Genesis 1

26 Then God said, “Let us make man[h] in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

27 So God created man in his own image,

in the image of God he created him;

male and female he created them.

28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” 29 And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. 31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

Matthew 13:31-33

31 He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. 32 It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”

[The video of this worship service and sermon can be found here.]

Good morning, Christ Church! Today is the first Sunday in a series that Fr. Cliff introduced last week on living “for the sake of others and being a church “for the sake of others.”

We do this through our vocation, through proclamation (locally and globally), demonstration (personal and social holiness), in our locations — in the neighborhoods and communities and workplaces in which we find ourselves.  

And this week, we’re talking about how we live for the sake of others vocationally — through our work and through our common, every day life. 

Let me pray. Oh God, may we hear your Word this morning amid these many words, and may the light of your truth and your call on us to be part of renewal for creation shine through and be made clear, our Rock and Redeemer. Amen. 

Writing about this first passage we heard today from Genesis 1, Christian apologist Nancy Pearcey puts it this way in her book Total Truth:

“In Genesis, God gives what we might call the first job description: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” The first phrase, “be fruitful and multiply,” means to develop the social world: build families, churches, schools, cities, governments, laws. The second phrase, “subdue the earth,” means to harness the natural world: plant crops, build bridges, design computers, compose music. This passage is sometimes called the Cultural Mandate because it tells gus that our original purpose was to create cultures, build civilizations — nothing less.” — Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth

Notice in this quote, she uses the phrase “cultural mandate” to describe all of these things — both in terms of what we do with the social world we live, and how we steward the natural world. The Hebrew word translated “subdue” in verse 28 (Hebrew kabash) can be understood to mean, “make the earth useful for the benefit and enjoyment of human beings.” 

What Pearcy is saying here is, yes we are called to be colaborers and coworkers with God, but because of our divine image-bearing status, we are also called to be co-creators with God, the original Creator. Co-makers. Co-cultivaters. Another way to put it is to say, we are called to be culture makers. We are called to the work of culture making. 

Now this term already probably needs some clarification. Because when we hear the word “culture” in the context of Christianity, it immediately raises big question about maybe the culture wars, and politics, and secular culture vs. evangelical or Christian subculture, the Religious Right, the moral majority, etc. 

Ok, and what we’re talking about today isn’t completely unrelated to all of that. But it’s different. Culture making here isn’t so much in reference to culture in the macro, “culture war” sense of the term. We’re more so talking about culture at micro level and in the way we actually shape it.

We do get shaped by culture ourselves too, and I’ll so more about that, but as individuals, we can shape culture, and that’s the kind of culture we’re talking about today. 

And there are some really technical, abstract academic definitions of culture out there as well.  But I want to use a definition that goes something like this — and this isn’t original to me, is more like I’m weaving together a few different sources here, including conversations with people at Christ Church:

“Culture is what we do with the natural world. It’s what we make of material things, and the meaning and purpose that is given to them in the process.”

As early as Genesis 4, we see three big areas of vocation and culture-making arise from the descendants of Cain:

20 Adah gave birth to Jabal; he was the father of those who live in tents and raise livestock. 21 His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all who play stringed instruments and pipes. 22 Zillah also had a son, Tubal-Cain, who forged all kinds of tools out of bronze and iron. 

Now, it isn’t immediately clear why these three great crafts or trades are listed here, and the commentaries I’ve consulted don’t all agree, but it’s still significant and seems safe to at minimum say that Genesis is giving an account of the origin of human culture to some degree here. So we can identity at least three major cultural and vocational domains here:

  1. Food (agriculture and livestock)
  2. Industry (craftsmanship, tools and handiwork)
  3. The Arts (music)

There are of course many other categories of culture, work and vocation that emerge throughout Scripture and civilization, but I’m going to take these three as representative and reflect just a bit on each one.

So first, Food:

One of the best illustrations or examples that I’ve heard Crouch and others give to explain what culture can be seen in the difference between an egg and an omelet. The egg is a product of nature, right — comes from the chicken. It’s the raw material of a biological process. But what do we do with eggs? We cook them. And in the case of an omelet, we cook them in a very particular way. 

No other creator, other than a human being, would be creative and skilled enough with tools and culinary arts to do this, I don’t think. 

Food in general, for this matter, how it’s prepared, with what ingredients and recipes, even the presentation fo the food itself has significance leaves all kinds of room for creative possibility and variety and taste. But it doesn’t stop with the omelet! It’s what the omelet or any other prepared food further enables:

In his book, Culture Care, Makoto Fujimura, says that 

[Culture Care] leads to generative work and a generative culture. We turn wheat into bread—and bread into community. We turn grapes into wine—and wine into occasions for joyful [celebration]. We turn minerals into paints—and paints into works that lift the heart or stir the spirit. We turn ideas and experiences into imaginative worlds for sheer enjoyment and to expand the scope of our empathy.

The Faith & Art ministry at Christ Church in its monthly gathering a couple years ago actually read this book together, and I got to be part of that as I was just coming on staff at Christ Church. And this is one of the quotes that I highlighted when I first read it. Culture care, and culture making, is simply, the kind of attention we give, and the significance we assign to what we do by how we do it. 

Secondly, there is industry:

This work of culture care touches on every arena of our lives. It’s especially important in the business world and in organizational leadership. Executives, managers and supervisors all want to know how to create a culture in their work environments that brings the best out of their employees and serves their company or institutional mission. 

There’s a video that I watched recently that touched on this, and we’ll share it on our Instagram page later today. It’s an interview with one of our own parishioners, Emily Padula, in a film series produced by another member of Christ Church as well. And in this clip, Emily talks about her role as an executive of a large hospital and how she handles that leadership and management responsibility. She talks about how people that she oversees are affected by the culture that she as a leader cultivates… [watch it here.]

Tomorrow is Labor Day, and most of us, myself included, probably don’t plan to give too much thought to the significance of it. But the holiday itself, and day off that many of us will get, is the result of painstaking efforts by those who’ve gone before us who usually weren’t the leaders, executives or managers. Rather, they were the laborers, the employees of manufacturing plant, teachers, farm workers, machine operators, groundskeepers, technicians, service industry professionals and the like. 

These blue collar, working class folks — many of them women, some of them immigrants and even children — were the advocates and organizers who gave us the 40-hour work week, required overtime pay, weekends off, restrictions on child labor, protection against various kinds of exploitation and unsafe working conditions. Their demonstration and activism, particular at the turn of the 20th Century and thereafter, had long-lasting. Culture-making influence. Not from the top-down, but the bottom-up, as a grassroots movement that changed the tide of public opinion, and thereby, law and policy and finally, culture. 

And what is more, this change wasn’t easily achieved. It wasn’t given away. Those with power didn’t just say, oh yeah sure  🙂 We’d love to pay you more for less work!

And we all know, not every culture is good or even neutral. In fact, most of the time, even the best culture is compromised and marred by sin. And some culture is downright unhealthy and even toxic. 

Just going back to the beginning of Genesis — two chapters after our passage for today in Genesis 3, and we hear the story of how humans get to this point. 

One way of understanding the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Even is this very question about culture making: What kind of culture will human beings make? How will we lead and organize structure and systems of society? How will we run companies? Will we trust and follow and submit to wise and holy God whose character perfectly distinguishes good and evil, or will we try to grasp and discern that difference, that knowledge of good and evil for ourselves, and attempt to live autonomously — by our own rules? 

Alright, now we come to the third category of the Arts, and specifically music as an example:

One of the most prominent human expressions of culture that we can all appreciate and relate to is music. And Christians have had an interesting relationship with music over time. There was a time in certain periods of church history where singing wasn’t allowed or considered part of worship — or there have been big debates of whether instruments should be allowed, and which ones…

I grew up in the Baptist church and, while I didn’t really experience this kind of prohibition first hand, I definitely heard the jokes about Baptists and not allowing dancing. Or, I still remember when I got my hands on DC Talk’s Jesus Freak album. If you didn’t grow up in the 90s or if you weren’t part of evangelical Christian culture in the US at that time then you might know what I’m talking about, and that’s ok. But DC Talk the band, had a way, especially with their song Jesus Freak in particular, of sounding a lot like some of big rock bands at the time — maybe most notably, Nirvana. And I can remember my mom having some discomfort with me listening to this Jesus Freak song because it sounded so much like “Smells like Teen Spirit.” 

Because music is powerful; music is intoxicating. It can take hold of us in such a strong way. It penetrates to the core of our emotional being. It tugs at our hearts and desires. And so what we do with music is tremendously important, because it’s such a culture-making, culture-shaping force. 

This summer, the Christ Church staff read a book together by one of the canon theologians of our diocese, Esau McCauley. It was called Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope. And there’s a particular passage from the book toward the beginning where McCauley talks about the culture of his own upbringing and youth, and the struggle between the good and the bad influences the cultures had on him:

“I knew the Lord and the culture. Both engaged in an endless battle for my affections. I loved hip hop because sometimes it felt as if only the rappers truly understood what it was like to experience . . . Black life in the South . . . But I also loved my mother’s Gospel music because it filled me with hope, and it connected me to something old and immovable. If hip hop tended toward nihilism and utilitarian ethics (the game is the game so we do what we must to survive), then my mother’s music, rooted in biblical texts and ideas, offered a vision of something bigger and wider. The struggle I speak of is not merely between two genres of music . . . I am speaking of the ways in which the Christian tradition fights for and makes room for hope in a world that tempts us toward despair.”

— Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope by Esau McCaulley

McCaulley says, “I know the Lord and the culture. Both engaged in an endless battle for my affections.” Notice the language of “affections.” And the title of Emily’s video clip I mentioned a moment ago was “Affected by Culture.” 

The use of the word affections here alludes to the way that culture taps into our deepest longings. This is what culture-making is about and why its a key part of living out our vocations and being a church for the sake of others. There’s a battle going on for our hearts, for our desires. 

McCauley states at the end of the quote: “I am speaking of the ways in which the Christian tradition fights for and makes room for hope in a world that tempts us toward despair.”

So while again we’re not talking about the culture wars, there is still a fight to speak of that’s going on in the vocation that Christians have to culture making. It’s a fight  for our allegiance. What is it we love and are chasing after most? What are we worshipping? Our cultural artifacts, how we do things, and what we make, points to that.

Deuteronomy 6:4–9 in the Old Testament is known by its first Hebrew words as the Shema Israel, and for the purpose of understanding the practice and art of culture-making all the better, I want to read it because it bears testimony to how much the Hebrew people had to fight to make their love of the one God real in their lives:

Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

As Andy Crouch puts it,

“Here we find all the essential elements of enduring culture: artifacts and patterns of life, external discussion and internal reflection, personal commitment and multigenerational transmission. This text, as taught by Jesus, also gives us the best compact definition…of what it is to be a human person. A person is a complex interrelation of heart, soul, mind, and strength, designed for love. We combine heart (not just emotion in the modern sentimental sense, but the Hebrew sense of affective will—choices made to achieve one’s desire), soul (the capacity for depth or fullness of self), mind (the capacity for cognition and reflection), and strength (the capacity for embodied action). This heart-soul-mind-strength reality of personhood is at its best when it is oriented toward loving God and, as Jesus emphasizes, loving neighbor. To care for culture, then, is to care for those cultural patterns, artifacts, and institutions that most fully allow human persons to express their love for God and neighbor. — Andy Crouch

As Christians, we must make culture — Because culture is getting made all the time around us, and it will make us. So we have to proactively make it. And again, this is not a fear-based instruction. And this isn’t about what’s happening in secular, post-modern culture at large, as much as it is about what’s happening in your daily life, in your environments, your neighborhoods, communities, workplaces, homes, and in our church. Culture is constantly working to bend our hearts in a certain direction, so we must attend to that, and we must cultivate that toward God.  

Turning now to a few final, practical points, let’s look briefly at the gospel passage for today: 

Matthew 13:31-33

31 He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. 32 It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”

I feel that the work of culture making can seem a little bit overwhelming at times. Just thinking about all the inundation we receive on a regular basis, from media, from pressures at work and in the home — just messages, forces that are vying for our attention and battling for hearts.  

But Jesus is giving us a mustard seed strategy. Not a grandiose, top-down, grasp for power or control — not a culture war. The Creator of the cosmos can handle the really big stuff. We start with the mustard seeds. We start small — in the language of Deuteronomy, we bind, we fix, we write! 

You know, maybe not a coffee cup or a t-shirt necessarily with a verse on it. We’ve done that before. And you know, it’s ok. But how else can we make culture or fasten ourselves to cultural practices that bend our hearts toward the love of God and others? We’re creative, we’re imaginative! Maybe take a minute today or this week and come up with some things. Because everything has culture.

Your home, your neighborhood, your conversations with friends, your school if you’re in school, your workplace of course — even your emails and your social media presence has a culture to it! And our church has a culture. 

And we don’t have to be CEO’s to make culture. You don’t have to be especially creative or artistically gifted. You also don’t have to have significant social influence or a big public platform.

And, you don’t have to make culture alone. In fact, you shouldn’t! We need community in this effort. Small groups have culture and make culture. Just into one at Christ Church.

The Fuller Formation Cohort starts in two weeks. This is the last week to sign up. We talk about vocation and culture making in very small groups — 3-5 people — it’s deep, mustard seed work, where you get challenged by people who are different from you and have your best interest in mine, and where you are blessed, encouraged and in commissioned in your vocation and how to integrate your faith with the rest of your life. 

And lastly, we’re not alone in this because the Spirit of Christ goes before us in the task of culture making, most of all!  He releases us from the guilt and power of sin by restoring us to our true humanity, or divine image-bearing status. He takes us back to our original intent and gives us a new heart in the process. A heart for co-creating and co-making with God. Co-cultivating. 

In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Let’s pray. 

Also published on Medium.