Unbinding God

Acts 17: 22-31

Easter 6A

May 21, 2017

Fondren Presbyterian Church

The Rev. Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

Fade in on busy street.   Narrow alleys lead off from the bustling thoroughfare lined with barking merchants.
People of all ages come and go in the hurried rush of the day.
The sun beats down relentlessly on the stone pavement and dust hangs in the air.
The shot follows the main thoroughfare toward an open-air marketplace.  Beyond the open space, towering over the people and standing on the highest point in the city is a temple surrounded by sweeping stairs toped with massive columns with statues of the gods and goddesses standing guard.
Close-up on a man dressed as a leather merchant.  He stands next to one of the God like statues.
We join him in mid-sentence.
That is my ham handed attempt to write the opening scene of the movie of Acts. 17.  I still don’t have a good name for the movie yet.  “Paul Preaching to the Atheneans before the Statue of the Unnamed God” seems a bit clunky.
There are not many biblical stories I wish had a movie remake.  In fact, there are not many bible story movies I can abide at all but this is one I would give a pass because to really understand what is happening with Paul in this moment, you have to have a picture of what is happening around Paul in Athens.
Paul is preaching in the heart of the greatest political and military power on earth.  The Roman Empire is not the ONLY powerful nation in the world, but there is none greater in political and military might.
He is preaching in a society that gives lip service to religion and freely coopts religion to suit its purposes but when it comes to living up to the broader ethics of their religious beliefs, well, that’s another story.  Rome’s is a civil religion.  It is the religion of citizenship rather than religion of devotion.  They use the same words and even some of the same symbols, but the overlap stops there.
It is also a place where that civil religion has begun to be defined by a sense of moral and philosophical nihilism.  Woven into the fabric of daily life was a sense of the inevitability of inevitability; a sense that not much that we do can really impact the direction or the realities of the political and economic behemoth that was Rome.  So most people lived lives not so much of hope for the future but of tolerance of the present.
Paul, in the midst of this militaristic world power where two dimensional religion rooted in nationalism rather than devotion has given way to a sense of daily resignation, stands up to preach the gospel of the Prince of Peace who repeatedly calls us drop everything and follow him and all the while preaches a message of hope and new life.
This sermon at the Aeropagus is one of the most famous in the history of the faith.  Paul’s bold apologetic is held up as a model of how we can share the message of Christ in a multi-faith environment; how we can share the gospel of Christ with those who believe differently; how we can make Jesus make sense to people who have not yet heard or need to hear again the Good News.
It wasn’t until I spent some time with this text that I began to realize that what Paul does here is both much greater and much simpler than we often assume.
At first glance, Paul seems to use a combination of;
flattery, “I can see that you Athenians are very religious people;”
cleverness, “Among the objects of your worship, I found a statue with the inscription ‘to an unknown God’…what you worship as unknown  I will make known;”
logic, “from one ancestor, God made all nations;”
and invitation, “God commands all people everywhere to repent…”
At first glance, the sermon at Athens seems to be theologian Paul at his rhetorical and apologetic best.
And it is.  There is no arguing that all of those ingredients- flattery, cleverness, logic, and invitation- are mixed with a heavy dose of Paul’s deep and rich theology to make for a monumental sermon and a transformative moment for the early church.  This sermon is all those things.
It is also much much more.
There is something going on here, I think, with Pail’s motivation to deliver this sermon.
I couldn’t name that sense of motivation in the text until the middle of the week when I was in Little Rock and took a little time to check the news back here in Jackson.  I went to the Clarion-Ledger website and staring back at me from the screen was a headline about the death of 6 year-old Kingston Frazier taken from a Kroger parking lot in the early hours of Thursday morning.
The details were scarce but what was clear was that a child not yet old enough to have given up on Santa Claus was dead.
There is no rational or readily comprehensible way for a child to die, but for a little boy’s life to end so violently chips away at even the most steel-hardened sense of hope in the world.  The news of a child’s death, especially at the hands of violence in our culture, takes the wind out of our sails.
Children were no less frail in Paul’s day than in our own and no less immune to tragedy.  I am sure that stories like this and tragedies like this were not foreign to the great evangelist to the Gentiles, so our experience in this community is not wholly different than Paul’s. At least not in this one narrow tragic way.
But Paul didn’t have Facebook.  Or Twitter.  Or the anonymous comments on news sites.
In Paul’s Athen’s, the philosophical resignation that he confronted was the logical nihilism of the Stoics and other schools of philosophical thought.
What faces us today is something much more insidious; the willing neglect of our connection to one another.
Let me say here that I am no foe of Facebook.  I have wasted as much and probably much more time on it than just about anyone in earshot this morning.  I’ve benefitted from its platform to connect with old friends, get to know new ones better, and stay connected over distance and despite busy lives.
But if we have learned one thing in recent years it is that social media does not always bring out the best in us and opinions that would never see the light of day in face to face conversation all to easily creep in from a digital distance.
It might be fair to rob the old cliché and say, “in Facebook veritas.”
Whet I saw in the hours after Kingston Frazier’s death showed the ugly side of that revealing truth. It did not take long for the conversation about a little boy’s death to come around to assessments of blame on the parents and judgments about the judgment of his mother.  I read, with no small sense of disgust, the freely shared opinions that the child’s death was somehow the fault of a grieving mother rather than the men who took a little boy’s life.  The death of this innocent child turned into a feeding frenzy for vitriol and bigotry and judgmentalism that reduced a little boy’s life to the status of a pot hole; political football for the anger of the moment.
Reading those comments it was as though compassion died in the back seat of that car with little Kingston.
I was shocked at some of the things I read and, I confess, more than a little bit angry at it.
In Facebook veritas, indeed.
On December 5, 1950, Margaret Truman, only daughter of the President, sang at Constitution Hall.  The next day appeared a review of her performance that was anything but flattering.
Having read the review of his daughter’s performance, Harry Truman penned one of the most famous letters in presidential history in which he referred to the reviewer, Washington Post music critic Paul Hume, as, “an eight ulcer man on four ulcer pay,” “a frustrated old man who wish[ed] he could be successful,” and promised that should they meet face to face, Hume would need, “a new nose, [and] a lot of beefsteak for black eyes.”
Reflecting on her days in the White House and that event in particular, Bess Truman later said that she regretted not taking away the president’s stamps.
The sermon I am preaching this morning is not the first draft of this sermon.  Let’s call the first draft the Harry Truman draft.  My initial foray in to this morning’s text in light of this week’s events was less a model of pastoral sensitivity and more an example of frustrated venting.  Paul might have preached with vigor and thoughtfulness, but I was ready to come with the fire and brimstone.
To try to make sense of the senseless death of a child is difficult enough.  To do it in a world where the kind of unceasing judgment and uncharitable callousness shown toward a grieving family is considered acceptable was frustrating and infuriating me beyond any helpful or hopeful words.
So I put the sermon aside and went back to the text to live with Paul’s words a little longer.
It doesn’t happen often, at least not for me, but this week a text I had read dozens of times- that I could quote by almost entirely from memory-changed in an instant.  
When I went back to Paul’s words to the Atheneans with my anger for many in my own community still keeping my blood up, I saw something I had never before seen in Paul’s words, or, more accurately, in Paul.
I saw the impassioned preacher.
I saw the theological tactician.
I even saw the evangelist reaching the unchurched.
But I also saw something I confess to seldom seeing in Paul or hearing from his challenging words.
I saw a brother in Christ hurting for a hurting world.
Confession being good for the soul, I confess before God, you, and every biblical studies professor I ever had that I know that it is dangerous to ascribe motives to moments like these, but I believe in my heart of hearts that part of what led Paul to preach that day was a desire not just to convert the Atheneans but to comfort them.
We so often view Paul as a theologian unlocking complex puzzles of historical and philosophical importance and he is surely that, but he is also a man who saw a world in need of hope.  And hope is something that purveyor’s of the Gospel have in ready supply.  So Paul shares the hope he knows in Christ.  And that, I think, is where the real power of this sermon resides.
When Paul stood up to preach that day he was not merely trying to overcome an argument or persuade people’s thinking, he was unbinding their understanding of God and throwing hope out in to the world like Johnny Appleseed.  He preached Christ resurrected because Paul saw in front of him a world where hope- deep, rich, life altering hope- was in short supply and where seeds of hope might take root and grow into faithfulness.
If there is s lesson for us here it is, I believe, this;
When we see a place where there is room for hope, there the Gospel must be preached.
Preaching hope is the Christian faith at its most eloquent..
Hope is what we do.
It is who we are.
It is how we live.
Or at least it should be, because friends, make no mistake about it ours is a world crying out in anguish for a word of hope and the one whose name we praise as “risen, risen indeed!” is same Lord who calls us to arise and go making disciples and proclaiming hope.
It took a little time, a gentle nudge from the Holy Spirit, and a renewed encounter with Paul’s sermon in Athens for me to really understand it, but beneath the rhetoric of division, and judgment, and hate, and blame, and fear, the soul of our community is really crying out for hope.
When Paul preached that morning, he knew that the next day Athens would still be Athens.  Like Sisyphus pushing his rock up hill, only to have it roll back at night, every day when Paul awoke the world was still the world.  Yet every day, he got up and he went to work pushing that rock called hope up the hill because Paul knew that while Sisyphus’s punishment was eternal, our work is for but a season.  And every day the Gospel is preached in the world is a day when the world knows just a little more hope.  And every day with a little more hope brings us another day closer to God’s promised tomorrow.
Paul went to Athens and proclaimed Good News.
Now it is our turn.
And, friends, as much as the Athenians needed it then, we really need it now.
Let us pray.
God of hope and promise, we hear the voices of our community cry out.  Shadowed in the language of lamentation, the vocabulary of vitriol, the dogma of division, is a still small voice crying out for hope. Make us, oh God, proclaimers of that hope.  May we listen past the words hurt and hear past the world’s fears so we might truly know the world’s pain. And knowing it, have the courage to share the abundance of hope we know in Christ Jesus our Lord.  Amen.