KNOWING THE UNKNOWN GOD

A Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter
April 27, 2008
by Pastor Laura Gentry

Acts 17:22-31
Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, "Athenians, I see how extremely religious 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 nations 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 grope 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."(NRSV)

Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

It is amazing how much a person can accumulate and nowhere is this more apparent than when you move. I remember one year as we were all getting ready to move out of our seminary dorm rooms, I stopped in on a friend who was sorting her items before she began to pack them into boxes. I made my way gingerly through the numerous and precarious piles of stuff before settling down in what seemed to be the only free corner of the room. There was not much to say, I was generally amazed at the amount of things she had managed to pack into her little room. She had a system to combat the accumulation, she would move from one section of the room to the other working one shelf and one drawer at time. Only if I had viewed her on a time-lapsed camera would I be able to enjoy the full effect of her moving madness.

While she was going through some items in her desk she handed me a metal screw cap.

"What is this," I asked.
She shrugged, "I don't know, but it goes in that box beside to you."

I looked to my side and saw a box filled with strange objects, each one of them was a piece of something from something. I dropped the cap inside the box. She told me that the box was her "what's this?" box and it was a tradition that she began some years back when she discovered that unusual items would turn up, which she could not identify, yet she could not throw out until everything had been sorted. If the items in the "what's this?" box did not find homes by the end of the packing then they would be thrown away.

The notion of the 'what's this?' is something we can all relate to, not only in housecleaning, but in the workplace, relationships, just about every aspect of human interaction. We are all confronted at some time by something that we do not understand yet we feel it is too significant to just dismiss, so we place the issue in the back of our minds with the hope that perhaps someday we will come to understand it.

Athens, Greece was a leading city of intellectuals. It was the place where many went to study arts and letters. A very 'heady' city that was not easily disturbed by new thought; however, six hundred years before Paul's delivery to the Athenians a terrible pestilence ravaged the land. The survivors felt that they had upset the Grecian gods and had to make amends. It was suggested, by a resident poet, that sheep be let loose in the town and when the sheep had run themselves to exhaustion then the place where the sheep came to rest would be the place where they would be slaughtered to the god whose temple they were nearest to. If a sheep came to rest near no particular shrine or temple then that sheep would be sacrificed to "the unknown god." There was an understanding to the Greeks that they did not feel that they had discovered all the gods that existed—they had the sneaking suspicion that there was a god whose presence could be felt but even though they did not fully understand who the god was. This feeling of an unknown god was too important for the Greeks to dismiss, but they just did not know who this god might be so they built up shrines to an unknown god, thus keeping connection with this god whose appearance was still a mystery to them. It is this notion of the "unknown god" that Paul builds his presentation to the gathered intellectuals in Athens, which we heard in our first lesson from Acts.

Paul appears to them in the Areopagus, a prominent area in the center of town that served as a kind of ‘speaker's corner.’ He explains to the Athenians that he knows the identity and character of their 'unknown god.' So he begins to unfold his findings to the people of Athens. Paul asserts that. this God is the one, true living God—that he is not limited to the walls of the temples nor is this God the creation of human imagination. These many shrines and idols that the Greeks have created are not the places where God dwells and the Athenians have been mistaken to feel that their gold and silver reproductions can match the power of the living God.

Paul asserts that God alone is the creator and we are the creation—this means that we are merely the creatures of this God and we have no access to the inner thoughts and actions of God. This God is not like their Greek gods who demand the sacrifice of sheep and cattle in order to bestow blessings. Paul tells the Athenians that while they were in darkness, they stumbled around for the truth—they made idols and worshipped those idols because they did not know the living God. They did not know any better. He adds that God acknowledged with a 'wink' their actions, but now that they have heard the gospel, God is calling everyone to repentance. No more will the idolatry be ignored as it was before, once the truth has been revealed then ignorance is no longer a valid excuse. Furthermore, Paul demonstrates to the people that God has spoken the terms of his judgment through the resurrection of his appointed one, Jesus Christ, and that through him, all will be raised and judged accordingly.

Paul's words continue to resonate through the halls of time and confront us here today as well. Like the Athenians, we have been searching for God and perhaps groping for God. And in Jesus, we have heard the good news that God is not far from each one of us. We can no longer claim ignorance as to the nature and character of God. “Oh, I don’t know God...I don’t know what God wants from me!” This is no longer a valid excuse, you see. Because Christ has come, we cannot place our religious faith in the “what's this?” pile, acting like we just don’t know any better. We do know better, for we have heard the Gospel—and many of us have heard it for years and years! And now that we have heard it, we cannot go on with our idolatries and ignorance about faith.

Since we have heard the Gospel and know it, what is important now, is how we respond to Christ. For in Christ, we have seen the mysterious, unknown God and, in this way, we can know God. This God of the universe is no longer a mystery to us, a “what’s this?” God. No. This God has been revealed to us in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and now that we know this, how shall we proceed? This is a question we must all ask ourselves. We are called to put aside our former, ignorant ways—to repent and follow this Savior, Jesus Christ, who can show us the way to the Father, who can help us know the unknown God, and who is coming again to judge the world in righteousness. May we follow him with all our hearts. Amen

May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.

 
© 2008 Laura Gentry