Acts 17:16-32
It sounds rather strange to us. It sounds strange to us to talk about God. We’d really rather avoid the topic entirely – after all, it’s not something you bring up in polite conversation – especially not the fear of God. Certainly you can’t be sure about your audience. You don’t know if she believes in God. You don’t know if she understands God in the way that you do. No, no, it’s best to avoid the topic altogether because it’s terribly unlikely that she will reply, so I would like to know what that means.
And yet, that is what the Athenians reply. Make whatever assumptions you will about the differences in time and space, but I don’t think it’s any different than it is now. Imagine beginning a conversation about God in the middle of the Portland Farmer’s Market or preaching about Jesus and the Resurrection at Congregation Bet Ha’am or marveling about God’s works to politicians in DC. This is what Paul did in the synagogue and the marketplace. It’s disrespectful. It’s rude – and let’s be honest, it’s arrogant. It’s babble to the Stoics and Epicurians. And it should be. Paul’s talk about Jesus and Resurrection was probably misunderstood simply by the fact that the Greek word for Resurrection is so similar to the name of the goddess Anastasia. And yet, remarkably, they don’t kick him out. They don’t ignore Paul completely. The Athenians want to know more. It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means.
We’re rarely that accommodating. After all, this isn’t polite conversation. Paul is “deeply distressed.” He’s eager to convince him that his way is the right way. We’ve all been in those conversations. We know what it feels like to be accused that we’re wrong, but how many of us reply as the Athenians did. How many of us would say, It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means.
In his own work, Bob Heath is more careful than Paul. Mr. Heath has been a police chaplain for 20 years. For the first time in 20 years, the disaster he’s been responding to is in his town of Joplin, MO. This week, Mr. Heath hasn’t been “deeply distressed” by the destruction of some other town where he’s been called into duty. This week, it’s his home where families are invited to the university’s student center to get more information about their missing relative. It’s there in the student center that Mr. Heath gives the family the news. He lets them express their wide array of feelings. He lets them be angry. He lets them cry. But, Mr. Heath doesn’t talk about God. He doesn’t tell them, I know how you feel. It’s going to be O.K. Don’t cry. God needed another angel. Instead, Mr. Heath sounds more like the Athenians, It sounds rather strange to me, so I would like to know what it means.
It’s a different approach than Paul takes. Paul wants to explain God. Paul wants the Athenians to know all about the God that he has come to know – the Creator who is greater than art and imagination but wants so dearly to be in relationship with humanity that God is never really very far away. But Paul does more than just describe this God. He does more than offer “common knowledge of God.” All of the sudden, Paul is no longer polite. He no longer respects the “extreme religio[sity]” of the Athenians. He starts to babble about this fixed point. And with that, Paul becomes the spectacle that everyone carefully steps around at the Portland Farmer’s Market without making eye contact. This is where we question Paul’s mental health. This is where we ask ourselves if this is the kind of faith that is really what is required to be a Christian. Because, really, we were fine when Paul talked about groping for God. We know what that feels like. We love the poet’s reference to God in whom we live and move and have our being, but it’s when Paul shifts to talk about the times of human ignorance. It’s when he commands us to repent that we get nervous.
All of the sudden, God is very far away. God is no longer in how we live and move and have our being. God is judging us. God is condemning us. God is unknown to us. God is fear. For Paul, God must be feared because of this fixed day where the world will be judged. That’s his explanation. Paul sounds like us. Paul fears the unknown so much that he has to explain it. He has to make it so that it will end everything that we know to be true – not unlike the so-called prophecy of Harold Camping.
And yet, like Paul, Camping was wrong. The world didn’t end on May 21, 2011 and it likely won’t end on October 21, 2011 as Camping has revised. Christians since Paul have been proclaiming the certainty of the end of the world since the very beginning of Christianity. Paul believed the end of the world would be in his lifetime. It was the center of his faith because he believed that that’s what it meant to follow in the way of Jesus and the Resurrection. Everything would change so dramatically that the known would cease to exist. That’s the power of Jesus the Resurrection for Paul. It’s an experience of God that is real and known. So, of course, there is no room for the unknown.
The Athenians disagreed as much as a police chaplain might. At that fixed point in the student center, a chaplain would leave space for you to ask your questions, to express your anger and to name your experience of God. A chaplain wouldn’t offer words that belittle that experience. He would make space for the unknown. Likewise, the Athenians erected a statue to an unknown god. They believed that there was still more to know about the divine. There had to be a space holder for what else God could be. But not Paul. Paul is “deeply distressed” about this fixed point. It’s that fixed point where these ideas of God matter because at that fixed point, it all becomes real. God becomes bigger than art and poetry. God becomes bigger than our imaginations. God really is bigger than all we thought we knew. This scares me. I admit that I am afraid of things that are bigger than me. It’s what makes me nervous about God, but I don’t always agree with Paul. Not totally. And that’s true here. I think that if you’re going to talk about the fear of God, you need the poets and artists to explain that fear. And so, I need the words of Mary Oliver in her poem It is Early.
It is early, still the darkest in the dark,
And already I have killed (in exasperation)
two mosquitoes and (inadvertently)
one spider.
All the same, the sun will rise
in its sweeps of pink and red clouds.
Not for me does it rise and not in haste does it rise
but step by step, neither
with exasperation or inadvertently, and not without
any intended attention to
any one thing, but to all, like a god
that takes it instructions from another, even greater,
whose name, even, we do not know. The one
who made the mosquito, and the spider; the one
who made me as I am: easy to exasperation, then penitent.
To fear the unknown of God isn’t even to be afraid of God. To fear the unknown of God is simply to claim that there are things about God that make you pause. There are moments where you stand before God when it is early or late unable to sculpt or argue because God is bigger than you had thought. And its strange, but in exasperation and penitence, you breathe deeply again knowing that this is the fear of God. And we may never really know what it means.