What Pastor Jon Preached on Sunday, May 29, 2011

Sixth Sunday of Easter
Acts 17:22-31 • Psalm 66:8-20 • 1 Peter 3:13-22 • John 14:15-21

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."

The apostle Paul was in a strange and unfamiliar place. He had had success spreading the mission of the gospel in southwest Asia and Greece. Threats to Paul's life dictated that he would go to Athens, and await his partners to return to let him know it was safe to travel again. Like any sensible tourist, Paul saw the many sights of Athens, and, eloquent preacher he was, he soon found himself holding forth before one of the centers of Greek culture, the Areopagus. It's as if Paul stumbled upon a lecture hall at Princeton, Harvard, or perhaps closer to home, the University of Chicago--a place of great, great prestige and honor, and a place that worships the rigors of the intellect. He began to speak of the love and power of Jesus, and naturally, the Greeks ask him, "May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting...we would like to know what it means." (Acts 17:19-20)

And in response, we have Paul's speech as today's first reading: a counter- cultural proclamation that Christ is not found solely by what we know in our head, nor solely in our heart. To these Athenians who worship an “altar to an unknown god,” Paul proclaims: Christ is found by his total encompassing of our whole lives in God's embrace because of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Paul, missionary par excellence that he is, observes the religious culture permeating Athens, a culture based on the belief that God is not knowable. After all, they worship an altar to an “unknown God.” Paul sees worship to such a 'god' as perhaps a failsafe in case the 'known' gods—the gold, silver, stone or artistic idols he sees the Greeks worshiping—do not live up to all they promise.

Paul preaches that as unknowable as God may seem, God is not found in an idol or an altar. God is found in the one God has raised from the dead. "We too belong to this God...as God's offspring, God's family," Paul says. (Acts 17:28, 31) After Paul's sermon, a handful embrace Christ and follow Paul to his next mission. But most do not. Perhaps its because this learned philosophic crowd only can only embrace God if God is kept purely as a clean concept--a distant, perfect idea, an unmoved mover, the first cause. Perhaps the risen Christ Paul proclaims is so challenging for this gathering to embrace, because they have such difficulty accepting a God who has taken on the messiness of our own existence.

But this is precisely the God that Paul proclaims, and it is such a knowable, real, incarnated God whom Paul proclaims when he says, "God is not far from us." Like the Athenians we too hold up gods that get in the way of God becoming incarnate in us. When we walked or drove or biked to church this morning, what god did we come longing to worship. Is it the idol of experience, that God can't be worshiped unless we've felt it? Or is it the idol of intellectualization, that God can be found if we just take one more Bible study, or just get our questions answered. Idols not only can distance us from Jesus, they can divide us from each other.

But the God who raises Jesus from the dead is not a concept nor an idea; nor is Jesus an emotional high who entertains us. God is a lover of flesh, of human history, of Creation's history! God loves the embodied, lived circumstances and contexts of our lives. Such a God, in whom we "live, move and have our being" (Acts 17:28), comes to adopt us just as we are--as people who are paradoxically at the very same time both sinners and saints. Bound up as we are in this mystery, this paradox, Christ knows us as members of the same genus, species, offspring—heirs of God's eternal life.

Lest we think that Jesus is an idea only in our heads, an "opiate for the masses" (Marx), God comes and reveals Christ through our weakness and imperfectness--not as an idea we need to discover, not as a way for us to escape from our life's responsibilities. Jesus' empty tomb has freed us from intellectual assent as a requirement to be Christian.

And lest we feel that Jesus can only live in our hearts, God comes and feeds us with the true story of Jesus that breaks open our attachment to the god of our emotions. For as they rise and fall with happiness and sadness, we, as sinners and saints, will continue to find ourselves fed by Jesus, whose resurrection we have the opportunity to put into practice every single day of our lives.

For all the ways we create idols that push God away, Jesus finds a way to break through, to form us, to unify us, to gather us in the diversity we find in his presence among us. Together as people formed by Jesus' story and by one another's stories, we find Christ breaking into our human life, present just as much in our sinfulness as our saintliness. (Lathrop)

ELCA Pastor Rachel Larson, the wife of the late Pastor Ben Larson who died in the Haiti earthquake last year, says that the ways she experiences resurrection come in lived, paradoxical ways that express the hope of new life for Ben, but also honor the pain of his loss. (Click here to see her testimony.) "Where do you find resurrection?" she was asked. In hugs. In smiles. In offers of dinner. In invitations to coffee, she said. Rachel sees resurrection in the hope of a lived invitation to see new life even amidst the pain of death. This is an invitation that the love and power of Jesus give to us as our opportunities to witness to resurrection again and again. Sinners and saints like Rachel give us the opportunities again and again to witness to real resurrection—as we witness the gospel's power to the hurts of this world with our lives.

I leave us today with a story that recalls the service men and women our country will remember tomorrow. It's a story that speaks of the reality that we both carry as sinners and saints. At the end of the American Civil War, the Confederate Army surrendered at Appomatox, Virginia in the spring of 1865. As this bloody, brutal war, which had raged for four years, finally came to a close, the soldiers still alive felt a mixture of sadness and relief at the conclusion of such struggle. When Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the Union General in charge of the surrender ceremony, saw the Confederate Army coming towards him, he did something no training would have ever told an officer to do to a surrendering enemy. He ordered his Union troops to shift from order arms—a position where the guns sit on the ground at the soldier's side—to carry arms, where the guns are held in their hands. This was a position of saluting, of honor. The Confederate General Gordon, when he saw this, he made his men do the same. Here at a moment when the two armies should have been divided into winners and losers, when the Union could have been cheering, and the Confederates could have been ashamed, humility allowed them to see themselves in each other.

It is on that level—the level that sees us all as wounded and yet whole people of God—that we see Christ, not as unknowable, but as real and present in our midst. It is on that level, the level where we all stand as sinners and saints, that we are freed from striving after idols, and the risen Jesus changes us forever. It is in that freedom that we have the opportunity to reach out in word and deed to embrace our neighbors' heads, hearts, and hands—their whole sinner & saintly selves. In coming to us, the risen Jesus' embrace has made God known to us, so that with the apostle Paul and the whole body of Christ, we can embrace the world too. Amen.