A sermon by Senior Minister John B. McCall, April 27, 2008
Acts 17:22-31
The Apostle Paul stood in the center of Athens, in the Areopagus, a large plaza surrounded by statues and icons representing the many gods of ancient Greece. He’d come there after days of wandering the city and preaching the Good News of Jesus Christ.
The New Testament letters are filled with speeches in which Paul and other Apostles spread the Gospel to new believers in the ancient places of the Roman and Greek empires. They sought inspire the faith that Jesus of Nazareth was, indeed, the promised Messiah whose coming had been foretold in the Hebrew Scriptures.
But this situation was a little different. Paul was now standing in the public square in Athens, addressing highly-educated philosophers, learned men who were accustomed to debating the finer points of theology and philosophy. There were Epicureans, Stoics, Skeptics, and others… each representing a deeply-held school of beliefs.
It’s a rather thick and chewy speech but so I’ll lift up the central statement in these verses – the keystone that holds everything else in its place. It’s right here in verses 22 and 23: as Paul walked through the neighborhoods he saw altars and shrines to all sorts of gods… Zeus, Athena, and many more. So, he said, he could see how very religious the Athenians were. Then he added that he came upon an altar inscribed “To an unknown god.”
To an unknown god… there may be several ways to understand this intriguing phrase. Here are a couple. The first is to think of a typical job description where there’s a list of responsibilities and tasks. And then, often, there’s that catch-all phrase “… and such other things as may from time to time be necessary…” or something like that. So maybe that altar to the unknown god was a way for the Athenians to say “If we’ve over looked any god we can use this altar to cover the bases.”
Another way to look at this phrase is to remember that Greek philosophers knew a lot and studied hard and debated endlessly. But they knew the limits of their knowledge. So this may have been a tribute to the powers and principalities that were beyond their knowing. There were many Greek gods with different attributes and names. Then there is the unknowable.
In any case, Paul saw this as a great teaching opportunity and said to the assembly: “you may think of this god as unknown, but I can tell you that the True God is known.” Then Paul lists three very important attributes.
First, (vs. 24) this one true God is the Creator of everything – all that we see and all that we can’t see, earth and heavens and oceans and stars and animals and plants and people.
Second, (vs. 25) this God is the Preserver, the Sustainer of everything. God didn’t create everything and then skip town but continues to dwell in creation and engage the human heart, breathing life into each one of us. We are the offspring of this God.
Third, (vs. 31) God has come to the world as Righteous Judge and has engaged humankind through one man whom God has raised from the dead as proof.
These are the three big pieces, but nestled right in the middle, in vs. 26 and 27, is something I want to look at more closely. Speaking of us, God’s creatures, Paul said:
“… [God] allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him, though indeed he is not far away from each one of us.”
Isn’t that a simply told and simply true and simply beautiful description of what our faith life is about? St. Augustine expressed this longing when he said, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.”
For most of the world’s history you would be born into a particular tribe or clan; adopt their customs and religions and language, and live and die in the same village.
For most of the world’s history religious groups lived in relative isolation from each other. Christians, Muslims, Jews, and others could make their exclusive claims about truth and righteousness. The Vatican could say Roman Catholicism was the only true church and all other claims are false; that Catholics were saved and others weren’t.
But, friends, those days are gone forever. We live in a time of mobility and debate. Nations and governments and religions are bumping into each other all over the globe, and any claims of absolute truth are looked at with great suspicion at best.
This is also a time of great spiritual restlessness much of which is documented in the 2008 report of the Pew Forum on Religion in Public Life. I hope you’ve seen it or will check it out on the web. (Links are at the end)
As we look at the religious landscape in our nation and try to understand what’s happening, there are four statistics that stand out.
• First, 84% of Americans consider themselves religious.
• Second, 44% of Americans have changed religions at some point in their lives – either converting to a different religion entirely, changing from one denomination to another, or dropping out of organized religion all together.
• Third, the fastest growing group is “unaffiliated” – folks who don’t belong to any particular religious community but who define and follow their own spiritual path.
• Fourth, the greatest losers are Roman Catholics [actually, statistics for Roman Catholicism have been almost flat but this is because immigrants have just replaced those who have dropped away]; and Mainline Protestants including our own United Church of Christ, Methodists, Presbyterians, most Lutherans, Episcopalians, and the like. That’s true all across the country and it’s not likely to change.
So, are churches like ours doomed to extinction? Many will disappear and die. Many will limp along. But we can choose how to live the faith in the realities of our world as it is today and will be tomorrow.
We can’t ignore the profound changes that are demanded of us if we’re going to respond to the leadings of the Holy Spirit in this new age. The ways we’ve believed and lived and worked and worshipped together in the 50’s and 60’s and even in the 80’s and 90’s is dying out; because those of us born in the first half of the 20th century are dying out. That’s blunt but true, and I include myself.
But churches that will let God transform them for ministry in this demanding new world are not dying – they’re finding new life. And I believe that’s happening right here among us on Meetinghouse Hill.
We’ve endured times that have felt like a deep pruning. We’ve sadly lost members who want the church to hold fast to what was good. We’ve struggled together to discern whether becoming Open and Affirming was God’s call or our own agenda. We’ve intentionally focused on equipping you, the people of God, for various ministries; and we’ve continued to emphasize that your called clergy are pastors, teachers, coaches, and more – but we don’t do the ministry for you, and we don’t have an inside track to God.
I believe we’re seeing something new and exciting among us. This won’t come as a surprise to most of you. There is a fresh wind that comes and I have the blessing of hearing it again and again. We, here, on Meetinghouse Hill are figuring out how to following Jesus Christ distinctively. We have struggled to define ourselves. We still may stumble to find the words. But we are finding our voice in this age of the religious smorgasbord. And it starts like this:
• As Christians we believe that through Jesus we not only know God, but God truly knows us.
• In this man Jesus, God has put on human form and walked beside us.
• In this man Jesus, we see one life filled to overflowing with the presence of God.
• In this man Jesus, we see all of God we need to see in order to have abundant life.
Now every Christian can claim that. And if that’s enough for you there are scores of Christian churches in greater Portland that will welcome you. But many of these tradition-centered churches also believe – or at least act like they believe – that Jesus came to separate the righteous from the unrighteous, the good from the evil, the people of light from the people of darkness. And they believe that the church is primarily a refuge for the self-righteous. And they believe they are righteous in the eyes of God.
It’s our normal, natural temptation to claim we know better than do others just what God’s will is. But that claim is a sin – it contradicts God’s nature of seeking and finding the lost and calling them in and serving up the feast.
None of us is the expert on God’s full intention or precisely what scripture means… not you, not me, not the Pope, not the charismatic preacher at a mega-church.
So here, at First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ in South Portland Maine, we make a more modest claim:
• We claim that no matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome here.
• We claim that with God all things are possible – that no one is so lost that God can’t find you and no one is so broken that God can’t heal you.
• We claim that when we share the meal of bread and cup, God is the gracious host and everyone is welcome, the meal represents the feast that God is offering to all humankind.
• And we claim that every one of us has a lot to learn about following Jesus, and a lot to teach others.
So, let us be unapologetically centered in Jesus Christ, and clear that his invitation breaks down the barriers that we, God’s beloved people, have built over the generations.
No, said Paul so long ago: God doesn’t live in shrines made by human hands. God doesn’t dwell in sanctuaries and chapels. God doesn’t depend on whether we worship in a cathedral or a mud hut, with one particular arrangement of the chancel or another. God doesn’t care whether we have high liturgy, or simple home-spun acts of praise and worship. God is not unknown and unknowable.
Rather, God comes to us in Jesus Christ to reconcile those who thought they were enemies, and to heal those who know they’re not there yet.
Whatever else we may do well as a church, let’s be very sure we never compromise that. God dwells in the hearts and the lives of all God’s people. And for this we can only offer praise and thanksgiving. Amen.