Our Known God -- Sixth Sunday of Easter/Mother's Day

Acts 17:22-31

May 14, 2023

            I went to a very strange wedding many years ago, where the couple wasn’t religious at all, but they wanted religion in their wedding service. Actually, they wanted religions. – plural. Or if not the religions, a symbol or custom from different religious traditions and cultures. They had a protestant minister officiating the ceremony. They were married under a Jewish chuppah. They broke a glass covered in a cloth also done in Jewish weddings. I think they lit candles like couples do in Orthodox wedding services. I don’t think they went so far as to jump the broom, an African American custom, but a variety of customs, cultures, and religious symbols were present in their ceremony.

As I said, this couple was not religious. The groom had grown up in a mainline protestant church but had fallen away. I don’t remember exactly, but I don’t think the bride had grown up in any faith, but she was the one driving the idea of having different religions and cultures represented. Even though she wasn’t religious, she liked these different customs, and I think, although she would never have admitted it, she wanted all their bases covered. I don’t ascribe to one religion in particular, but I am going to include snippets of all sorts of religions – just in case.

It was an interesting ceremony to say the least. Since it is Mother’s Day, I will also add that I was newly pregnant with my first baby at that time. The wedding was on an island off the east coast, which meant we had to ride a ferry across the choppy Atlantic to get there, and I spent much of my time at the wedding observing the different cultural traditions and trying not to get sick.

Although our passage from Acts today has nothing to do with wedding services, there is a sense that this story is about people who want all their bases covered. Paul sees the Athenian people as, willing to believe that deities exist, but stumbling around in a spiritual darkness, groping for a God they did not yet know.

We come into this passage in the middle of the story. Paul is in Athens, but he hadn’t come there specifically on a missionary journey. In the verses before ours, we learn that Paul has been in Thessalonica, where his preaching and teaching had caused an uproar. From Thessalonica, he had traveled to Beroea, where the same thing had happened. His followers and friends managed to get Paul safely to Athens. There he waits for Timothy and Silas to join him. While he waits, he walks around the city and in verse 16 the text says,

“ … he was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols.”

Paul did in Athens what he had been doing all along. He talks to people in the marketplace. In modern Athens, the oldest part of the city is the Plaka. This was the marketplace where people worked and gathered, where they discussed the news of their world and their neighbors. This is where Paul must have walked, talking to the people who were gathered there. He talked to Jews, and he talked to Gentiles. He shared the gospel with anyone and everyone. He told 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 while he was there Paul eagerly debated with some of the leading Epicurean and Stoic philosophers.

The people Paul talked and debated with brought him the Aeropagus. This was just below the Parthenon, and it was the place where trials were traditionally held. Was Paul on trial? No. But it was also a place for the presentation of ideas. The people who brought him to the Aeropagus wanted to hear more about this new teaching about this Jesus guy and this gospel about resurrection 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, since these are some of the people Paul was preaching to. The Epicureans and Stoics were not atheists. They believed that the gods existed. Epicureans were hedonists. But 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 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. They believed 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. If we try to fight where the universe is leading us, we will be miserable. But if we resign ourselves to following where the universe is taking us, trusting in divine reason, we will have peace. We will not expend our precious energy on useless resistance and struggle. The universe 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 known, God is known 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.

And this is where Paul lost them, maybe not all of them, but many of them. As so often happened (and happens), the resurrection was the wall that folks either ran into headlong and got knocked to the ground or the one some people shied away from completely. In that crowd were Stoics and Epicureans, people who believed that dead was dead, the end, done, finite! These were people who believed that the universe was a rational entity leading us along on a reason-lined trajectory. Resurrection from the dead 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 people gathered there 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 was known and the God who knew them.

The God who is known and the God who knows us. Our God who is known and knows. This past Wednesday, as part of our Bible study, we watched a brief video by The Bible Project on the loyal love of God. The Bible Project is a series of in-depth word studies and deep dives into scripture that is shared in relatable, down-to-earth ways. In this video, the narrator digs into the Hebrew word khesed. We often see khesed translated as steadfast love, or as the narrator called it, loyal love. God’s khesed, God’s loyal love, is a part of God’s character. God doesn’t put it on for show. God shows khesed because that is who God is. And in the final example of the video, the narrator says that God’s greatest act of khesed was in the person of Jesus Christ. By becoming human, God bound God’s self to us, to all humanity, in Jesus and through Jesus. God bound God’s self to us because God knows us, God loves us, and God acts with loyal love for all creation – even when our loyal love to God is not always so loyal.

Our God knows us, and our God is known to us through Jesus. If we leave here with nothing else, than let us leave with this – our God is known. And our God knows us and loves us with a loyal, steadfast love. We don’t worship blindly to an unknown God. God knows us. God loves us. God’s khesed is for us so that we can be khesed for one another.

Let all of God’s children say, “Alleluia.”

Amen.