During these weeks after Easter, I’ve been inviting our congregation into the consideration of various “mysteries.”1
This week, I’d like to consider the mystery of “the world.”
For this purpose, I’m going to look at Acts 17. The text for Sunday is that famous moment with Paul in the Aeropagus. Having walked around Athens and observed the many temples, including a temple to “an unknown god,” Paul waxes upon the topic of religiosity and then makes a focused invitation to consider the God (in Christ) who he proclaims as the “known God.”
Now, first a bit about the Acts of the Apostles. Acts is a big book, part of a duopoly that begins with the gospel of Luke. We find it as the fifth volume in the New Testament collection, immediately after the four gospels.
During the season of Easter, it has become traditional for liturgical churches to replace what is typically a reading from the Hebrew Scriptures with readings from the book of Acts. So for these seven weeks of Easter, we hear selected texts from Luke’s story of the early church.
Now, Acts is as I mentioned a big book, and there’s a long history of interpretation. I’d like to mention just two commonly noted aspects of the book as way of preparation for the sermon Sunday.
First, Acts is kind of idealized. That is to say, there’s a sense in which it describes the early church as we would wish it to be, as Christians would be if they were their best selves.
We see this in the claim in the second chapter that the early church held all their possessions in common. We also see this “idealized” sense of the early church in the fantastically well-organized sermons the apostles preached that then converted thousands upon hearing them.
Now, what I’m not saying is that Acts is untrue. But what I am saying is that it is idealized.
The result of reading an idealized text repeatedly over thousands of years has been that, when churches try to become “Acts” churches—that is, when they take as their model for church life in the present an idealized text from the past—inevitably that means they act in an idealized manner.
The church growth movement in the 20th century, for example, really latched onto the idealized and fantastic growth of the church as recorded in Acts. Many preachers stylized themselves after the preachers recorded in the text. And so on.
So the first thing we should recognize is that Acts is… larger than life.
But the second thing we can notice is that the Acts of the Apostles is, as I often like to say in order to remind us, a “recapitulation” of the life of Jesus. More popularly, we call this a “recap.” In other words, Acts is told in such a way that the church as church appears in many ways to move in the world the way Jesus moved in the world in Luke’s gospels.
The apostles teach like Jesus. They heal like Jesus. They suffer like Jesus. All you have to do is read Luke, take a break and eat a slice of pie, then read Acts, and you’ll see how in many broad brush and specific ways Acts parallels the events recorded in Luke, but, as I said, “recapitulated” in the life of the church.
Okay, so now with all of that as context, let’s consider the specific text for Sunday.
Just to save you some time, here it is in full:
Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. 23For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 24The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, 25nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. 26From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, 27so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us.28For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’ 29Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.30While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, 31because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”
James Barr, in his Gifford Lectures on Acts 17, writes concerning this text:
“For the text that Luke wrote was one that took this incident on the Areopagus as a glorious moment, and Luke commemorated it with one of the finest of his many fine speeches. It stands in line with the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the Speech of Stephen, and Paul's speeches before Jewish authorities and before Agrippa. And that in turn is a reason why it is not easy to reduce the authority of Luke to a secondary level. Even if Luke somewhat mixed up the words that were historically spoken, and produced something of his own theology rather than exactly what was said at the time, from the point of view of the authority of scripture the effects on Christianity, if Luke's depictions are to be taken lightly, would be enormous.”
Notice a couple of moves on Barr’s part. First, he notices that Paul’s speech is in a long line of speeches that begins with… wait for it… the speeches of Jesus.
Second, he takes as basic fact that we have in Acts not a literal, historical recording of what Paul said, but rather “an idealized” version that serves the purposes of presenting the gospel (recapitulated now in the early life of the church) as Luke understood it (theologically).
This offers us a kind of preparation for how to consider the text if we want to also consider it as the basis for considering the “recapitulation of Jesus in the life of the world.” I’ve thought for a long time now that, although Jesus (and later the early church) thought the gospel was primarily for a smaller chosen nation or once the Gentiles were evangelized, the “believers” vs. the “non-believers,” what we have in this Aeropagus passage is a moment similar to the many moments when Jesus encounters individuals outside of Israel and his religious tradition.
It shows Paul’s curiosity, his willingness to not immediately dismiss the temples in Athens, mirroring Jesus’ curiosity about what those from neighboring traditions believed (like the Samaritan woman at the well, Luke 10).
Paul even quotes Athenian poetry. And all of this is happening when the core aspect of Paul’s preaching is the articulation of a doctrine of creation. This should tell us a lot about what a Christian doctrine of creation could or should be, rather than what it often is (which unfortunately in the modern era is often utilized to re-inforce gender essentialism).
And it also teaches us how a Christian preacher might engage religious texts (and art, and more) in an era when the Biblical text, though still crucial for how that preacher preaches, isn’t necessarily what they specifically preach “on.”
And I’ll stop right there, because that places us right at the position I plan to be when I preach Sunday, because I’d like us to consider what it means (this is the mystery), in terms of our care of and relationship to creation, that “we search for God and perhaps grope for God and find God—though indeed God is not far from each one of us.” Creation care as groping for God. Or something like that. We’ll see.
The first week, we considered the life of faith in community between two sociological groupings—the church in worship, and the individual in their personal life of faith. The second week, we considered the mystery of books themselves, and being a people of “the Book.” The third week, we considered the mystery of Jesus himself. Then we took a break, and hosted Victoria Goddard for a “Speculative Sunday.”
If I can imagine a world without creationist ideology, then I would wish for us to envision our union with Christ as both established in baptism, as well as, at least in part, affected by our engagement with the more thorny religionist burdens we bear of our hermenetics and tradition. I am sure there is a way to blow liberation into our stuffy theological shibboleths. We start with a level playing field with baptism. And we return to it daily.