At the Areopagus

Acts 17:22-31

April 27, 2008

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

Many years ago when my husband was in college, he lived as a boarder in the home of a family from a fairly conservative church. One day, as his landlord was out washing his car, Gavin overheard him having an encounter with a couple of clean-cut and very friendly folk from the Jehovah’s Witness church. They asked the landlord if they could tell him about their faith. His response, given in a very friendly tone of voice, was: “Well, according to my beliefs all the people in your church are going to Hell, so I don’t think we have much to talk about. Have a nice day!”

That is one model of relating to people who believe something different from you! And although we laugh and may congratulate ourselves that we would never be that rude or blunt, nevertheless, as Monica said last week about politics, it is easy for us to fall into assuming that our expression of faith is far superior to others and so criticize others covertly, laugh about their idiosyncrasies, or dismiss them as foolish or misguided or not as far along in maturity as we are. I know several Roman Catholic women who tell of how they regularly have people of various Protestant faiths urging them to leave what these “friends” call a regressive religion; how, they wonder, can such a smart and mature woman, stick around in the Catholic Church? Did you see the picture in the New Haven Register this past week of people protesting the Pope by dressing up in clown outfits along his route in New York?

So far, these are all Christians I have been talking about, Christians relating to one another. Given the difficulty we have with that, is it any wonder we struggle to relate to Jews or Muslims or Buddhists or Atheists?

So when I turn to Paul’s encounter with the philosophers, poets, scientists and artists at the Areopagus in Athens, I struggle with what I see there. On the one hand, he seems to me the very model of how we should be figuring out how to talk about our faith with those who believe something different. On the other hand, he ends his encounter by implying they and all humanity have been ignorant for millennia and offers them one way out of the ignorance with a threat of God’s judgment attached. No different from either Gavin’s landlord or the Jehovah’s Witnesses to whom he spoke or the Pope or Orthodox Jews or Fundamentalist Muslims, for that matter.

And most of those considered the wisest people in the city ignore Paul and he leaves Athens with only a few believers.

Is the only alternative to calling people ignorant who don’t believe as we do not to talk with others about our faith at all? That is the alternative many Christians, Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, and otherwise have chosen. It used to be received wisdom that you don’t talk with neighbors about religion and politics because it will only cause trouble.

And yet, if, like Paul, we have had an encounter with God, with Jesus, with the Holy Spirit, that has transformed or touched us deeply in some way; if we love God and our church and think they can be an instrument to bring love, peace, healing and joy to others and to our world, wouldn’t we want to share that? How do we talk about these things without calling others with other beliefs “ignorant,” especially if they are very intelligent people as is often the case in New Haven? Where do we connect in a positive way with those no in our church or possibly any church?

I think if our desire is to convert first, then we will either decide we can’t do it at all, or we will run the risk of pushing away those to whom we most want to reach out. But if our desire is to connect with others, to find our commonalities of need or joy or hope; if we seek to, as Paul puts it, “grope” together toward God, then perhaps evangelism can lose its scary quality for us. Because then it becomes about the other person and God and not about a doctrine or institution.

Paul starts out that way in Athens. He comes to speak at the equivalent of whatever the most prestigious lecture hall at Yale might be. He comes to speak to intellectual and artistic leaders in the most prestigious of all cities for intellectual pursuits (we’ll call it New Haven, though Cambridge and Princeton might compete for that honor!). The first thing he does is seek to meet them where they are. He has been exploring the religious sites in the city. As an educated Roman citizen, Paul knows well the various religious groups in the Empire. His first words are to call them to recognize their impulses toward God; they are, by any measure, a religious people. All that is good and beautiful about their artistic, intellectual and scientific achievements are an expression of the reality that they are created in the image of God. All the shrines show their reaching out to connect with the one in whom, as the Greek poet Epimenides said, “We live and move and have our being.” Paul tells them that his understanding of God is that God made all of us with that inner yearning to connect with something greater, with the divine, and with each other. We come from one God and from a common ancestor, so none of us can claim superiority to any other.

This is the first step of evangelism: meeting people where they are. The first step for people of faith to connect with God and with one another is not setting forth one doctrine or another as the best or the only true path. The first step is not to give instructions for right worship, prayer or even right living. The first step is to recognize in ourselves and to help others recognize that the impulses within us to connect with beauty, with truth, with knowledge of any kind, with compassion, and with other people, come from God and call forth in us the image of God in which we were created. We start with what led us to God; what did and do we search for? What are our deepest longings? What draws us to other people in the congregation as well as to God? What are our passions and how do we live them out? These are the conversations that lead to connections.

Now where Paul loses the Athenians is when he says that not only do we all reach toward God, but that God has come in flesh to reach toward us, to connect with us in a radical, intimate way in Jesus (whom, you will note, Paul never names). Oh, the Greeks had stories of the gods connecting with human beings, but those encounters were rarely positive, and many of the philosophers, like modern intellectual atheists, dismissed those myths as fanciful human attempts to explain the unexplainable. So most of his listeners left unconvinced.

But there were others that day, as there are now, people like Dionysius the Areopagite or a woman named Damaris that day in Athens, who are also searching to connect with something they may not be able to name, an “unknown God” as it were. They may be searching for connection through gifts God’s spirit has instilled in them, like art or music, poetry or nature, science or philosophy, politics or philanthropy or through destructive things like drugs or casual sex or power.

For us here at Redeemer, we believe, as Paul did, that the ultimate connector is Jesus, God no longer waiting for us to grope toward love and truth, but God reaching out and caressing our hands; it’s what Michelangelo tried to portray in that famous painting on the Sistine Chapel. Jesus, the enfleshment of God’s longing to connect with us, feeding us, calling us to recognize God present in and among us, calling us out of pettiness, out of ruts that bog us down, out of anger or guilt, out of self-righteousness or self-hate. The embodied God, reaching constantly to us, this is what we have to offer, not to impose or threaten. This is what we have to share, to help others put not just a name, but a presence to a being they may sense bit whom they might call the unknown God.

I recently heard an English Anglican priest tell a story of a trip he took with representatives of the greater Anglican Communion to New Zealand. As part of their trip, they were invited to worship with a Maori group (the Maori are the aboriginal people of New Zealand). As they came into the worship space, they were led by a group of singers, singing them into the sacred space. When they got to the front, they started to sit down, when their interpreter stopped them. You see, when guests came to the community, they were greeted with singing, but then they were expected to sing from their own tradition as a return greeting. They quickly caucused together and realized they all knew the first couple of verses to Isaac Watt’s hymn “O God Our Help in Ages Past,” so they sang that to their Maori hosts.

I love that picture; it connects to a wonderful image that C. S. Lewis uses in the Narnia books. Lewis imagined that the world was actually created by God not by speaking as we usually think of it, but by singing. Each creature had a song which called them to life.

As evangelists then, let us imagine that our role is to sing our song and call out of our neighbors the song that is in them, the song that God created in them in the divine image. Only when we connect with one another can we fully explore, then, the most marvelous journey of connecting with God who reaches always toward us. Amen.