no place like home,” has been made famous by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, but it originally came from the song, “Home! Sweet Home! written 180 years ago. When we landed in SFO on Friday, we said, “There’s no place like home!”
It’s a big, wide, wonderful world in which we live, created by God for us to dwell with him. May we be Third Culture Christians who live and work in the world for God’s Glory and light within it!
There is no place like home with the Lord!
Let us pray.
Thank you, God for granting us the invitation to live at home with you in Christ and the mercy and forgiveness when we fall into temptation and live in darkness. But may even these times provide us with the capacity to become “Third-Culture Christians” to reach out and proclaim Good New for the whole world. We pray for that day when heaven and earth are one. Amen.