Unknown
Acts 17:22-31
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According to the Pew Research Center, one of the fastest growing religious groups in this country is the ‘nones.’ That’s n-o-n-e-s not nuns. We’re not talking about orders of religious sisters in black and white habits, but those who when asked what they believe indicate that they are atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular. When surveyed about their religious tradition, they check the box next to the word ‘none’. In just seven years, from 2007 to 2014 this group went from making up 16% of the adult population to 23%. At the same time the percentage of people who self-identified as Christian dropped from 78 to 71%. Just the other day I overheard an example of this. A man on the airplane was talking to a fellow passenger about his relationship. He was talking about his life with this woman and her children from a previous marriage. Then he explained that while they were together, they were not married and didn’t have any plans to that effect. “Neither one of us is religious,” he offered as an explanation for this fact, “so it’s not like we were going to go to a church, and there really aren’t any compelling legal or financial reasons to get married.” That snippet of conversation offered a window into a completely different worldview. One that is often defended and described as perhaps, “spiritual, but not religious.”
When Paul landed in Athens, he found himself surrounded by the idols of the day. It wasn’t as though this was all new to him. After all, he grew up in a Judean home surrounded by the Greco-Roman influences of the empire: Roman soldiers with garrisons in every town, Roman taxes on commerce and trade, and certainly the Greek and Roman gods whose temples could be found up and down the Mediterranean coast. But when Paul landed in Athens he found himself in the heart of Greek culture and learning, which meant that there wasn’t just a temple to Artemis next door to the village synagogue. No, Athens was a city filled with statues and shrines to every god in the Greek pantheon, and a city full of ideas. And Paul could see that they were people who were quite religious, if not spiritual.
Now Paul was supposed to be waiting for his ride, waiting for his traveling companions Silas and Timothy to catch up with him from Beroea. The three of them had been causing a stir wherever they happened to stop and when trouble followed them from Thessalonica, Paul was sent on to Athens to stay one step ahead of the heat. But Paul was not one to cool his heels and take it easy. He looked around Athens and its proliferation of idols and began to say something about it both in the synagogue and in the streets, mixing it up with his fellow Jews as well as with people from different philosophical schools of thought. You would have thought that given the trouble he had caused elsewhere that Paul might want to keep his head down and maintain a low profile. But word quickly spread about this man, his strange ideas, and his foreign god. So much so that he soon found himself center stage at the hill of Ares, or the areopagus- sometimes called Mars hill, the Roman name for the god of war.
The Areopagus was the hub of Athenian civic life. It was where matters of law, justice and philosophy were openly discussed and decided. Lately it’s been suggested that there is no place for matters of faith in the public discourse, that belief is an intensely personal matter, and thus a private one that belongs entirely between an individual and the deity that they worship. It’s safe to say that such a suggestion would not only baffle the citizens of Athens, it is one that the Apostle Paul would recognize as in no way consistent with the way of Jesus. Jesus regularly found himself at odds with the ruling powers of his day. His life, his words, his work, and certainly his crucifixion and resurrection were every bit a political matter as they were spiritual. The way of Jesus serves as a prophetic repudiation of what passes for power in this world. And it still does. It did that day at the Areopagus.
In a world that is still filled with idols and ideas, it isn’t so much what Paul says as the way he says it that’s important. In a world of competing ideas and ideologies, a world that increasingly sees itself as spiritual but not religious, a world that would see faith privatized, Paul’s way of engaging a worldview very different than his own encourages us to do the same. Instead of shrinking from the opportunity, or ducking it altogether, Paul does what God has done in Jesus. He meets people where they are and speaks to them in a language that not only can they understand, but one that they will hear.
Paul opens by practicing what the writer Brene Brown describes as generosity. Generosity is more than material, more than giving money to a cause or donating goods to someone in need. Generosity is a posture of assuming better of someone and not worse. He isn’t critical, or judgmental, or combative with his audience. Some commentators think that he’s trying to flatter the Athenians, but what he does looks a whole lot like what Jesus did when he encountered someone he didn’t know. He practiced generosity of spirit. He gave them the benefit of the doubt. While Paul may not have shared the Athenians inclination toward the gods they worshipped, he could recognize the intention behind their worship of them. He could see how very religious they were. These days religion has become something of a dirty word, which probably contributes to the number of people who don’t want to identify themselves as religious. Religion is seen as controlling, manipulative, rigid and judgmental. When Brian McLaren was here a few weeks ago, he shared the story of a conversation he had with a young man on an airplane. When he found out that his work was talking about church, he told Brian that he wasn’t really into organized religion. McLaren suggested that maybe it wasn’t so much that he didn’t like religion itself, but rather that he didn’t like what it was being organized for, how it was being used. The young man agreed. And when McLaren followed up and asked what he thought it should be doing instead, he said he hadn’t given it much thought but that it shouldn’t be protecting pedophile priests and making televangelists rich. Indeed. It’s not hard to find examples of all the ways that religious traditions of every stripe have been used to protect, enrich, and harm in ways that are contrary to the very tenets they proport to advance. But that isn’t where they began, which means that isn’t where most of us begin- whether we are Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or any variety of something else. We begin with the desire to connect with something larger than ourselves. That is what the word ‘religion’ means, to bind. In the same way the binding of a book holds its pages together as part of a larger work, the religious impulse is an attempt to connect, or bind, our lives to the larger work of God around us. People do that in all kinds of ways. Where we get ourselves in trouble is when we confuse our particular binding, our particular practice with the larger work to which we are trying to connect. The danger in that is that it may lead us to think that we’ve got this God thing all wrapped up, that we’ve got a corner on the truth. As St. Augustine so famously observed, if we think we understand God then what we have understood is not God.
In that way we could learn a thing or two from those Greeks and their altar to an unknown God. Because religious belief requires a bit of humility about all that we don’t know even as we speak about what has been made known to us. It’s the kind of humility that recognizes that because we’re not the only ones trying to bind our lives to something larger, there might be something to be learned from other attempts to do so. Even as Paul is making his case for the God who is unknown to the people of Athens, he invokes the words of their own poets to do so. I can remember years ago making a call to colleague on the phone whose voicemail greeting included a blessing in the name of the one in whom we live and move and have our being. That’s scripture, right? I mean it’s found right here in Acts, chapter 17. But before those words found their way out of Paul’s mouth, they belonged to world of Greek philosophy and poetry.
If God is the one in whom we live, the one in whom we move, the one in whom we have our being, that means that God is not ours to control, or manage, or do what we want. God is not ours so much as we are God’s. Who God is and what God does is not dependent on who we are and how we worship; which sacrifices we offer and where. Rather, who we are and how we worship depends on God and what God has shown us to be true in Jesus. To be religious, but not spiritual, is to confuse the binding with what it is meant to connect us to. Likewise, to be spiritual but not religious is like trying to decipher the meaning of the larger work from a single page. None of us has the whole story unto ourselves. There is more to it than our own private, personal understanding of things. Religion doesn’t just bind us to God, it also binds us to one another as part of the larger whole. It shows us that the only way we come to know more about all that we do not know is by engaging with one another. Not only sharing what we have seen with a generous spirit, but opening ourselves as well to what someone else might have to show us that we may not have seen.