The Big Story
Culture - Identity - Art - Story ... All in The Big Story
Welcome to The Embassy!
The Embassy is a newsletter dedicated to understanding culture in general, our culture in particular, and - especially - the intersection of culture and faith. Hi, I’m Mike Sherman and I’m the person behind The Embassy. I have been engaged in exploring our culture and helping individuals, groups, and teams understand the intersection of culture and faith for many years. My goal is to help us see ourselves and our world through fresh eyes so we can live out our faith in an effective and purposeful way.
We will offer dispatches every week or so. At first, the great majority of dispatches will be free - please subscribe! Eventually, we will have a more balanced flow of free and subscription-only posts.
A set of ‘Dispatches from The Embassy’ may include some combination of:
A Link, A Take, and A View.
Links are just that - a curated link that says something about our culture, ourselves, or our place in our culture. Links are not endorsements - these will be pieces that I think say something interesting - we can observe them and understand them without agreeing with everything (or most things) about them. It is just something our culture is saying that I think is meaningful, or interesting, or fun.
Takes are just short observations or opinions - not necessarily a hot take, just something I am thinking or observing related to the intersection of culture, identity, meaning, faith …
Views are medium-length to a little longer than medium-length pieces. They may be a review of something in our culture, a riff on a cultural trend, a meditation on faith in our world, or a meditation on living out my faith and growing in it while living in this strange world. Or it may be something completely different that I think fits that week.
The Embassy is in partnership with Embassy Equipping (embassyequipping.com) which seeks to provide resources for the church in understanding and engaging culture as well as in leadership development - but The Embassy has a wider audience in view (namely everybody).
The Embassy also has a podcast - On Culture (search everywhere podcasts can be found). On Culture will often take a current week’s Link, Take, or View and riff on it a bit. We will invite friends and collaborators to be a part of the conversation from time to time as well.
We look at current cultural moments as we go mixed in with stuff that is a bit more meta, dealing with a particular cultural issue. (For example, in the next few weeks, we’ll have posts on how we think about war and on what we think of the #IStandWithUkraine tags in social media bios).
This Week’s Dispatches from The Embassy:
A Link -
An analysis of outrage culture from four years ago (2018), which examines a review of the outrage of four years prior to that (2014). It looks at outrage being an end and not just a means to something better - exemplified by reviewing the sources of outrage that have largely been forgotten and which are often not terribly important. As the author notes, we seem to be “losing the ability to focus on what matters”. I would guess we could repeat this every 4 years or less and be surprised, amused, or annoyed at how little those controversies which dominated the outrage market a few years ago mean now - if we even remember them.
A Take -
I know, outrage can be fun. Curiosity is more fun in the long run - or it brings more joy. In some respects, outrage culture and curiosity are opposed to each other. Curiosity invites reflection and seeks understanding. Understanding usually connects us to some common ground we may share - some part of our shared humanity. Even if the solution or approach or the belief of the other person is in fact outrageous to us, or if it is simply objectionable or maybe just wrong - we share some part of a common human experience with this person that works against being outraged, if we let it.
Outrage is correspondingly attached to a sense of certainty. The less certain I am about the issue at hand, or the more I admit some level of complexity or nuance, the less grounds I have for outrage. So curiosity and humility work against outrage as certainty feeds it.
Investigate. Think. Have strong opinions, even. But add curiosity about other points of view and the people who hold them - and include humility. Also laugh at yourself from time to time. You may not be 100% correct. They may not be 100% wrong. You are probably standing on more common ground than you may think. This, and the belief that we both stand before the God of the universe, will lead us away from outrage and toward grace.
A View -
The Big Story
This first view is a bit unique and introductory. It reveals part of the foundation for all of my understanding of culture. And it has to do with story. Starting next week, we will look at our social media bio’s, we’ll have fun with creativity in our culture, we’ll think about what we are to make of war, and - riffing on a recent story of singing on airplanes, we’ll think about when we should return to our seat and fasten our seatbelts. But, just to set things up - this week we’ll think about story.
Have you ever imagined yourself in an one of the epic stories? Which epic would depend on your taste or experiences … Paradise Lost or The Odyssey or The Divine Comedy or Joan of Arc or The Lord of the Rings. I’m thinking of Sam’s speech in the second book of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy:
Sam: “It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end, because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. Bit I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now, folks in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t, they kept going, because they were holding on to something.”
Frodo: “What are we holding onto, Sam?”
Sam: “There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”
The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien
One of my foundational understandings is that we are all, all of us right now, in an epic, unfolding story. I believe that story is the biblical story, but you don’t have to in order to understand where I am going.
I believe we can’t fully understand ourselves, our identity, mission, relationships, loves, losses, and our culture - without grappling with this foundational truth - that we are in a story, that this is all going somewhere. We are all in a great story with a beginning, a middle, and an end that is still ahead of us. We have a part to play, there will be darkness and danger, so much bad will happen - but the sun will shine as well. And it means something. Because there is some good in this world and it’s worth fighting for.
The Big Story in a Christian framework is starts with some creation event, it all goes wrong with the fall, and this begins a journey of redemption - which will eventually be fulfilled when all will be made right.
I think we can’t fully understand ourselves, our identity, our mission, relationships, loves, losses, or our culture - without grappling with this foundational idea of story. Here is one rendering of it:
OK, that isn’t to scale. And it is just one simple view and I’m not an artist and it isn’t terribly original … but there is a lot here that informs how I understand faith and culture. We have an identity, we are going somewhere, we participate in the transcendent, we are fallen.
We reflect the image of God in our imperfection. That image, though tainted by our human nature, is touched by love, joy, beauty, meaning, and the sacred because it is connected to the eternal story and the author of our story. He is what gives us transcendence - and that transcendence finds expression in us, in our vocation, art, relationships, and in the word we give to all of these things - culture.
One of the aspects of this big story within the eternal story viewpoint we will explore over and over is that all of us, if this is true, are in the same big story. We all touch transcendence and we all are fallen and we all are wired for eternity. So there is always common ground - even amidst the biggest (or most outrageous) cultural disconnects.
We will attempt to find that common ground so that we can see the disconnects clearly and with grace.
Why is it called The Embassy?
Just to get this out of the way, not that most people will care, but ‘The Embassy’ is an allusion to a biblical metaphor. I want The Embassy to be a resource for anyone, regardless of belief system, to understand themselves and this world and what it may mean to live in it. Even as I say that, I recognize that I will be speaking from who I am and will, from time to time, have to translate out of what only an insider to the faith might understand to what anyone might be able to understand. This recognition is part of what drives The Embassy, but I probably should explain the biblical metaphor first. It is key to understanding who Christians should be in the world - curious, loving, fun, and gracious.
The Apostle Paul calls Christians “ambassadors” (2 Corinthians 5:16-21, for those who want to check my work). Ambassadors have to do a couple of things. They have to understand the mission, the culture, the beliefs, and the desires of their own country. The task is to understand and be able to answer the question - What does a good representation of your people, your home country, look like? And then to live that out - this is what my people should look like. Ambassadors need to represent their home country in such a way that it is recognizable. Those in the foreign land can see what citizenship in the ambassador’s home country looks like.
The other half of the mission of an ambassador is to effectively translate the mission and desires of the home country into the land to which they have been called. In order to do that well, the ambassador needs to understand the language, the culture, the practices, the beliefs, and the people of that land. There is just no way to live effectively, no matter your ‘home country’ in this culture without understanding it - at least in part. What makes them (us) afraid? Outraged? Anxious? What are the stories they (we) tell? Who are they (we)? The pronouns here tell a tale, but not one related to any current controversy about pronouns. Because they are we and they are us. We may be an ambassador from our ‘home country’ to this land, as the metaphor tells us, but we also live here and are not separate from the culture of this land. ‘The Culture’ isn’t “them” - it is us - not all of us equally at all points, of course - but it is not simply “the other”, not simply a source of fear, anger, or anxiety. We can understand ‘the culture’ in many ways by looking in the mirror as well as looking out the window. We’ll do both here.
That is what I hope this newsletter will help us do. Understand who we are - our mission, our identity, our story (or at least see what my understanding is while you are working on your own self-understanding). While seeking to understand the land in which we live. And to translate our identity, mission, and purpose - ourselves - into our world. I am speaking to all of us in this story, even to those who don’t really buy the idea that we are in a great story. Because of our common humanity, many of the things we examine in this newsletter will speak to our common human experience. You don’t have to see everything my way, I believe, to benefit from such a process. I am looking forward to the journey together.
OK - with all the housekeeping done, the real fun starts next week. Also, check out our companion podcast - On Culture for a 30 minute discussion of whatever we are talking about that week.
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