Acts 17:22-31
May 17, 2020
“Marco?!” “Polo!”
“Marco?!” “Polo!!”
“MARCO?!” “POLO!!!”
When I was a kid, this was one of
our favorite games to play in the pool during the summer. When I started taking
my own kids to the pool in the summer, I taught it to them. Even today if
Phoebe, Zach and I have a chance to go swimming together, we’ll end up playing
Marco, Polo. You know that
game, don’t you? Whoever is designated as It must move around the pool with his
or her eyes closed calling, “Marco.” The others that are hiding from It have to
respond, “Polo.”
My kids and I played Marco Polo a
lot. And to keep the peace between the two of them, I would get the ball
rolling by voluntarily being It first. That meant that I spent a great deal of
time splashing around the pool with my eyes closed and my hands out, groping
blindly for my kids, and hoping I didn’t tag someone else’s child or another
parent in the process.
This was the image that came to my
mind when I read these words of Paul’s sermon to the Athenians from our passage
in Acts. Paul saw the Athenians as people stumbling around in the dark, groping
for the God that they did not yet know.
Our passage from Acts this morning
starts in the middle of the story. Paul is in Athens, that we know, and he is
in front of the Aeropagus, which is an outcropping of rocks just below the
Parthenon. This was a place where trials were traditionally held. Was Paul on
trial? Not necessarily, but in the verses before we read that Paul and some
others had caused an uproar in Thessalonica with his preaching of the gospel.
Then he went to Beroea, where the same thing happened, and now followers have
gotten Paul safely to Athens. There he waits for Timothy and Silas to join him.
While he waits, he walks around the city and as the text says, “he was deeply
distressed to see that the city was full of idols.”
Paul did what he had been doing all
along. He talks to people in the marketplace, the Plaka, to Jews and others
about the gospel. He tells them the good news of the resurrection. Some people
believed him. Others called him a babbler. They thought he was pitching foreign
gods. Now Athens was a city of philosophy. And Paul debated with some of the
leading Epicurean and Stoic philosophers.
It was these people who brought him
to the Aeropagus. It was not because they wanted to put him on trial,
necessarily, but they wanted to hear more about this new teaching, this new
thing that sounded so strange to them.
I don’t want to take us down an
unnecessary rabbit hole, but it might be a good idea to understand a little
more about Epicureans and Stoics. They were not atheists. They believed that
the gods existed. Epicureans were hedonists. But not in the way we tend to
understand hedonists. They were not the drunken, toga wearing gluttons ala
Animal House kind of hedonists. Epicureans believed that the only thing that
was intrinsically good was pleasure. That which increased pleasure was good,
that which decreased it was bad. Pleasure and pain came in both mental and
physical form, and to Epicureans there were two types of acute mental pain:
fear of the gods and fear of death. Epicureans did not believe that the gods intervened
in human life. The gods were set apart from humans on a completely different
realm, indifferent to humanity and all of its ills. The Epicureans were materialists;
they believed that everything down to the smallest atom, including humans, was
made up of matter. Matter does not have an eternal soul. So when we die, we are
dead. The point was why fear gods who were indifferent to humans, and why fear
death when it was a complete end? There would be no punishment in some life
after this one. Live for today and live in simple moderation and tranquility.
The Stoics valued reason. They believed that the universe was based on reason
and rationality. The Stoics, like the Epicureans, believed that tranquility and
peace of mind were the foundation of happiness. That tranquility and peace of
mind came from reason governing our desires, self-control. The universe was
based on Divine Law, and Divine Law was grounded in reason. Therefore, there
was no point in getting bent out of shape over anything because everything was
happening as it should. Imagine a dog being tied behind a moving cart. The
universe is the moving cart and humanity is the dog. If we fight against the
rope tying us to the cart; if we chew and pull and resist, then we are going to
be miserable. But if we resign ourselves to follow along behind the cart,
trusting that the cart is moving according to reason then we will not expend
our precious energy on useless resistance and struggle. The cart is reasonable
and rational, and we just need to accept that it is going where it should.
Paul walked into this philosophical
melting pot and did what Paul did so well. He used his significant rhetorical
skills and his ability to speak from the place where his audience lived –
physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
“Athenians, I see how extremely
religious you are in every way.”
That’s a way to win friends and
influence people. Paul goes on to say,
“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.”
It is as if Paul was saying, look
friends, I know how religious you are. I know you believe. But that unknown
god? Let me tell you, that god is the God, capital G. That God is known and
here. I know that God. And I know that God and you know that God because all
creation, this earth that we live on, this world we inhabit, all that was made
by this known God. Paul even goes on to quote what was most likely a Stoic
poet,
“In him we live and move and have
our being.”
Then Paul tells them that this God
who created everything cannot be recreated through human imagination, even the
best of human imagination. God cannot be found in gold or silver or stone. God
was found, God is found in the One whom God raised from the dead. Up until this
moment, Paul had not even mentioned Jesus. Still, he does not mention Jesus by
name. But he speaks of the resurrection. He speaks of God Incarnate, God who
was born, God who died, God who rose from the dead.
As so often happened (and happens),
the resurrection was the wall that some folks ran into headlong. In that crowd
were Stoics and Epicureans, people who believed that dead was dead, and the
universe was a rational cart leading us along on a reason-lined trajectory.
Resurrection was too much, too irrational, too unreasonable, too upside down,
too illogical, too much. It was the inner spirit that counted, not the finite
matter. Again, we stop reading before the story is finished. Some people
scoffed at this idea of what was dead being alive again. Paul, this babbler,
was preaching about a God who embraced not only the spirit, but the flesh, the
body. This God Paul preached of loved the body enough to resurrect it. How
irrational? How strange? But some listened. Some wanted to know more. And some
believed. Some, perhaps those who had been groping for God the longest,
realized that the unknown god was truly the known God; the God who knew them.
It seems to me that all of us, no
matter how long or short our personal story of faith is, spend time groping. We
stumble around, hands outstretched, trying to find God, trying to know God.
Perhaps, as Paul suggested, the desire to know God, to search and even grope
for God, is an intrinsic part of our very being, our very creation.
Maybe this time is a time of
groping, stumbling, reaching; maybe this is a time when the whole world is
searching to know – not just anything – but to know God. The good news is that
even when we are unsure, even when we feel we don’t know, God knows us. We are
known. That is where our hope lies, that is the good news. We are known by our
known, creating, loving, resurrecting, embodied, God.
Amen and amen.
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