Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely spiritual 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 I 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 peoples 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 fumble about 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,
Acts 17:22-31 (NRSVue)
‘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.”
My sermon from the 6th Sunday of Easter (May 14, 2023) on Acts 17:22-31.
Areopagus is a word that literally means “Mars Hill” and it was a physical place where court cases in Ancient Athens were heard and decided. But by the time Paul arrived in the city, it had become the name of the city’s governing authorities. Athens had long lost its status as a major political power but it was a place that valued education and learning. Paul, after being chased out of the city of Thessalonica, took refuge in Athens and told his friends to meet him there. He planned to keep a low profile but he soon fell into his old habit of visiting the local synagogue and the nearby marketplace to tell anyone who listened about the Jesus who lived, died, and rose again in a land across the sea. Some who heard Paul dismissed everything he said but a few gentiles – non-Jews – wanted to learn more. They brought him before the Areopagite Council who were more than simply the leaders within the city. They also represented the intellectual curiosity at the heart of Athenian identity. Paul, I think, knew what this kind of curiosity looked like since he, as a Pharisee, read, preached, studied, and just dug deep into God’s word. Those who brought Paul before the council probably recognized his curious spirit and so they asked Paul to flesh out the message he had been sharing. Paul, then, did exactly what they wanted him to do but chose to not share the name of Jesus at all.
Now that feels a bit weird since Jesus was the reason why Paul was in Athens in the first place. Paul’s use of the name of Jesus was one of the reasons why he had been driven out Thessalonica. Paul name-dropped “Jesus” all the time whenever he was preaching. Yet here, before those who embodied who the Athenians imagined themselves to be, the name of Jesus was nowhere to be found. It’s possible that Paul, after his dustup in Thessalonica, was wary of what the leaders in Athens might do. He might have wanted to stay on their good side until his friends arrived. The name of Jesus can sometimes be used as a cudgel, turning words centered in love and grace into a threat. When we’re told to “Believe or else!”, we often build a kind of mental, emotional, and spiritual wall that protects who we think we are. This wall can either shut us down or cause us to lash out, refusing to fruitfully engage in whatever makes us feel uncomfortable. This defense mechanism can, in certain situations, keep us safe but it also might stop us from becoming who God knows we can be. We all, I think, worry that our words about Jesus will cause others to react to us in this very negative way. And we don’t think we have the words or knowledge or even the energy to faithfully respond to what this lashing out might look like. Paul, I think, didn’t even want to be in Athens and so avoiding the name of Jesus might have been his way to keep the governing council from arresting him or worse. Paul wanted to move into the future he had already planned for himself. Yet the words he shared with the Athenians revealed how God’s future had already begun to include them all.
Paul began his words by describing what he recently saw: an altar in the middle of the city dedicated to an unknown god. The Athenians, I think, noticed how our beliefs don’t really capture just how big the divine actually is. This altar, which would have been used for different kinds of food and animal sacrifices, was their way of trying to grab this unknown god’s attention. The Athenians were doing what they could to reach out to God even though God had already reached out to them. Rather than digging into the Bible and his own Jewish identity, Paul invited those listening to him to remember their own story. The line “In him we live and move and have our being” was probably first written by the poet Epimendies and the words “for we too are his offspring” likely came from the poet Aratus hundreds of years before Jesus was born. Paul doesn’t, at first, use our scripture to show the Athenians who God is. Instead, he leaned into their own desire for grace, hope, and love, to show them what God had already done. The Athenians, up to this point in Paul’s sermon, probably thought Paul was simply naming the thoughts they already had. As he talked, he drew them deeper into who they thought they were. And they expected for Paul’s curiosity to lead them into a kind of thought experiment that felt abstract, holy, and mysterious. Yet Paul, without even naming Jesus, grounded the Athenians by showing how their unknown God had become known in a very particular time and place. God didn’t wait to be found before God decided to find those who needed to be welcomed and loved. By listening to the Athenians’ own story, Paul created space for them to do what none of us want to do: and that’s to repent. Repentance, in ancient Greek, is more than simply turning to God and turning away from sin. It’s more than what we typically do when we give up eating chocolate for Lent or decide that today we’re going to be a kinder person. Repentance is a deep re-orientation of our minds, opinions, and points of views so that we see ourselves and our world in a new way. Repentance is more than becoming the good person we think we’re supposed to be; it’s about joining in with God’s particular story of love, grace, and hope so that we become so much more.
The Rev. Dr. Matthew Skinner, in his book Intrusive God, Disruptive Gospel, saw two big themes in Paul’s short speech to the Aergogaus. “First, it reminds us that salvation doesn’t exist in some pure, unadulterated form with no connection to human languages, cultures, and our foundational assumptions about the world. Paul preaches an enfleshed message: one enfleshed in the Athenians’ religious curiosity…God may disrupt or confound our preexisting understanding of what’s valuable or possible…but the message of God’s good news also connects to what we hope for and what we know.”
“Second, Paul’s speech spotlights resurrected life as a core piece of Christian hope. The Easter message is about more than God undoing Jesus’ death; it is about a promise God makes to us in Jesus. God promises to change us… God values our embodied selves and intends a future for them.” It’s that last bit, I think, that describes the kind of story Paul was inviting the Athenians into. Repentance, while mindful of our past, is always about our future. It’s about a way of being in the world that says the particular life you are living matters because God, in Jesus, lived a particular kind of life too. When we share Jesus with others, we are inviting them into a future they can live in right now. And while I’ll admit that my default is to always encourage you to name Jesus as the reason why we do what we do – from our worship, to our support of food ministries, to the meals we cook for one another when we’re in crisis, and including why we turn our church into a one-day thrift store to raise $10,000 or raise 1300 lbs of produce for the Tri-Boro Food Pantry – God also gives us the freedom to do what Paul did by learning another person’s story and showing how Jesus knows them too. That kind of sharing takes a little time and effort on our part, forcing us to leave our preconceived notions, assumptions, and points of views at the door while we discover what the world looks like through someone else’s eyes. But this is something we get to do because, in our baptism and in our faith, we’ve already been met by the Jesus who lived our life so that we could discover and see and know who God actually is.
Amen.