April 27, 2008

Scripture:         Acts 17:22-31

Sermon:           “Looking for God?”

            I’ve chosen as our text from scripture this morning what is one of the most fascinating passages in the Bible.  I won’t say that it is the most important by any means.  Just that it is fascinating.

            Turn with me to the 2^nd chapter of the book of Acts where we’ll read together from chapter 17, verses 17 through 31.  You can find that easily on page 184 of the New Testament in the bibles provided in the pews.

            The fascinating thing about this lesson is we encounter the Apostle Paul as he travels to that ancient city of Athens—a place renowned for its high culture and intellectual pursuits.  It was what we might think of as a university town.  He’s taken the gospel of Jesus Christ to someplace like Bloomington.  How does this new spirituality stand up to the great minds of philosophy and ancient religions?  Can it hold its own?  Or will it prove to look like the superstitions of simple country folk from the backwoods of Galilee?

            Now, we should say here that Paul is no dummy.  It turns out that he’s got quite a background in the classics of the Greco-Roman world.  Many a backwater preacher have failed to speak with eloquence in the face of a modern and secular world.  And many followers of Christ have decided that the modern, educated, secular world is a place worthy of suspicion.  That’s not what Paul did.  He met them in their own back yard, respected them for who they were, and forged ahead to try to give to them something he believed was the need of every human being—God’s love.

            What Paul did not do is start quoting scriptures to prove his points.  He didn’t take the Bible and tell them that he was right because the Bible said so.  What sense does that make to people who don’t put any stock in scriptures?  Instead, he connected with things that they already knew and believed and went from there.  And that takes a certain level of respect.

            Just briefly, the verses before our passage tell us that Paul was debating with some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers in the marketplace.  In Athens, that would be a rather common thing to do.  Something like sitting around a coffeehouse and exchanging ideas.  You learned this in a philosophy class at sometime in your life.  But, I’ll refresh your memory in case you have forgotten it like I had.  Epicureans were practically atheists.  They didn’t have much use for all of the idols throughout the city of Athens, either.  The true aim of life for Epicureans is the avoidance of pain and suffering.

            Stoic philosophers, in the heritage of great thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Zeno, had a more religious angle to things.  Stoics would understand the idea of a deity that underlies all of the universe.  That deity was in all things.  Posidonius wrote about this deity, “in him we live and move and have our being”.  You might think that comes from the Bible.  But, only because Paul quotes it here.  And he also quotes the words of another Stoic, Aratus:  “For we too are his offspring”

            See if you can connect the themes of these ancient philosophies with the words of Paul as he speaks to the gathered minds of the city of Athens.  Listen for the word of the Lord…

            Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way.  For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’  What therefore you worship as unknown, this is proclaim to you.  The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.  From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us.  For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’

            “Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.  While god has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

            That takes a lot of guts.  We’re not talking about preaching to the choir, here.  Paul’s standing in this hallowed place of great learning and debate.  And he’s arguing the case for Christian belief as if he’s got his own academic robe draped around him with degrees from Harvard, and Yale.  Guts, I tell you.

            And, Paul’s no dummy it turns out.  He’s got a background in this stuff.  Epicurean philosophy.  Stoic philosophy.  Culture of the Greco-Roman world.  Arts and humanities.

            You take a simple fisherman from down in Galilee and try this stuff.  Someone like Peter, you know.  Can you imagine an ‘ole country boy trying to make his case in front of high-minded intellectuals?  I don’t think it would go too well.  These guys that made up the Areopagus were like a firing squad of great minds.  It was something of a game to them to have debates and discussions with others over new ideas.

            Now, there was a time in my life when I entertained the thought of studying at one of these ivory towers of the highest learning.  I had it in my mind that I could decorate my wall with a degree stating that I was a Doctor of Philosophy in Theology.  And then I could teach classes to undergraduates and graduates and write books and articles and travel the world on sabbaticals and research grants.  An honest to goodness PhD.

            So, I took a trip up to the vaunted grounds of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago—an institution with the remarkable identity of “the place where fun goes to die”.  Admittedly, the University of Chicago is setting the bar rather high.  I left the school after my visit and I must have looked as though I’d seen a ghost.

            There was this one candidate for that highest of degrees who was living in the house where I stayed for a night.  He had poured his life of the last ten years into the production of a dissertation that would finally earn him the degree.  He had this great job lined up at a seminary down in North Carolina.  All he had to do was defend what he’d researched and written before a panel of the faculty who were going to assemble and grill him on every detail.  And we’re talking about the very best of the best.  The University of Chicago is known to scoff at lesser schools.  Harvard.  Princeton.  Yale.

            This poor soul was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.  He’d lost weight.  Taken up smoking.  His hair was thinning at an alarming rate.  The night that I met him, he was all disheveled.  He was muttering under his breath like he was rehearsing.  Bags under his eyes.  His whole life and all of his dreams were in the balance of this one day.

            Law school graduates get like this before they attempt the Bar Exam.  Accountants have to go through this in order to become Certified Public Accountants.  Architects…engineers…same thing.  I’m working with a young man whose getting married here next month.  He’s preparing for tests to qualify as a fire fighter.

            These things are supposed to be intimidating.  You stand in front of experts in the field you are entering and try to prove that you’ve got what it takes.  Nerve-racking!

            Paul kind of takes control.  He’s not keeping his head down.  He’s not intimidated.  He’s got this attitude of confidence.  It’s like he knows that deep down his argument is so deeply rooted in the truth that he has no reason to fear.

            But, Paul doesn’t stand there with any sort of arrogance.  He seems to really have a fondness for these intellectuals.  I think he’s actually cut from the same cloth.  You read his letters in the New Testament, you know, and it’s obvious that Paul’s got quite a head on his shoulders.  It’s fascinating to watch this exchange.  Because he starts by pointing out the aspects of his own faith that resonate with the understandings that each of these people brought with them.

            The Epicureans probably weren’t going to find his presentation all that convincing.  They rejected most forms of spirituality.  All of those temples to the various gods of their time were a bunch of hooey as far as they were concerned.  “Opiate of the masses”.  They’d think highly of what Karl Marx said of religion.

            Paul kind of relates to them here, doesn’t he?  You know that Jewish folks didn’t make idols to worship.  So, he connected this idea with their own beliefs.  God can’t live in shrines.  God can’t be represented by the works of human hands.  God doesn’t really need our worship.  God’s God.  What do we think we can really give to God?  Does God really need our help?  And there isn’t any amount of gold, silver, or precious stone that can be made to represent such a deity.  Epicureans, you see, could understand this sort of critique of the way folks went about their religious ways.

            Truth be told, these were probably the folks that the verses after ours remained unconvinced.  They probably scoffed at the notion a man could be resurrected.  But, they didn’t just throw him out of the place, either.  Paul held his own.

            Now, there were also the Stoics.  There isn’t a few of us here who wouldn’t identify ourselves as Stoics, by the way.  You’ll resonate with many of the things these old Greeks had to say.  There’s this underlying spiritual reality to all of the universe.  God is in all things and all things spring from God’s existence.  Boy, that’s familiar stuff.  And they were moved to make this bold assertion that all human beings were, in a fundamental sense, related by their shared existence in God.

            I remember studying the works of a Catholic thinker named Karl Rahner.  And he had a term for people like this.  It was like they were Christian and didn’t even know it.  Their lives and their values didn’t come from a faith in Jesus, but they lived just like all of that was the case.  Anonymous Christians.  People who you’d swear were good Christians by the lives they led.

            Well, Stoics could very well be seen as people whose lives sprung from very similar ideas about spirituality as Jews and Christians.

            So, Paul says things with them in mind.  This unknown God is the one who made everything in the entire universe.  Now that was an easy thing for a Jew to proclaim, you know.  And all of us, you and me, even though we’re Jews and Greeks, we all come from the same ancestor.  We’re all just human beings.  And we’re all connected to God, whether we know it or not.  God’s right here next to us, in us, all the time!  Right here.  God.

            I love how he quotes this wonderful line from one of the great Stoic poets.  He said, “In him we live and move and have our being”.  That’s got so much in common with how we understand our relationship with God that we’ve been saying it as Christians with conviction ever since.  I love that.  In him we live and move and have our being.

            I imagine that it was some of these Stoics that wanted to know about what Paul was saying.  Some of them said, “we’d like to hear you again about all of this.”  And some of those intellectuals actually just up and started going with Paul right away.

            It’s a fascinating story to me.  I hear some really profound insights about sharing our faith that are completely respectful of who people are, where they’re coming from, and how they relate to the world.  People aren’t lost and evil.  They’re flesh and blood like us.  And only through respect and love can we communicate something that is life-changing and profoundly life-giving to the world around us.

            But, finally, there is a word for you and I here.  It’s a word for us because we’re not all like the Apostle Paul.  We’re not always so convinced of things, are we?  We live in all varieties of doubt and disbelief.  We move from moments of great faith and assurance to moments of tremendous separation, fear, and questioning of this God.  Life fulfills us, you know, and God is at no time more certain.  Life breaks us, and there is very little to grab onto.

            The Stoics would say things like this.  Jewish folks say things like this.  Christians say them, too.  It’s an ancient truth that transcends religion.  We are all searching for God, perhaps groping to find God.  And it turns out that God is just right here all the time.  Indeed, God is not far from each one of us.

            I suspect that most of us are not certain of things all the time.  Our lives just don’t make enough sense to us for that to happen.  I know.  I’ve got this robe and stole on like I’ve got it all figured out.  I don’t.  My deepest expectation is that we make our way to this place on this day of the week because we want to know if it’s really true.  Maybe we’ll feel again what we felt once.  Maybe God will be revealed to me today.  It sure didn’t feel like God was revealed yesterday.  Too much pain.  Too much fear.

            And then there are these words:  Indeed God is not far from each one of us.  Ever.  In God we live and move and have our being.

            Are you looking for God?  Maybe you and I can find God right here amongst us.

Rev. David James Brown

Park Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)