Acts 17:22-31
April 27, 2008
Rev. Marc Sherrod, ThD
It’s a text like few others in scripture. A bold sermon from the hand of Luke, the writer of Acts, placed in the mouth of Paul, spoken to an entirely pagan audience. Remarkable since, even amid the intensity of the first generation of Christian preaching and theological development, when the New Testament writers were so keen on differentiating Christian truth from Judaism and various Greek religions, remarkable that here, in Acts 17, Paul pursues a path of religious dialogue with his opponents in Athens.
Let me try and set the stage for Paul’s sermon on the Areopagus. The Book of Acts records the travels of the first apostles and the spread of the gospel message outward from Jerusalem. Earlier in our narrative, Paul has had his conversion/call experience on the Damascus Road, and his travels eventually have taken him to Greece and that intellectual capital of the ancient world, Athens. There, the apostle waits for his fellow missionaries, Silas and Timothy, to rejoin him.
By the middle of the first century, about the time of the writing of Acts, the glory days of Greece are past, for Rome is now, by far, the dominant force in all things military economic, social, and political. But Greece still has its Athens, still its reputation as the world’s foremost center for learning and philosophical inquiry. As he waits for his friends, Paul does what anyone with time on his hands might do – he walks around the city, takes in the flavor of the marketplace, enters the local synagogue to debate with the Jews and God-seekers about whether Jesus is truly the Messiah.
I can imagine that, with time on his hands, Paul was able to form some friendly relationships with the locals, time to seek out others interested in similar religious matters; in fact, he engages in god-talk with several groups of philosophers, the Epicureans and the Stoics, who actually misunderstand his message and think Paul’s devotion is two gods, one named Jesus and the other named resurrection. And you though only your own preachers got things wrong! Apparently, either Paul wasn’t clear or his audience heard what they wanted to hear – or a combination of the two, as it usually is!
Athens is a place where novelty is the name of the game, and the locals are so intrigued by what Paul has to say about Jesus and resurrection, that they bring him to the Areopagus, which was a big rock that presumably allowed for better acoustics with a large audience and functioned as a kind of town square open-air gathering for the curious to discuss the day’s burning religious topics. Acts reports, “Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.”
Here’s Paul’s chance to speak about “his” own new religion from the Aeropagus. Interestingly, he relates neither his personal conversion narrative, nor attempts to create the carnival-like atmosphere of a revival crusade, nor even rehearses a long litany of the mighty acts of God in salvation history. Instead, he begins where the Athenians are: their own search for the divine represented by their many idols and altars that he has noticed during his daily walks through the city.
And one particular altar has attracted his attention: an altar to an “unknown god.” The Athenians don’t know it, but as Paul quickly points out, in their attempt to cover the bases and not leave any gods out, they have actually stumbled across the God whom he now proclaims.
Abundant images made from gold, silver, or stone, what one archeologist has estimated to be over 33,000 individual ones in Athens alone, may make that city’s religious scene seem quite foreign to our own, but consider this comment from a Methodist minister from West Virginia who describes getting into a car “that has a rabbit’s foot sitting in the cup holder, a sacred heart air freshner [and dream catcher] dangling from the rearview mirror, a bobblehead Buddha sitting on the dashboard and a Darwin “fish with feet” emblem on the trunk” (Jenny Williams, “Idol Behavior”). Of course, we begin to understand this confusion of images when she tells us that the car is in Southern California, but her larger point is worth considering, namely, is there, perhaps, a bit of Athens in America when we consider the eclectic nature of our spiritual practices, the cult of celebrity worship, the rampant materialism and attempts to keep up with the Joneses, or the vast number of us who wouldn’t dare miss being entertained by a TV show called, “American Idol.”
Maybe idolatry is in the eye of the beholder, but Paul’s larger point is that there is one God, this “unknown God,” who is both life-force of the universe and near presence to every person. If the Athenians can acknowledge the dual truth of God as creator and immanent presence, then Paul hopes they will eventually accept who Jesus is and affirm the power of the resurrection.
The version we have of this sermon in Acts, which can be spoken in less than a minute, is surely much shorter than a typical speech or sermon of that day, which I imagine might have gone on for an hour or more, probably in conversational fashion. Who knows what words Luke omitted in his record of this event? And compared to other sermons reported in the Book of Acts, this one on the Areopagus wasn’t particularly successful.
At the end, some scoffed, while others were polite enough to say, “we’ll hear you again” before they started talking about what was really on their minds, which was the weather or their plans for lunch; while the net result of a couple of converts doesn’t measure up to other wildly successful sermons in Acts such as Peter’s Pentecost sermon that garnered over 3000 converts or his next one that got 5000, I, for one, should be delighted that at least two, Dionysius and Damaris, came to faith that day.
But, truthfully, the evangelistic success of this Areopagus sermon is, for me, less the question than the sermon’s usefulness as a model for dialogue across the divide of social and cultural boundaries, divisive issues, or differences over deeply held values.
Certainly, idolatry is no less a problem now than it was then, though certainly a topic more subtle and complicated in our time. But I submit that there is another topic, namely, care of the earth, or creation stewardship, that is equally deserving of faith reflections and spiritual practices. And Paul’s words to the Athenians can serve as a catalyst for how such reflection and practice might proceed.
If we are going to preserve and not destroy the earth, manage wisely its resources and not bleed it to death, then we will have to practice dialogue with the Athenians and skeptics of our own time, both convincing them of truths within the Judeo-Christian tradition about caring for the earth, but also seeing, through dialogue, what we can learn from them about particular responsibilities, but also the need for universal accountability and repentance.
Just how might the particularity of Christian faith intersect with a universal ethic for tending the whole creation, an ethic that honors God, respects differences among religious traditions, and empowers all people to be pro-active in treating the natural world with respect and justice? Just as numerical growth of the church was the single most important issue facing the early church (that’s really what the Book of Acts is about – how the church added members and grew), , it may well be that the future survival of the planet is one of the most critical theological issues before the 21st century Church. I say that with a little hestitation, but the prophetic pulpit may be the voice that can finally awaken our society to all the damage and harm we are inflicting upon the early and call us to repent from our rampant consumerism and lust for more and more.
Every religious tradition has a story about how the world came into existence, and Paul tells the Athenians that it is the God of the Jews, now fully revealed in Jesus, who gave “to all mortals life and breath and all things.” With that little phrase, life, breath, all things, Paul’s sermon recalls the creation stories in Genesis, particularly the story of the divine breath animating Adam, and Adam’s responsibility to manage and care for his garden home.
From the outset, the Bible demands that humanity practice a careful stewardship of the planet instead of a careless subjugation, for immediately in Genesis 3 after giving the first human dominion over the earth, God instructed him to “cultivate and keep it.” Throughout the pages of holy writ, God insists that we humans are not the center of the universe, that while the making of human beings might be the crowning event of God’s creative activity, that does not grant us permission to destroy or ruin what the divine word called forth on the other days of that first week.
It is the obvious starting point, but no less important to state out loud: the land, the seas, the sky are a gift of grace, and that while governments, corporations, and individuals may say that we “own” everything from minerals, to water rights, to land parcels, nothing could be further from the truth. The Judeo-Christian tradition says, emphatically, that we are only managers, stewards, of that which finally is God’s alone. We, therefore, have no right to harm, destroy, or otherwise mishandle that which does not belong to us.
Think about it. What might, then, be the radical reordering of corporate and national priorities about energy consumption and fuel efficiency for vehicles, to name just one quite obvious example, if Christians and other people of faith who hold great corporate wealth or who hold great political power would simply heed this first principle about ownership as narrated in our holy scriptures?
Every religious tradition has a similar “myth,” a primal, sacred narrative, that seeks to explain how the world came to be as it is. In fact, at the time the book of Genesis was being written, dozens of creation myths circulated in the ancient near east, stories which the biblical writers meshed with their own understanding of revelation into the written word as we have it today.
As stimulating as it can be to parse, again, those old debates between evolution and creationism, such a preoccupation masks the far more critical issue of how the various stories of human origins can give to all the world’s people a shared literary and mythic foundation for seeking peace with this earth entrusted to our care. Discussions about creation should become more than just an issue of biblical interpretation or a tenet of orthodox theology. Rather, our stewardship of creation should expand into an eco-theology that explores the Church’s role in proclaiming God’s redemptive intentions for the whole planet; the preservation of the environment is, further, a serious moral issue that calls us to use the spiritual language of “repentance,” “conversion,” and “new life” to describe how we all need to undergo a radical reorientation to how we view and treat nature and its resources.
The corollary to an affirmation of God as creator is the idea of divine immanence or the nearness of God. Paul says to the Athenians that God is “not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being.” God is the matrix of existence. It is a minority report in the Christian tradition, since God’s transcendence and sheer otherness dominate our creeds and dogma, but it is a minority report no less central: God is not someplace else sitting on a throne, but the divine presence is all around us. We live and move in God. Now, neither scripture nor the tradition have ever gone so far as to say that God and nature are the same thing, but the idea is that God can be felt, sensed, experienced in the natural world, in the everyday, in the here and now. There is no place we can be where God is not, where we are outside of God. Maybe that’s what Luke’s Gospel means when Jesus speaks that verse that is, perhaps, the most revolutionary of all words in scripture: “The kingdom of God lies within you.” The human soul is charged with divinity. That’s how close, how intimate, God is.
Bill McKibben, a Christian naturalist akin to John Muir, perhaps speaks for many in their search for the God “not far from each one of us,” when he writes:
I am a reasonably orthodox Methodist, and I go to church on Sunday because fellowship matters, because I find meaning in the history of the Israelites and in the Gospels, and because I love to sing hymns. But it is not in God’s house that I feel his presence most – it is in his outdoors, on some sun-warmed slope of pine needles or by the surf. It is there that the numbing categories people have devised to contain this mystery – sin and redemption and incarnation and so on – fall away, leaving the overwhelming sense of the goodness and the sweetness [of God] at work in the world. (The End of Nature, 61)
Isn’t that a wonderful passage? Or, consider that the Bible really is an outdoors book, meaning nearly everything the Bible talks about happens outside. Have you ever thought about that? – from desert journeys and mountaintop theophanies to hillside crucifixion, seaside healings and sermons spoken while standing on a rock. Maybe that is true, in part, because the world of nature gives testimony to creation itself as truly the greatest wonder and miracle of them all.
And so, it is this creator God, so near the Athenians, so to near us, that to bring willful harm or destruction to the creation is to verge on committing the sin of blasphemy. Now that, I know, is an audacious claim, and I mean it not with regard to the land and sea as productive of food and other things necessary to sustain life than I mean it with regard to that terrible power humanity now holds to destroy all life through nuclear catastrophe or through our stubborn refusal to hear certain inconvenient truths, such as the long-term ill effects of our lifestyle choices on the atmosphere or the way that patterns of our unchecked consumption have and will contribute to global poverty and to a looming ecological disaster.
Paul further reminds the Athenians that one God made all people, for “from one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth. . . [for] we are all God’s offspring.” It is no small detail that Paul addressed his audience with that inclusive “we.” Since we are all children of God, all created by God, then we should understand that we can’t create God. A child does not give birth to his or her parent, and creatures do not create their own creator.
To acknowledge our shared humanity and the interdependence of all things must be the beginning point to overcome the idolatry of worshipping our gods of silver and gold. Paul’s sermon doesn’t use this phrase, but it seems to me that he practices a form of “spiritual friendship” as he interacts with the Athenians: he treats them with attentiveness and respect, looking for points of contact; he recognizes that he can learn from them as he affirmed that they were “religious in every way”; and he is careful not to pass judgment on their choices as he invites them to see the bigger picture of what God is now doing in the world. In other words, he proclaimed the Good News with respect and not domination, inviting relationship and a common search for truth, not a tone of rejection, condescension, or arrogance.
So much is at stake when we think about the future of our planet, so much that caring for creation can no longer be a matter just for the scientists, the environmentalists and the politicians, but must be a spiritual practice engaging the devotion of us all. . . whether that “all” includes Christians across the wide spectrum from progressives to conservatives, the tree-huggers to the dooms-day apocalypticists, or whether that “all” should mean even finding common ground with folk of other religious traditions or with no tradition at all, who, likewise, also can teach us much about how to care for creation with justice, wisdom and respect.
I can assure you that those greenhouse gases deteriorating the air we breathe do not discriminate whether they have been produced in East Tennessee or in China; the extinction of yet another species, whether in the Smokies or in the Rain Forest, will still diminish the vast and wonderful complexity of God’s good creation, celebrated by the Psalmist; and global warming, whether in rising water along our shorelines or changed weather patterns in Africa, will eventually make food production more difficult in Third World nations even as it disturbs our own economy and lifestyle choices.
As Paul said to the ancient Athenians from the Areopagus, ignorance is now no excuse as God commands all people everywhere to repent. And while it is true that these Athenians practiced a chaotic devotion to many gods which clouded their ability to see the truth of Jesus, they had one thing strongly in their favor: they were searching for the right God, the God of life-giving power who “made the world and everything in it.”
May this same God empower us, and all people everywhere, to experience afresh the One in whom we live and move and have our being, so that this earth, our home, may be safeguarded for future generations, and so that we might finally be at peace, not only with all members of the human race, but with the whole creation.
I close with these words: “I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.” (Edward Everett Hale)
So let it be. Amen.
