Acts 17:22-31
Psalm 66:7-18
1 Peter 3:13-22
John 14:15-21
O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
St. Paul crosses the quadrangle on the U of L campus, with
the University President, the chair of the Religion Department, a gaggle of
science professors in lab coats, and a FOX News crew in tow. Curious about a
Jew with a full beard, Roman robes and such an impressive escort crossing their
campus, students begin to latch onto the parade as it cuts through the Ekstrom
Library. The students crane their necks to see and yet wear wry smiles of
indifference, just in case this whole thing turns out to be some kind of joke. What a sight they all make, striding
together through the high shelves of books, the collected knowledge of the ages
surrounding them on all sides. Passing through a back door, they are out in the
bright sunshine again. They cross the grassy lawn behind the Speed Museum
before slipping into the art museum’s main hall. As in the Library, the group
grows silent in the hallowed spaces of the museum, and you can hear the echo of
Paul’s sandals slapping on the polished marble floors. The crowd is full of
anticipation, wondering what a first-century Christian apologist could possibly
say in 2014 that would be meaningful to this erudite group, many of whom
certainly are not Christian. It is rather like bringing Bill Nye the Science
Guy into the auditorium of the Creation Museum to explain the origins of the
universe! But St. Paul seems unfazed. In this temple of ancient and modern art
assembled for our edification, for understanding the human condition and spirit,
the Apostle to the Gentiles begins to speak to Louisville’s intellectual elite.
What would he
have said, do you think? My feeling is that, if St. Paul really came to the
Speed, his discourse would be very similar to what he said to the curious
Athenian intellectuals in today’s reading from Acts. After all, aren’t our
university libraries and art museums our “Areopagus,” the place where new ideas
are born, discussed and tried? Aren’t our libraries and museums the places
where books, paintings, and statues are reverently collected, like the statues
of the gods lining the square in Athens, in an attempt to inspire us to deeper
self-knowledge, to lead us into deeper truth about the world? Atheist Alain de
Botton even wrote not long ago that museums should take the place of churches,
propagandizing “on behalf of ideas like kindness, love, faith and sacrifice,”
using “pretty things to change us.”[1]
I imagine that
St. Paul would have looked straight into the eyes of all of the curious
“nones,” the “spiritual but not religious” who thirst for truth but do not find
it in the churches, and he would have appealed to their longing for the Unknown
God. As an agnostic eighth-grader, I read James Michener’s novel The Source, a thousand-page epic
spanning the entire history of the Holy Land. Somewhere in that novel, I
remember a passage about the “altar to the unknown God” of the Athenians. Forty
years later, I still remember how my doubting heart lifted as I thought about
the hopeful option of worshiping a God I didn’t know. I thought for the first
time about a God bigger than anything I could imagine, a God bigger than the “old
grandpa on a cloud” God at my church, a God bigger than the doctrines that
seemed so silly to me. I could sense the Unknown God in the beautiful music that
I loved. I could see this God in the wondrous art that I was discovering for
the first time. I could sense this God outdoors in the pounding ocean waves or
in the amazing intricacies of a sea-shell’s patterns. What I didn’t know as an
eighth-grader was the origin of the Athenian altar to the unknown god. Some
scholars believe that the altar to which Paul refers was one of many altars raised
in an ancient attempt to propitiate the imagined anger of a god who might have gotten
left out of the pantheon after a terrible plague was killing half of the
population.[2]
But I’m pretty sure that even that unknown
God would have pleased my young mind. I didn’t like my doubts. I wanted to
believe as fully as I thought that a good little girl should. The altar to the Unknown God that I raised in my heart was also perhaps an attempt to make peace
with the love that my intellect just could not give to the God that I knew.
Now of course,
as a priest, I can see the other
side. I can identify with pastor Lillian Daniel who wrote several years ago
about her frustration with the “spiritual but not religious.” I too have worn
my collar on one too many airplane flights where the person next to me wants to
tell me that he doesn’t go to church but is definitely a spiritual person.
Complains Daniel:
Such a person will always share this
as if it is some kind of daring insight, unique to him, bold in its rebellion
against the religious status quo. Next thing you know, he’s telling me that he
finds God in the sunsets. These people always find God in the sunsets. And in
walks on the beach. Sometimes I think these people never leave the beach or the
mountains, what with all the communing with God they do on hilltops, hiking
trails and … did I mention the beach at sunset yet? Like the people who go to
church don’t see God in the sunset [too]![3]
Paul does not attack the spiritual
but not religious, however. Paul speaks to them where they are. Paul starts
with the Creator of all that is, the God who made this beautiful world and all
that is in it. He quotes the poets that his spiritual listeners know and love
and sings the praises of the God of the beach and of the sunsets. At the Speed,
I think that Paul would have pointed to a beautiful work of art and talked
about how its beauty or its truth points to the beauty and truth of God, poured
out into creation, just as the artist pours herself into what she creates. Paul
would have blessed the longings that arise in all of our hearts wherever we
catch glimpses of the “More” that we so desperately desire, even when we can’t
name it.
Paul, however, does not stop with
what is called “natural theology.” He doesn’t stop with the God of beaches and
sunsets and paintings. Paul slowly and gently pushes past what comes easy to
the intellect. At the Speed, perhaps he leads the crowd through the galleries
and over to one of those medieval wooden altar pieces. Perhaps he points to
scenes that show a little baby with golden halo lying in a manger, a
compassionate teacher healing the blind, and a tortured victim on a cross. The
God who was unknown is now known, he tells us,
pointing to these images of Jesus. In him, we see the face of God. We can’t
just admire him in this museum, however. In Jesus, God is calling us to “a
radical life-change. He has set a day when the entire human race will be judged
and everything set right. And he has already appointed the judge, confirming
him before everyone by raising him from the dead.”[4]
“Aww man! Really?!” mutters half of
the audience in the Speed. “He had everybody in the palm of his hand. He was
sounding so profound! Why did he have to go and ruin it with this wild
resurrection and old judgment stuff?!” As in Athens, I imagine that most of
Paul’s Louisville audience then wanders off, shaking their heads. Some mock.
Others say politely, “This was interesting, but we will listen to you another
time concerning this [resurrection] matter. Right now, we’re going to check out
some more paintings.”
In eighth grade, I liked the Good
News of the Unknown God precisely because it did not require anything of me. It
didn’t require my introverted heart to love my neighbor; it didn’t challenge my
reason with the strange cry that death can lead to eternal life; it didn’t make
me spend my spare time volunteering in the community; it didn’t ask me to put
up with and join the kids in Sunday School who made fun of me or the youth pastor
who got on my nerves. The Good News of Jesus Christ, however, requires all of
those things, and Paul is not afraid to proclaim that Gospel. The face of the
God that we see in Jesus Christ is clear both in its particularity and in its
call to restorative life in community with one another.
What I didn’t know in my eighth grade
innocence is that the Unknown God is fun to ponder and to discuss in philosophy
class, but the Incarnate God is the only one who knows the pain of the world
enough to transform it. The generative power of God creates the art, the artist
and his world, but only the broken power of Jesus crucified and raised can set
the world aright. Without the terrible scandal of the Gospel, the truth of the
museums and the sunsets cannot move us beyond individual enlightenment. Without
the scandal of the Gospel, the Church, too, will become a museum. Jesus won’t let
us sell ourselves short in building altars to an Unknown God. Jesus promises the
community that he leaves behind: "I will not leave you orphaned;
I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you
will see me; because I live, you also will live.” Follow Paul out of these halls
of human achievement. Leave the lifeless collection of things that you create in
your search for me. And you will see me, the Incarnate God, in the streets and the
homes where you serve in my Name.
[1]
Rachel K. Ward, “Altar to an Unknown God: In Response to Alain de Botton,”
February 28, 2012. Found at
http://theotherjournal.com/churchandpomo/2012/02/28/altar-to-an-unknown-god-in-response-to-alain-de-botton/
[2]
William Barclay, The Acts of the Apostles
(Louisville: Westminster/ John Knox Press, 2003), 154.
[3]
Lillian Daniel, “Spiritual But Not Religious? Please Stop Boring Me,” September
13, 2011. Found at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lillian-daniel/spiritual-but-not-religio_b_959216.html.
[4]
Eugene Peterson, The Message, Acts
17:30-31.
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