Acts 10: 34,35; Acts 17:22-25

There is a new show on tv.  I usually keep my tv watching limited to pbs, the soccer channel and a few clever sitcoms, but I had to sit down for a few minutes for this one.  It’s called the Shah of Beverly Hills and it was about a psychobabbling gay Iranian American Muslim who visits his estranged Jewish Iranian American father and grandmother in New York.  Well, welcome to the twenty-first century. Let’s just say Muslims have issues with Jew, Jews have issues with Muslims and as far as the relationship between gays and major religions, let’s just quote Facebook and say:”It’s Complicated.”  His grandmother calls him a “goy,” a gentile, but he protests: “I’m from Beverly Hills, I have been to a lot more bar-mitzvahs than to mosques.”  Where am I going with this?  Well, where I am going with this is to the idea that faith and culture always mix. I want the Church to be honest about that and because the Church isn’t I think it gets just as neurotic as a lot of us. We can learn from our Mexican American brothers and sisters next door.  Their rituals drip with the culture of Aztec history and the brutal Spanish occupation.  They have vibrant smells, sounds and carved images of a rich culture.  This church here is different. It expresses the simplicity of Japanese spacial sensibility and the stark minimalism of Calvinism.  The new two stained glass windows are a stretch for some people. Then we have the flag over here.  That’s culture. It probably doesn’t belong here, but it has always been here as far as I know, perhaps to show that our members too were Americans even though they weren’t treated as such. I see it more like we as a congregation are a ship that flies the flag of the port it is visiting. Faith and culture mix. They have always mixed.  They mixed even in the days of the Council of Jerusalem two thousand years ago.  Local Jewish apostles who had been disciples of Jesus and who want to take the Good News to their fellow Jews as Jesus mostly did meet Paul and cohorts, Paul a Roman citizen Jew born in Turkey who challenges the young church to take the Gospel to everyone which meant the Jewish Church would almost immediately become a minority.  That his perspective won out saved the Church and let it grow into what it has been and will be.

Similarly, this congregation had to decide whether it would remain a mono-cultural, mono-ethnic community nearly two decades ago.  The fact that it chose to receive all with open arms has been a wise decision also.  It moved from Christian faith and Japanese American culture to a multicultural perspective.  I can now make a declaration and that is that task has been accomplished: we are a multicultural congregation with individuals of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Mexican, Ukrainian, Russian, Indonesian, Irish, Scottish, Slovenian and Dutch descent and we’re still small. Can you imagine that? I can even say that in the coming years our multicultural make-up will be a given.  So where is our new challenge? Where is the way forward?  A small church is always vulnerable. Every member of the community is vital. It’s a tightly rigged ship. Well actually, we are already well on our way to the future, believe it or not.  We have tackled and gotten a handle on the cultural aspect.  Can we handle the faith part, can we accept the reality not only that there many cultures as in “ethnicities,” you can see them here.  But can we accept that there are different cultures of faith which in turn are intertwined with political culture?  There are people that sit in our pews who were raised devout Baptists and there are those who still consider themselves Roman Catholics. There is also a Buddhist or two and there are even those who admit they don’t know what they believe or believe in nothing.  There are Democrats and there are Republicans (okay maybe more of the former) and you all know those two are the two dominant religions until November. All that too is the post-modern twenty-first century.  This is my question here today: can we like Peter affirm that indeed God has no favorites, none at all, period.  Can we like Jesus Himself say: come to us as you are? Can we say: we will try to present You the Good News with as little cultural distortion as we can.  At the same time, can we say like Paul: let me try to put it in ways that you can understand.  Let me try to speak the language of your culture.  Let me try to say it in ways that do not scare you off or alienate you.  I know you are unsure and skittish about Christian faith. I know you have been hurt.  But come, let us open the panels and let the light shine through, straight from God to you. Let the Holy Spirit work.

Finally, friends, let me say.  The world does not need a Church that it’s stuck in its ways, that’s self-righteous and arrogant.  There is a line from a raunchy movie my kids like to quote where Michael Caine says:” There are only two kinds of people I don’t like: those who don’t accept other people and …The Dutch.”   Let me just say in a twisted paraphrase: the only people who should not be included in the church are the ones who exclude others. But come to think of it, even the excluders are welcome. We’ll just have to make them inclusive.

Friends, it used to be that families were simple and that church was simple. Those days are over. Alienation is inevitable.  Only the church can truly overcome it, but only if it is honest, unpretentious and genuine.  Families are no longer a guaranteed refuge, for they are also a complex source of pain.  That is why more than ever warm we need genuine, inclusive, whole communities (like we are trying to be) where people can come and seek God as they are.  And I am saying “whole” because without the spiritual in our lives we cannot be whole.

Friends, in the post-modern church what we must do is open the door, open our hearts, set the table and set the tone. God is the host. You are all welcome. Thanks be to God. Amen.