On closer examination, I think there is. For Paul writes, "Let each of you lead the life that the Lord has assigned, to which God called you." The common denominator between Paul's exhortation to his congregation and Jesus' call to his disciples is what "the Lord has assigned, to which God called." Not everyone is called to follow Christ in the same way. St. Francis, for instance, was called to give everything he had to the poor and to follow Christ as a mendicant friar, founding the Franciscan order. The great King of England, St. Edward the Confessor, on the other hand, was not called to abdicate his throne, but through his power served God, most memorably in the founding of Westminster Abbey. So while each is called to follow Christ, not everyone is called to follow Christ in the same way.

Whether a begging monk or a ruling monarch, however, every Christian is a "slave of Christ," enjoined not to become "slaves of human masters." Slavery is, in its extreme form, a thing of the past; but the concept of being enslaved to one's job by economic necessity or even to a pastime like football by fanatic obsession is not an unfamiliar concept. Is it bad then to have a job or to enjoy football? Not at all. By all means, work and play. But one of the underlying messages here is: do not be enslaved by your work or your play.

The greater principle behind this concept of "slavery to Christ" versus "slavery to the world" is that the kingdom of God is to take precedence over the kingdoms of this world. Of course, just as slavery is a defunct institution in America, so is monarchy, and so in mulling over these lessons I cast about for more accessible language. Luckily, I came across what Paul Neuchterlein, in his meditations on the lectionary, suggests -- that instead of thinking in terms of the "kingdom of God," we could think in terms of the "culture of God." We could see ourselves as servants -- Civil Servants, if you like -- of the "culture of God" versus the "culture of the world."

Of course, even this concept needs a little fleshing out, for it leads me to ask: does this mean we should detach ourselves from the world, be "in the world but not of it," as the saying goes? Yes and no. For when I speak of "God's culture" versus the prevailing culture, I am by no means calling upon the Church to engage in some sort of fundamentalist "Culture War," some quixotic Crusade or Holy War that defines us by what we're against rather than what we're for; after all, being "in the world but not of it" can lead us to a negative spirituality or a positive spirituality, depending upon how we interpret it.

Two images come to mind: the Puritan and the Diplomat. While I hardly like to speak ill of the dead, let alone my own ancestors, several of whom came over on the Mayflower, the Puritan heritage in America has its roots in a negative spirituality, which held that in order to be "purified" from the world's pernicious superstitions, the Puritans needed to separate themselves from those people who in their view constituted a threat to godly living. I was raised with this notion as a part of my spiritual heritage, and was taught at an early age, for instance, that Roman Catholics and people who sent their children to public schools were putting themselves at risk of being contaminated by the world, by "popish superstition" on the one hand and by "secular humanism" on the other. In short, the Puritan way of being "in the world but not of the world" is a spirituality of suspicion, constantly on guard against giving "aid and comfort to the Enemy." You can imagine, then, that in this spirituality there is no discernable ethic of hospitality to the stranger, unless it is with the express goal of convincing the stranger of how he or she should become just like me.

The second image, however, is that of the Diplomat. When I was chaplain to the Washington Episcopal School, I taught the children of many diplomats. A sizeable minority of my students was from Muslim countries such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, and as their chaplain I was responsible for their spiritual nurture and care. Like all other students, they attended weekly chapel and took part in the service rota, but because they were of a different religion, they were never assigned to read the Gospel, for instance, or to lead Christian prayers. Some parents and teachers thought that because of this fact, we should not read from the Gospel or have explicitly Christian prayers, because it "might offend the Muslim families." But this turned out to be a projection, for the parents who most expected Washington Episcopal School to be Episcopal were the Muslim parents! It's not as if they didn't know they were sending their children to a Christian school, after all. I discovered through my interaction with these diplomats that in order to be open and hospitable to the other, whoever that other may be, one had to be grounded first of all in one's own identity. It was not inhospitable to "exclude" Muslims from reading the Gospel; rather, it respected their difference by not forcing them to do something that was foreign to their own identity.

So, how do these two images, the Puritan and the Diplomat, relate to God's culture versus the prevailing culture? In the Puritan's case, we see that to be "in the world but not of it" is insular and rejecting of differences. But the Diplomat, while foreign, engages the "other" in respectful dialogue, participating as appropriate, but not expecting that everyone should be the same; the Diplomat is "in the world but not of it" in a positive, life-giving way. The Diplomat is a "cultural attaché." This is true whether the Diplomat is only marginally foreign to us, such as a Canadian diplomat might be (eh?), or vastly different from the majority of Americans, such as a Bahrainian diplomat would be, whose language, culture, political and economic systems are all alien to our everyday experience of the world.

The question I would like to pose, then, is: How are we called to be diplomats of God's culture to the world? What sort of "cultural attaché" will you be? To get at this question, let's take a practical -- and timely -- example. Today is Super Bowl Sunday. Obviously, unless you're a Puritan who believes that sports shouldn't be played on the Christian Sabbath, there's nothing wrong with Super Bowl Sunday per se. In fact, I'm looking forward to watching the game this evening, and our Head to the Heart confirmation program will have a football theme in the Super Bowl's honor; we even moved the time of our program so that families could be together to enjoy the game.

The dark side of the prevailing culture can be illustrated, however, in an issue that has little to do with football as a pastime, but has become almost synonymous with the Super Bowl itself: domestic violence. You may have heard the statistic that emergency calls to 911, battered women's shelters, and the like increases by 40% on Super Bowl Sunday. Of course, I wondered how accurate that statistic might be, and whether that statistic is as true today as it purportedly was when first reported in the media. As Homer Simpson has wisely said, "people can come up with statistics to prove anything…14 percent of all people know that."

So I did a little sleuthing via the Internet, and of course found all sorts of conflicting information, from wholesale acceptance of the 40% figure as proven fact to arch-conservative conspiracy theories accusing the "feminazis" of deliberately stretching the truth in order to push their devious agenda on the unsuspecting American public. The most objective account I found, however, was from "News Flash," an online newsletter of the Family Violence Prevention Fund, which stated:

The Super Bowl and domestic violence probably became entwined in Americans' minds in 1993, when battered women's advocates helped convince the NBC television network to broadcast a public service announcement on domestic violence during its Super Bowl coverage. It was a serious commitment by NBC, which could have sold the much-coveted pre-game 30-second spot for approximately half a million dollars. But instead of another advertisement for beer or automobiles, one of the biggest television audiences of the year saw a well-dressed man sitting in a jail cell saying, "I didn't think you'd go to jail for hitting your wife." An announcer noted, "Domestic violence is a crime."

While many commentators applauded NBC's decision to air the [public service announcement], others claimed the network had been coerced by inflated claims about Super Bowl Sunday being "a day of dread" for battered women.

Although there appeared to be an increase in domestic violence dispatches on Super Bowl Sunday during the 1993-94 football season, UCLA researcher Lawrence Chu cautioned that results cannot be generalized to other areas and "we could not say that football causes domestic violence."

Well, that's a relief. That said, while I'm glad there's less of a link between football and violence than has been bandied about in the past decade, I don't think it's a bad thing at all for Super Bowl Sunday to have become a day on which the too-often overlooked, ignored, and denied issue of domestic violence is brought to our attention. The sad fact is that not just on Super Bowl Sunday, but on every Sunday of the year-indeed, every day of the year-spouses continue to be battered by the very people who are supposed to love, cherish, and honor them. And this is true of black people and white people, rich people and poor people, "church" people and "secular" people. We live in a violent culture, and if we truly are "slaves of Christ" who have repented and believed in the good news, if we truly are willing to follow Christ and fish for people, then we need to become the sort of cultural attachés who name evil wherever it lurks and claim good wherever it is to be found.

So, maybe there's a woman you know who won't be beaten up by her husband today, but maybe you know or suspect that she has been abused in the past, and remains at risk for being abused in the future. How can you be a diplomat for the culture of God, how can you establish an embassy of peace in a nation of violence? Even if the specific issue of domestic violence isn't one that you'll ever encounter, there are as many ways of being a slave of Christ, a civil servant in God's embassy, a fisher of people -- whatever the image -- there are as many ways of responding to God's call to you as there are stars in the sky over Monkton on a clear winter's night.

You know, sometimes I think the Collect of the Day is misplaced in the liturgy. Sometimes I'm so busy with "getting down to business" that I find myself saying "Amen" to the collect without even listening to it. That's too bad, because so often the prayer speaks directly to the main theme of the Scripture readings. Such is the case today. So in closing, let me give us all a second chance to listen to God's call to us in that collect. The Lord be with you. [And also with you.] Let us pray:

Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation, that we and the whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, on God, for ever and ever. Amen.