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Jn.14:16-20 / Act.17:22-29
 I like how Paul says to the Athenians that we humans are “groping for God.” It reminds me of that old children’s game, “Pin the Tail on the Donkey,” when you have to walk blind-folded and search with your hands. Yet Paul also concludes that we can find what we’re seeking because “God is not far from each one of us,” for “in God we live and move and have our being.” That resonates with the promise Jesus made to send the Holy Spirit as he says, “On that day you will know that I am in God and you are in me and I am in you.”
The story of Paul preaching in Athens reminds me of my first day of seminary, way back in the 1980s. I went wandering through the University of California, which is two blocks from the seminary. The University of California at Berkeley has 36,000 students, which is three times bigger than my hometown. That’s a lot of college kids to have all in one place, plus the nine seminaries in the neighborhood.
Through the center of the university campus there is a broad pedestrian avenue, many blocks long and, during the first couple weeks of school every fall, all of the hundreds of social, religious and political groups on campus set up tables on both sides of the avenue and try to recruit new members. There are fraternities and sororities as well as intramural sports teams. As you walk along, there is also every possible political persuasion from libertarians to communists. Mixed in between all of them are tables for every religion under heaven, from native Hawaiian nature religion to Shintoism, Buddhism and Confucianism, to Hindus, Shiites, Sunnis and Sikhs, to Evangelicals, Jews and Christians, to Wicca and other forms of witchcraft, to Atheists United and more, all trying to convert you. As I walked through all of that on that first day of school, I thought of this story in Acts in which Paul arrives in Athens and walks up an avenue lined with altars to all the gods and goddesses in the ancient world, and even sees an empty altar with the inscription, TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.
We live in a similar world today. Never in world history—certainly not since Roman times—have we had more religions to choose from in the marketplace of ideas than we do in America today. How can we choose between all the religious and spiritual options we have? How can we possibly make a commitment to just one religion…like following Jesus?
Globalization has brought us into close contact with most of the cultures of the world and immigration has changed America into a patchwork quilt of many more races, ethnicities and cultures than just those of Europe. This is driving some people crazy, and they want America to have an official language and an official religion. We here at 6th Avenue may be more tolerant of diversity, but we also wonder what of our past is worth preserving and what does Christianity still have to offer in this newly expanded marketplace of ideas and spiritualities.
I asked Marcus if I could tell you that on Tuesday night at our lectionary discussion, as we read these Bible passages ahead of time and shared how we felt about them, Marcus talked about how hard it is for him to share his faith outside of church because he grew up in Colorado Springs, the headquarters of Focus on the Family and The Family Research Council and all the rest of those organizations that the Southern Poverty Law Center has now officially designated as “hate groups” along with the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nation. Marcus talked about how hard it was in school and on street corners being constantly bombarded, arm-twisted and threatened-with-hell if he didn’t conform to their religion. So now, just thinking about sharing his faith gives him flashbacks of that and he doesn’t want to be like them. He said on Tuesday night that he has mixed feelings about this story of Paul preaching in Athens because maybe Paul was disrespecting ancient Greek culture. I think many of us feel that way.
One thing to consider is that ancient Greek culture had disintegrated by the time that Paul was in Athens. Every once in a while in world history, there come times when there are basic shifts in human consciousness and everything changes—much like how the tectonic plates under the surface of the earth shift and cause earthquakes. I think we are in one of those periods of cultural earthquake now. It’s this globalization of ideas and religions happening all around us.
It also happened in ancient times when Rome conquered all the countries from Spain to Egypt to Israel to Turkey and made the Mediterranean Sea a Roman lake. The Romans didn’t care what all these people believed as long as they added just one more god to their various religions, and that god was Caesar, the Roman emperor, whom everyone was forced to worship as a god. The other thing the Romans did to insure their power was to move all these ethnic groups around within the empire, splitting them up so they couldn’t rebel. What that meant on a practical level was that in Roman cities there were big ethnic neighborhoods next to each other for the first time in human history. That caused a cultural earthquake because people could no longer be provincial; they were forced to be cosmopolitan.
In all these Romanized cities like Athens, Corinth, Madrid, Damascus and Cairo there were neighborhoods of Egyptians next to neighborhoods of Anglo-Saxons next to neighborhoods of Jews next to neighborhoods of Greeks and suddenly everyone was aware that there was more than just the religion they grew up in, there was a whole world full of different gods and goddesses. As time went on, everyone started wondering which of these gods was real and their belief in all of them faltered. That’s the world in which Paul walks through Athens on a street lined with altars to all the gods, including an altar to “an unknown god,” just for good measure.
Paul felt that he had something good to offer. Back in the old days, in the 1980s, you would often hear people talk about how terrible Christianity is because the early Christians stole Christmas trees from the Druids and Easter eggs from the bunnies. But that conspiracy theory is not really how it happened. It was a much more gradual, organic process in which the gospel filled the void left when the old religions died. By the time that Paul was in Athens, most Greeks no longer believed in the old gods and goddesses living atop Mt Olympus and were searching for something new that would work for them. Something similar is happening in our world today.
Paul arrived in Athens only 18 or 20 years after Jesus, and he was already universalizing the Christian faith. That quickly after Jesus, it is no long a religion just for Jews. Paul makes it clear that he’s talking about the god who deserves a capital G because this is not the god of an ethnic group, but the universal G_d of all people, even if we don’t get that. This God is so big that you can’t escape him, for “in God we live and move and have our being.” And since we are all “God’s offspring”—no matter our ethnicity, race, gender, age, class, ability or orientation—we are all sisters and brothers. This is Paul’s first insight: a universal God creates a universal brother-and-sisterhood. True Christian spirituality has no ethnic or national boundaries.
Second, Paul argues that since God created us all, all of us humans have a natural yearning to find G_d, to connect with G_d, and to integrate G_d and spirituality into our sense of self. As Christians, we believe that this yearning for God is what makes us human and what we all have in common. There’s that famous quote from Augustine, “O God, you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.”
I hope you are hearing that God is not some little provincial thing so small that the only place you can find Him is in Colorado Springs. That way of pushing God reminds me of trying on a pair of shoes that’s too small—they pinch your feet and you can’t walk in them. That’s very different from a God so big that in God we can “live and move and have our being.”
Our God is so big that we can’t talk about Jesus alone, because we have a whole trinity of ways to think about God, and the Spirit still can’t be captured in the famous “three in one.” Fact is, we are not able to explain God—God is way too big for our puny languages. But we have this story from The Gospel According to John in which Jesus says, “I will not leave you orphaned. I will ask God to send you an Advocate, the Holy Spirit, who will abide with you and live in you forever. On that day, you will know that I am in God and you in me and I in you.”
I once had a spiritual director who suggested that I use that as a mantra, not just when I pray, but as I drive my car or take a shower or go for a walk or clean the house or whatever. I could repeat that phrase and see where it would lead me. “I am in God and God is in me. I am in God and God is in me.” Or you can use “Christ” if that works better for you. “I am in Christ and Christ is in me. I am in Christ and Christ is in me.” That’s the cool thing about the Trinity. It means that YHW/H, Christ, and Spirit are all co-equal manifestations of the same thing, so you can jump on board using whichever of those three parts of G_d you most relate to and eventually that one aspect of the unnamable G_d will lead you to a deeper understanding of the other two.
So in terms of daily, practical Christian spirituality, whenever you’re stressed or anxious, whenever you’re afraid or lonely, you can repeat as you breathe in and out, “I am in God and God is in me; I live in the Spirit and the Spirit lives in me,” and you’ll remember that you are not alone, you are not an orphan, because Christ lives in you and you live in Christ and we are all spiritually together in the circle of the Trinity, whether we know it or not.
Cultural earthquakes create high anxiety, which is why there’s so much talk about the end of the world these days—their fundamentalist world is ending. Paul thought he had a faith that could help people in such a time, so he offered it. In his sermon to the Athenians he said, “No matter what your religion is, if we can agree that we are all God’s children, God’s offspring, then we can also agree that we should not think of G_d in terms of images in gold or silver or stone.” We should think of G_d more in terms of what we are: more like a person than a statue, a work of art, or an ideology. If it’s true that human beings are born with an innate connection to God or Spirit or whatever you want to call it—if Lady Gaga is right and we’re Born This Way, born with a spiritual side—all groping in our different ways to reconnect with that Bigger Reality, then we Christians do have something to offer: our faith that God is Love. For when we humans misplace our yearning for G_d with a yearning for idols of silver and gold (or money or power or being “right”), we get off the track of what it means to be a whole human being with a spiritual side. When people are hurt, sad or afraid, we gently offer our faith to help them when the time is right.
But another thing the group discussed on Tuesday night at lectionary (you should come, it’s fun!) is that not all of us are preachers, not all of us talk easily about our faith. That’s totally true. Most of us share our faith through deeds of love, which we can all do. Last summer when I was on sabbatical, I went back to my seminary in Berkeley to summer school, and I took a class from an ordained priest who has left the Catholic Church and become a psychiatrist. The whole class was on how we can verbally share the “good news” of the Christian faith with others with-out ever using churchy words—just using psychological words and words of love.
I think of our own member, Powell Bland, the Reverend Powell Bland. He’s the one who often comes late or leaves early on Sunday mornings and sometimes gets a phone call during my sermons and gets up and leaves. That’s not because he’s rude, it’s because he’s a hospice chaplain and he’s being called away to sit with someone as they die. Now, as a hospice chaplain, Powell has sworn an oath not to push his own particular religion down any patient’s throat against their will, but rather that he will personally accompany anyone and everyone, no matter their religious beliefs. But on the other hand, I’ve never met anyone who loves Jesus more than Powell does. He not only grew up in the South, he grew up Southern Baptist, and when he talks about Jesus he slips back into his southern drawl and starts saying, “Jeezus!” So how can Powell love Jesus so much and yet promise not to talk about Jesus with non-Christians who are dying?
It’s because, as true Christians, we don’t have to push a narrow interpretation of G_d down the throats of other people like they do on the street corners of Colorado Springs. In fact, we shouldn’t. Jesus did not say, “They will know you are Christians by your arm-twisting.” He said, “They will know you are Christians by your love” [Jn.13:35]. I’m sure when Powell and our other hospital chaplain, Lucas, talk with non-Christian patients who are dying, they say some-thing like, “Don’t be afraid, because you are in God and God is in you.” If that is too much god-talk for the patient, they say, “Don’t be afraid, you live in the Spirit and the Spirit lives in you.” If even that is too much, then they say, “You live in Love and Love lives in you forever.”
Truth be told, we are all groping for God. Those certitudes that the fundamentalists try to push down our throats are just their way of trying to cope with not knowing. But we believe it’s okay not to know everything because God knows for us—that’s the grace. We don’t have to save ourselves because God saves us. –This God who “is not far from each one of us.” –This God who is so big and inclusive that “in God we live and move and have our being.” Sadly, there are a lot of people out there who believe that God is a Judge, God is Hate, God is small. But we have an alternative vision of God, which is that God is Love. That is such good and gentle news that you may well feel like sharing it with those who are afraid. When we follow Jesus, we replace religion with love. That’s what makes it universal.
So the next time somebody on a street corner yells that God hates you, or is judging you, or that God is going to end the world or send you to hell, just walk on by and repeat the mantra that Jesus gave us when he told us that he would not leave us orphaned: I am in God and God is in me … I am in Christ and Christ is in me … I live in the Spirit and the Spirit lives in me.
Pastor Dan Geslin
Sixth Ave. UCC
Easter 6 - 2011 |
