Orchard Ridge United Church of Christ

Preached on April 27, 2008 by Winton Boyd
Acts 17:22-31; John 14:15-21

Lest we think that our religious pluralism is a new phenomenon, this story from the life of Paul reminds us that from the beginning – the people following Jesus have always been relationship with those following other religions, ideologies, and philosophies of life. While much of the church’s efforts to convert others to Christianity has been disrespectful and violent; and while much of it runs completely counter to our own sensibilities –this lectionary story from Acts may be able to speak to us about how to live as authentically Christian in a religiously plural world.

As the story begins Acts 17, Paul was waiting for Silas and Timothy in Athens. While there, he was deeply distressed at the number of idols the Athenians worshiped. After conversations with Epicureans and Stoics, two thriving philosophical communities, Paul was brought to the Areopagus, also known as Mars Hill, to explain his new teachings – teachings about Jesus. His words quote both the Old Testament (Isaiah and 1 Kings) as well as Stoic poets, namely one called Aratus.

Clearly, Paul wanted to establish theological and intellectual credibility. Clearly, he is passionate about Jesus and wants others to know his passion. However, at this core of his life and this story in particular, is his proclamation or confession of faith in the context of his world.

As we read this story today, in a world that struggles with religious pluralism and religious violence of all kinds, it is good to remember that it was not really his words that were most important, but his walk from the temple to Mars Hill. The point is not his particular view of God, but his willingness to embrace and proclaim his faith. It was his willingness to take his own confession (not just ideas), his own faith, into the wider marketplace of ideas.

If the backbone of his confession can be seen in the words, “indeed God is not far from each one of us. For “In God we live and move and have our being” – if this is something he knew with certainty, in his bones – what is the backbone of our confession?

Imagining ourselves walking up Mars Hill, what would be the confession of the progressive or liberal church in the marketplace of ideas? We say “spiritually alive, joyfully inclusive, committed to justice.” But what is it that grounds this theologically, spiritually?

We share a tradition that values questions, affirms doubt – but is there anything we can say that compares to Paul’s deep and abiding belief that in God we live and move and have our being? Is there a way we can create room for mystery while living with certainty? Is there a way we can be both humble about what we don’t know and bold about what we do?

In the face of life’s mysteries, the gospel of John – from which today’s gospel lesson comes – lifts up that which we know, and can count on, namely, that
God is love and we are people created in love.

Because of this love, we know that spiritual friendship matters; faith, community, hope, and prayer matter in our lives. We see this love in…

• The upcoming Race for the Cure reminds us that community matters when are diagnosed with cancer and face chemo and radiation.
• Prayer matters when our loved ones – at whatever age – are rushed to hospital for emergency health problems.
• Our belief in God’s abiding presence matters when we send our children off to school – be it a kindergarden classroom, a middle school, or college.
• We are strengthed in times of suffering by the knowledge that God grieves more than anyone in the face of human suffering – in our city, our country, and our world.

I think these are things about which we can be certain.

But, we also know that there is much we don’t know, what religions of all kinds call mystery. In the long history of the church, people of faith have lived in the face of many unknowns.

o Spiritual longings we can’t quite quench
o Questions of God’s absence or presence in the face of untold suffering, unfair illness, unrepentant evil.
o Emerging questions on the borders of ethics, science, world politics, interfaith relations, food distribution and others that are complicated, nuanced and loaded with complexity.

In the common vernacular within our church, progressives/liberals are more comfortable with questions, evangelicals are more interested in easy answers. I am not sure this is true, and I am more concerned that this simple analysis actually misses the point.

In recent years, I have been moved and touched by the work and writing of Krista Tippet. She moderates a radio program called Speaking of Faith. It comes out of Minnesota Public radio, and is a wide-ranging exploration of religion and faith in our world. Tippet wrote a book, also called Speaking of Faith, that is part autobiography and part theology.

One of central figures in her early life of faith was a grandfather.

“My maternal grandfather, the Rev. C.T. Perkins, emerged from the (evangelical tradition). I called him Gaggy…He discerned certain truths about the nature of the universe, and he lived by them. They both clarified and constrained his range of vision and movement. My mother grew up forbidden to dance, swim, go to movies, wear pants or play cards.

But she did not subject me to his rules and so I was free to be intrigued by him. I could never by in to the popular idea in our family that he was a tyrant. He was funny. He told jokes. He laughed easily…even as he preached hellfire and brimstone, he had a sense of play.

I believe that Gaggy held intellectual clarity and personal pleasure in a truce with his faith. He kept them a respectable distance away from his beliefs and rules he had accepted as true and beyond question, indeed dangerous to think through to the end…there was a fear in Gaggy as large as his laughter, as vigorous as his mind. And the Christian faith, as I learned it from him, saw human beings as weak creatures set loose in a world awash with dangers.

I spent much of my childhood in church. Faith helped me live with the tension between the smallness of the world around me and my intense inner sense of a larger beyond. It helped me keep that tension alive.

But my grandfather’s rules and beliefs did not add up as I grew older…I would only be able to return to faith after I concluded that the stories and vocabulary and symbols of the faith of my childhood could withstand and contain my questions and ideas. Christianity would yield and expand, making room for even larger questions beyond my wildest imagining.

But I hold to my memories of his complexity, his fear and fallenness along with the humanity and virtues of that faith of my childhood…The rock solid, certain aspects of my grandfather’s faith bequeathed me a spiritual inheritance. They are the foundation upon which my questions and ideas are now planted.
I learned to trust in an overriding sense behind the universe.
I learned to look for grace and for truths that revealed themselves at times badly but just as often between the cracks in my ability to see and hear what is important.
Above all, I understood belovedness to be woven into the very fabric of life. …Jesus loves me was a simple sung refrain from my childhood, an antidote to the darkness of night and larger terrors of the world…
(Scholarly) analyses (of religion) rarely take note of the power of a sense of belovedness as an antidote to fear.

Her words raise these questions

Can we find a spiritual legacy in a broken religious past?
Can we claim and feel confident about our own sense of “belovedness”?
Are we guilty of using liberal religious ideas in fearful ways that cloud the power and potency of “belovedness” in our lives; alternatively, do we cling to certain ideas at the expense of “sinking” into our belovedness?

Doubt and faith, mystery and certainty are not mutually exclusive – but held in creative and rich tension. Uncertainty and boldness, coupled with love – are the progressive church’s gift to others. That combination is a gift to us, and is one we can believe in, share, and embody.

How do we feel our Christian message fares in our marketplace of ideas in Madison today? As we see a changing religious landscape, the growth of some churches and the dying of others, what is the powerful, positive, upbeat, honest and certain message of God in which we live and move and have our being?

If we can be evangelists for the Badgers, the Packers, political candidates, eating local, Trader Joes, Cabellas, the Wisconsin idea or solar energy – can we not be evangelists for a joyful, loving, caring faith that isn’t afraid of the unknown? Can’t we witness the power of a community that helps us care for the world, that cares for us and lets us care for them? Can we be a voice for and a witness to a God who is still speaking a beloved, life affirming, community oriented, justice centered word?  Amen

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.”

John 14:15-21

‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you for ever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.
‘I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.’