Acts 17:22-31
At the beginning of the service, I highlighted how different the culture was 2,000 years ago compared with today. I also reflected on the idea of the 200-year present in which each one of us finds ourselves. The life I am living today is, in many ways, unrecognisable from when my parents were born—let alone my grandparents.
The world around us is constantly changing, and we should not be naive about the fact that the church is constantly changing too. As people who profess to be growing as lifelong disciples of Christ, each one of us is challenged to think about how we ground ourselves in something as constant as God's love whilst we live through these changes.
When we look at stories that come to us from the early church, we see people doing precisely the same thing. Last week we read from Acts chapter 2, and I reminded us about the miraculous manifestation of the Holy Spirit. Peter's preaching in response to the miracle led people to be baptised, and it changed everything about their lives. There were social, economic, political, and religious implications in the transformation that was taking place.
Fifteen chapters later we find Paul speaking in Athens. Rather than describing a particular experience or appearance of God, Paul is engaging in philosophical, theological, and spiritual conversation. In this sense, I see him using reason and reasoned argument to invite people to come to know the God he has encountered in Jesus.
It is helpful to give a little bit of context for what has occurred earlier in chapter 17. Paul had been to Thessalonica, where he had shared the news of Jesus with the Jewish community there. The response of this group of people had not been good. Paul then moved on to a different city, Beroea. Again, he was speaking to Jewish people who already had a relationship with God, and, in this case, they respond much more positively to Paul’s message.
It is only then that Paul moves to Athens and into a very different environment. It is noted that Paul reacts against the many idols, temples, and statues in the city, and he heads to the marketplace, called the agora, to engage in conversations with people about Jesus. It is in the marketplace that he debates with Epicurean and Stoic philosophers and presents to them his understanding of Jesus.
It is at this point that some of the Greek people who were engaging with Paul decide to take him to the Areopagus (which means Mars Hill), because they are so interested in his ideas. The Areopagus was a seat of power within Athens, with the capacity to determine whether what Paul was speaking about was an approved teaching about the divine.
Whilst I don't think that Paul consciously thought about what I'm about to share, I believe there are several steps in Paul's engagement that might be helpful for us to consider as people who are called to witness to our faith and share it with others. There are five movements that I am going to refer to.
1. Discerning God’s presence.3. Learning about the culture
4. Sharing the good news, and
5. Inviting others to belong.
The first thing that Paul does when he encounters the people at the Areopagus is affirm their spirituality and point towards an altar with the inscription, ‘to an unknown god’. This means that Paul was discerning where God might already be at work among the people. Paul is not negative about their spirituality but affirms it and points to it as one of their strengths. He also audaciously makes the claim that the God he knows in Jesus Christ is already at work among them; evidence for this is given in relation to the altar he has named.
As people of faith one of the challenges for us if we have grown up in the church culture and always been part of the church is that there are significant limitations on our ability to discern God's presence in the culture around us. In fact, often we have a view of the culture as being a place in which God is absent rather than present.
So, on our journey to becoming people who are better at talking about our faith, being open to the idea that God may already be at work in surprising situations—and being able to name that to others—is an important first step.
The second thing that is important about what Paul was doing is that he was prepared to be innovative about where he went and who he spoke with. Paul went into the agora, into the marketplace, to have conversations about his faith. By being open about his faith, and offering reasoned arguments about what he believed, Paul was able to open the door into other councils in which he could talk about Jesus.
For us, this phone is a symbol of the marketplace of our era. Social media, websites, blogs, and vlogs are places where ideas are exchanged. Of course, we know that much of the debate is shallow, lacks nuance, and presents the world as dichotomies or simple binaries. Nevertheless, it is a place where we can share God's love and acceptance of people and look for ways to name how we see God at work—even when people do not appear to have a Christian faith.
One of the hurdles that all of us probably need to get over is that, for far too long, we have treated our faith as a private matter. Whilst faith is personal to each one of us, personal does not mean private. The idea that we're not supposed to speak about our spirituality or religion is something being imposed on people of faith by a culture that wishes to reject God, spirituality and religion generally. One consequence of this is that we need to grow in maturity and understanding, and in our capacity to engage intelligently and sensibly with others in a reasoned way as we speak about who Jesus is for us.
This brings me to the third aspect of what Paul does. In his opening argument with the people in the Areopagus, Paul has already presented a connection between the God he knows and the unknown god. As he continues to speak, Paul quotes from two Greek poems.
The second phrase that Paul uses is: “For we are indeed his offspring.” This comes from the poem Phaenomena by Aratus, written around the third century BCE. I want to share the preceding lines of this poem so that you can see what Paul is doing here more closely.
Let us begin with Zeus, whom we mortals
never leave unspoken.
For every street, every market-place is full of Zeus.
Even the sea and the harbour are full of this deity.
Everywhere everyone is indebted to Zeus.
For we are indeed his offspring... (Phaenomena 1-5).
In this instance, again, Paul is making a correlation between a god from another religion and the God that he knows in and through Jesus Christ. Paul was a Jewish teacher and lawyer by background and would have understood very clearly the ideas contained within the Ten Commandments about there being only one God. Despite this, Paul makes the claim that the God he knows is the same God that the Greeks have encountered as Zeus. This is innovative and radical thinking as Paul engages with sharing his faith in a different cultural context.
It is at this point that Paul names that the way they have understood God is missing something. This is where Paul begins to witness to Jesus. It is missing the person of Jesus Christ. The good news of Jesus that he is God who walks among us. He has lived and died and risen and ascended. This news transforms our reality.
Later, when Paul goes to Corinth, he makes the comment that when he came there, he knew Christ, and Christ alone. I suspect it is his confidence in knowing Christ and knowing that, in God, Christ was reconciling all things to himself that allows him to leverage the possibility that God is at work in the world in ways that people may not be aware of. His job is to bring the centrality of Christ into these situations where people are spiritual and devout but have not yet come to the fullness of faith in Christ.
This leads me to the last aspect of what Paul does: he invites people to come to know Christ, and into a greater sense of belonging to God in creation.
As an apostle, Paul was seeking to influence others so that they came to know that they belong to Christ. To return to what I said at the beginning. Each one of us, as a lifelong disciple of Christ, has a role to also become an influencer in the name of Christ. The move from being a follower to a sharer of the gospel is the move from being a disciple to an apostle. The word apostle means one who is sent.
Each week, you who are living in the 200-year now of your existence can be an influencer for Jesus everywhere you go. At the end of the service each week, I stand here and invite you to stand with me as I say a commissioning and a blessing. The commissioning part of what I say is to send you out into the world to live a life of faith, sharing that with others and bearing Christ’s light in the world. A colleague and friend of mine once said in a sermon: at the end of the service, we are not sent home; we are sent out. We are sent out to live as Christ’s witnesses in the world—to be Christ’s influencers.
To recap the process: as lifelong followers of Christ, we can seek to discern where God is already at work in the world around us. We can look for opportunities and innovative ways to engage the people we encounter in conversations of faith. We can lean into the culture, which reflects the context of people's lives, as a touchstone they might connect with as we talk about our faith. We can speak about the centrality of Jesus at the heart of our faith, and the way we know God. And we can invite people to a deeper sense of belonging in the world and in community as they begin to follow Christ as well.
It
is important for us to think about our role as people who witness to our faith and
as influencers for Christ as we enter the next month or so as a church
community. We are going to be intentional in our engagement with the community.
Through the “Stories that Shape Us” series we have an author event and a book
and plant sale. There will be Reading the Bible in the 21st Century
seminars, and “Play Church”. We will also be starting a Book Club and
relaunching out congregation Library. These weeks should provide many
opportunities to engage innovatively in listening to the stories that shape the
lives of other people and give to us the chance to share why the story of Jesus
matters to us. This is our marketplace, our agora.
