We, The Athenians
This morning, I want to focus on the passage we heard earlier from the book of Acts. I’m going to read it again, though, to make sure that it’s fresh in our ears before I start talking about it. Hear these words from the Book of Acts:
Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, "Athenians, I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way. For 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. The 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, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all people to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps fumble about for him and find him--though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For '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.' "Since 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. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because 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."
This passage drops us pretty abruptly in the middle of the story of Paul in Greece, and more specifically in the city of Athens. It’s a passage about a travelling apostle, in a land that is not his own, trying to win converts to “the Way,” the new Jesus movement to which Paul had recently converted. He had been making his way around the Mediterranean, stopping at synagogues to argue the scriptures and try to convince his fellow Jews that Jesus was the messiah. He has some success in Thessalonica, and a little more in Beroea, before arriving in Athens. While in Athens, he witnesses what are described as idols, the multiple gods and spirits who had devotees in Athens, and by which he is horrified. He also finds a large community of philosophers, the intellectual elites who had the ability to spend their time thinking and debating and, as the author of Acts claims, spending their time “in nothing but hearing and telling something new.” And so, when this travelling preacher arrives in the Athenian marketplace bringing a new way of thinking, allegedly described by those who heard it as “pretentious babblings,” the elites politely kidnap Paul and take him in for questioning. And that’s where our reading for today begins, with Paul having been brought before this group of thinkers, who love hearing new ideas and discussing them. And, of course, we get to witness the hero of the New Testament explain to the pagan philosophers why they’re all wrong and he is right.
There is a traditional reading of this text that uses Paul as a stand in for the Church. This reading would have us project ourselves onto Paul, as those called to take the light of Christ out into the world—even going to places and residing among people who take on entirely different faiths and worldviews from us. It is this reading that brought encouragement to Christian missionaries, who travelled the world in order to convert those who worshipped many deities. Paul went to enlighten the spiritually lost and confused, those who did not know his God or who were already worshipping his God without knowing it. It’s this reading, this interpretation, that allowed and allows the Church as an institution to begin with the gentle, passionate, and pastoral explanation of who this God is and who we believe God to be, and end by insisting that those who hear these words repent and accept what is being taught to them. It’s a colonial mindset, one that sees those who follow Christ as rightfully civilising and converting those who worship too many gods, or who worship the wrong god. This reading remains present today, even in otherwise progressive Bible commentaries that see those in the organized Church as Paul, stepping out into a world that needs to know God, that needs us to reveal, to teach, to know better than. That sees us as stepping out into a world of religious pluralism, of non-religion, of atheism, and of those who identify as SBNR—Spiritual But Not Religious—and needing to set them straight.
But what if we flip the script. What if we see ourselves not as Paul, not as the one who makes God known to the pagan masses, but as the Athenians. The Athenians, after all, are the organized, the privileged, the educated, and the scholars. The Athenians are the institution, those with some degree of authority. They gather, intentionally, to seek greater understanding. They gather seeking to more fully know what the nature of the divine is, to know what and how to worship. They are a community that knows that they don’t know it all, and that’s a good thing. But they are also a community pulled in many different directions. This searching doesn’t seem to be driven by a desire or a need to build the kind of countercultural community we see the followers of Jesus constructing. It doesn’t seem to be a journey of trusting one another and whatever divine presence they choose to align themselves with. It doesn’t seem to be transformative. Rather, it seems to fall into the category of a leisure activity, something done to fill the time that needs to be scheduled alongside other activities. Other than prompting the construction of new shrines to even more gods, it doesn’t seem like this seeking leads the Athenians to live differently.
I’m not saying that these are bad characteristics or that we should be less curious, do less study, or ask fewer questions. I’m certainly not saying that we should have less diversity of thought and belief. But if we are the Athenians, the insiders, then we need to remember to listen to Paul. Not necessarily everything he writes in the epistles, and especially not everything that is attributed to him but written by other people. But Paul the traveller, Paul the outsider, Paul the incarcerated. We need to see Paul less as the Church, less as the institutional savior of humanity who convinces the world to come to Christ, less as us or the missionaries sent to aid in the domination of colonized bodies. We need to see Paul, in this particular instance, in those colonized bodies. We need to hear this outside voice, calling to us from outside our high places, telling us that the divine does not stay up on top of the hill, theologizing theoretically and philosophizing in absentia. Telling us that the divine does not remain in the shrines we build—in the cross, the altar, the churches, the stadiums, the markets, or the walls. But that the divine image flows through Creation, and is revealed to us in the voices that call to us from outside. The voices of the migrants, the indigenous, the women, and the bodies that have been colonized. The voices of the young adults who are talked over in Bible studies. The voices of children, who often know God better than we do ourselves. The voices of Creation, that cry out with all those we push to the outside of our search for God.
John’s gospel today reminds us that just because Christ had to leave the disciples, that doesn’t mean that the disciples were left alone. Christ sent the Spirit, to ensure that the work was still being done. To remind the followers of the Way that God is never far away, but that God is here with us. To remind them, and us, that God is not absent, but still at work in the world— moving and speaking to us. In our search for God, may we not overlook the voices of those who come from beyond our mountain top. May we cast aside any notion that we have all the answers and that it’s up to us to force those answers on the world. May we listen for what the Spirit is saying to us, and how we are being called to act. Because to know God is to love, fully and sacrificially and in the company of those we journey alongside. May we have the courage to listen, and to trust that God is present in the sharing and the receiving, than in receiving and responding others might come to see God at work in us—and trust that we can journey together in peace and in solidarity. Amen.