Easter 6A
Text: Acts 17:22-31
Sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
May 17, 2020
A Question for Our Own Day
In the first lesson this morning, from the book of Acts, St. Paul makes a visit to the city of Athens. Now this is curious, because Athens had not been on his itinerary; Paul had not intended to go there. He winds up in Athens only because when he proclaimed Christ in the region of Thessalonica he had ticked off the Judean authorities so bad that not only did they run him out of town, but they then followed him to Berea, which was kind of the next station on the train line. When Paul tried to preach there, they incited the crowd in Berea to riot.
So the brothers and sisters in Berea, the little handful of Christian believers there, they take Paul aside and let him know: “Dude, you are way too hot. Time for you to get away, chillax, and go somewhere to see the sights. Y’know, Athens is beautiful this time of year. You can go, take in the Parthenon, all by yourself, enjoy a little me-time. Now, go!”
So it is that it’s all by himself Paul is banging around Athens at the beginning of chapter 17, checking out all the shrines to this idol and that little god, checking out the local synagogue and the marketplace. He runs into some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, the Scripture tells us, and they invite him to the Areopagus, the lively, beating intellectual heart of the city, to present to them this God of his. The Scripture says that “all the Athenians and the foreigners [in the Areopagus] would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.”
And it’s here, in the Areopagus, that Paul gives his only speech to an entirely pagan audience, and it’s that speech that is our first lesson this morning. Paul appeals in the first place to the religiosity of the Athenians; hey, with all these gods around, y’all must be really religious kinds of folks. And then there’s that altar dedicated “to an unknown god.” Almost as if, when the gods of all their other altars and shrines fail them, maybe the player-to-be-named-later god will show up and do the trick.
Does this sound to you like a problem of ancient times, and are you wondering why I’m spending so much sermon time in ancient Greece? Nah, this is a problem of our very own day and age. Last summer I took an uber in the city. Very nice young woman, appeared to be Latina, and I figured that too because of the air freshener hanging from her mirror, the common Roman Catholic image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Sacred Heart air freshener; hmmm. But then again, on her key chain she had a big old rabbit’s foot. And on the dashboard was of all things a bobblehead Buddha. And best of all? Got my bag out of the back after the ride, and there on the trunk she had that Darwin emblem; you know?, that fish with feet. Here I’d thought she was just a fairly typical Latina Roman Catholic, but turned out she was a whale of a lot more religious than that!
It’s a problem of our own day. Years ago I was pastor in the University of Chicago neighborhood, and in our community were some students from the University of Chicago Divinity School, Lutheran students who had signed up for a multi-faith, an academic seminary experience. Then they would complain to me about their teachers: “They know all kinds of things about religion, but hardly a one of them is a practitioner of any kind of faith! They know everything about God, except God.”
It’s a problem of our own day. My young uber driver is just looking for an experience of the divine, the latest experience of the divine, and in that way she’s just like the ancient Athenians, and just like us when we reduce the divine to mere experience that can be had by us. Sometimes I think that all of American society is kneeling at the altar of Superlative Experience, looking for the highest high, the most extreme sport, the most sordid confession on a reality show. You don’t buy anything anymore before you Google “What is the best ….”; and Yelp reviews are the new standard of our existence. Call it a cult of experience, and think of it as a misguided groping for God, like unto the groping of those ancient Athenians.
It’s a problem of our day, and it’s a problem of our churches. What kind of experience does worship lead me to, becomes the question. Did the sermon, or the prayers, make me laugh, or cry? We come to measure our worship, not by whether it speaks to us of the God who is beyond us or by whether it’s an opportunity to give thanks and praise, but by whether I liked it. God as ultimate authority and Lord of our existence, is replaced by me.
So what are we who follow Christ to do? St. Paul’s sermon to the Athenians is instructive. First, we are to heed Paul’s call to repentance, realizing that none of us has a corner on understanding God or living as a follower of Christ. There is big heaping helping of humility in order here. And since repentance involves concrete acts of turning away from the old, inward-curvature of our souls and toward the new, transforming, and open-facing and open-handed kind of life, we are to behave like community, the community that God created in Baptism. We are made in the image and likeness of God, not in the image of any idol – not even the idol of my own supreme personal authority – that would tempt us. We are obligated then, to listen to one another, to engage in our differences, for it is only outside ourselves and outside our own, oh so little, world, that we will come to know the one, the true God.
One last example of how this works, of how this Athenian question of the nature of God is a question of our own day. The big question before us right now – before each of us, before our congregation, and before our nation – is when and how do we re-open. This week Dr. Anthony Fauci went before the nation and gave no specific answer, of course, because the answer will come only with listening to what our circumstances are – listening to what God is saying to us, if you will, through the natural world, which is another way of saying, science – and the answer will be shaped by how we do community, how we listen to each other. We will listen for the truth, and we will engage.
On Wednesday President Trump responded to Dr. Fauci: “To me that’s not acceptable.” For purposes of my illustration here, it’s those first two words that are important: to me. What’s I’m pointing out is not that the president disagrees, but the basis on which he does so. “To me”: That’s something like the Yelp review of the work of Dr. Fauci and the rest of the scientific community. No one of us has that kind of corner on understanding the truth, and so the truth is not a matter of our own opinion, of what it seems like “to me.”
No. Instead, let all of us who are so often tempted like that by the false idol of our own opinion hear the words of St. Paul’s sermon this morning: “Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is … an image formed by the … imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now God commands all people everywhere to repent, because God … will have the world judged in righteousness by [Christ].”
Our God, then, is not any unknown God. Actually, we know this God of ours very well, thank you very much. Matters of this world are judged in righteousness by Christ, and for those of us who know Christ, oh, man, that is Good News. Nothing unknown about it; we know that leaves our world in very good hands, indeed.