Easter 6, Year A – April 27, 2008
Acts 17:22-31; John 14:15-21
St. Giles Church, Northbrook IL – The Rev. Cynthia J. Hallas
There’s a legend that some six centuries prior to the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, the city of Athens was beset by a plague of unexplained origin. As the plague continued to devastate the city with no apparent signs of letting up, the city fathers put their heads together to decide what to do. They came to the conclusion that one of the city’s gods must have been offended and therefore must be appeased.
But which god? There were hundreds of gods known to the Athenians. The city was, in the words of one author, “the god capital of the world.”
After much discussion and discernment and sacrifices to the gods they knew, the authorities were no closer to identifying the offended deity than they had been at the beginning of their search. And so it was that a “consultant” was brought in. This consultant, named Epimenides, concluded that since none of the known gods seemed to be responsible for the plague, there must be some god who existed but was as yet unknown to the Athenians, and he suggested an unusual solution.
He took a flock of sheep and left them unfed for days, then released them into the most succulent pasture in Athens. As it happened, that rich grazing land was the same place where the city council met, a place called the Hill of Mars. Epimenides asked those observing the sheep to note whether any of them refused to eat. As odd as this may sound – starving sheep, rich green grass – it was noted that several of the sheep simply lay themselves down where they were and refused to graze. Epimenides instructed the city officials to build altars “to an unknown god” at each of these sites, and the unfortunate sheep who lay there were then sacrificed to that unknown god.
Almost immediately, so the story goes, the plague stopped. Over time, the altars fell into disuse and became neglected and overgrown, but at one point one of them was restored, and became a point of remembrance, on that Hill of Mars, for the unknown god whom the Athenians had credited with ending the plague.[1]
Some of you might know that Mars is the Latin name for the god of war. The Greek name for this same deity is Ares. Thus Hill of Mars becomes, in the Greek language, ̉'Areios Pagos, or in the Anglicized version we have here, Areopagus. It was at this very site that Paul found himself in Athens hundreds of years after the plague, and it’s quite probable that the “altar to an unknown god” that Paul mentions was in fact that one altar that had been restored.
It is even thought that the poet whom Paul quotes in this section of Acts was none other than Epimenides himself.[2]
Paul knows the local culture very well (an important strategy for any missionary) and he clearly has his hand on the religious pulse of Athens. He is well acquainted with who, what, and how Athenians worship, and the idolatry he witnesses is offensive to him both as a Jew and in his newer identity in Christ – “he was deeply distressed”, the text tell us. Some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers debated with him. They were rival philosophical schools, but in the verses just preceding this morning’s lesson, they are on the same page in their misunderstanding of, but fascination with Paul:
“What does this babbler want to say?” or, “He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign divinities.” So they took [Paul] and brought him to the Areopagus and asked him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means.” And the author of Acts continues: Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new. (Acts 17:16-21)
Paul does note (perhaps he’s even teasing and enticing them a bit here!) that the people of Athens are devout, in their own way. These particular groups seem to be curious and open minded. So Paul has a receptive, if somewhat skeptical, audience. He has only to convince them that their devotion to idols, known or unknown is foolish, misguided; in a word, wrong.
What he offers them, of course, is a God that they CAN know, a God who wants to be known – a God who can be “searched for” and even “groped for” and found, a God who is made known in the person of Jesus Christ.
Paul makes it clear: it isn’t just that you shouldn’t worship these idols (though that directive is certainly present). The real question is: Why would you want to, when available to you is the God who gives all creation life and breath, who wants you to know Him. You can’t “live and move and have your being” in an idol made of stone, or gold, or silver.
It’s not that God needs anything from us in the sense that the Athenians believed their idols do - certainly no animal sacrifices meant to appease. But it’s clear that God does desire something from us. He desires our repentance, and he also desires something else: he wants to be known to us, to be in relationship with us.
Athenians (Paul says): the God who is unknown to you is not a statue, living in a shrine constructed by human beings. This true God does desire to be known by you, since we are all children of God. And if God created us in God’s image, how can God be something we’ve made up? How much more real is that God than any idol determined to exist by something so frivolous as where a sheep happens to lie down?
Across the centuries this sermon of Paul speaks to us in much the same way, even though our culture and our knowledge and our world are all so very different. The temptation to put our faith in things that are temporal and tangible is great; so is the temptation to “put God off” until there’s a time when we’ve decided we need God. But that’s not the way God wants it.
There is every kind of emptiness out there, emptiness that God longs to fill. There is desire for God that sometimes even goes unrecognized in a culture that doesn’t honor that quest, but it’s there.
And God has given each of us our own “Areopagus”, our own place or forum where we can help make God known. So where’s your Areopagus? In the rehearsal, the sports practice, at the office, in the classroom? At the book study group, the coffee clatch, the bridge or bingo game?
What about the apartment or condo building, the tree-lined street, the dormitory?
One of the reasons God puts us into relationships and into communities in the world beyond this parish is so that we can be living witnesses to the love and power of God in our lives and in this world. And we do that in places where we know the context and ‘speak the language’, figuratively; places where we have some credentials. We can be savvy missionaries, just like Paul. The mission field is no longer on the other side of the world – it’s right outside the doors of this building.
So think about that – this week, as you go about your various routines, think about those places you regularly find yourself as your own little Areopagus. Take yourself there and find those places where God is present but still unknown; find the people who are searching and groping and longing for God.
That searching is not an empty effort, not even when we do have to “grope”. And that can be an appropriate word for defining our often awkward approaches to God, and to faith. Yet even those awkward approaches are welcomed by our Creator, a Creator who wants to be known so badly that he paraded around in frail human flesh and conquered that frailty by rising from the dead; a God who, as Paul reminds, is never, ever far away.