“To an Unknown God”
Acts 17:16-31
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
9/17/17
A fine line separates the conviction that makes a disciple
bold, and the certainty that makes a zealot dangerous. Paul often appears to
have one foot on either side of that line. So, he is alternately a bull in a
china shop stampeding over breakable treasures, and a humble mystic walking
alongside fellow believers with patience and love.
When feeling bullish, Paul loudly declares an imminent, “fixed
day” of judgment. He exudes an almost neurotic urgency to change the world as
soon as humanly possible.
That’s the old Paul, though. The fundamentalist Pharisee,
the religious zealot who has proven himself not only capable of organizing and committing
violence in God’s name, but quite efficient at it. Let’s face it: Before his
Damascus Road experience, Paul was a terrorist.
Afterward,
he’s still Paul. He still has the capacity for launching into words and deeds
fueled by the blinding passion of religious certainty. And he begins to
make room for the Christ within. The emerging Paul has the capacity for confession
and compassion. He can tolerate ambiguity. Still, he continues to struggle with
balancing his desire to love as Christ loves, and his single-minded passion as
a zealot.
Entering Athens, Paul immediately feels his zealot’s blood
begin to boil. Everywhere he looks he sees idols. So, he heads straight to the
synagogues and marketplaces to argue with whoever “happen[s] to be there.” In
ancient Athens, rhetorical debate is a kind of spectator sport, a cross between
Sunday morning talk shows and minor-league hockey. Ever the intrepid one, Paul
leaps into the fray and rails against idolatry.
“What does this babbler want to say?” ask the Athenians.
To
find out, they drag Paul to the Areopagus, the site of the most consequential
debates in Athens. In this place of intellectual and cultural ferment, Paul has
the ears of people whose opinions help to shape the mindset of the empire. And
Paul steps onto this very public stage with the hoof of a china-shop bull on
one foot and the sandal of a holy mystic on the other.
He begins by blurring the line between compassion and
sarcasm. ‘You Athenians really take your religion seriously,’ he says. ‘And
that’s good. You even have a statue set aside to honor what you call An
Unknown god.’
Isn’t that fascinating? In the midst of the pantheon of
named, storied, and all-too-human Greek gods, someone in Athens has had the
spiritual humility and curiosity to acknowledge mystery.
Then Paul says that he knows who that unknown God
is, namely, “God who made the world and everything in it…[the] Lord of
heaven and earth…[who] does not live in shrines made by human hands.”
Having sparred extensively with lesser partners, Paul enters
the Areopagus with ever-deepening wisdom, patience, and mindfulness. Steeped in
prophetic mystery, he focuses on this Unknown god as common ground. He knows
that God us unknowable. He knows that God is not a created being, nor even some
perfect version of humanity. He is learning, as the Apostle John will write,
“Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (1John 4:8) As
Love, God is the creative energy within all things, the mysterious
gravity holding all things together.
Paul describes the holy paradox. He says that God is real
and near enough to be the one in whom “we live and move and have our being,”
the way fish live, and move, and have their being in water. At the same time,
this mystifying Presence transcends all the rhetoric, all the “art and
imagination of mortals.” This eternally present God defies every effort to be completely
known. That means God transcends any given religion.
If this paradox illustrates the truth of God, then building
altars and shrines to God becomes one more way to “grope,” as Paul says, for
the kind of knowledge that creatures cannot have. Even when well-intended, our
altars and shrines are still human creations. Because they must be financed, maintained,
and insured, they often do more to keep us distant from God than they do to
bring us closer to God. And even when we built them in honor of God, at some
level, they tend to encourage a degree of certainty that claims to have solved
mystery, to have overcome transcendence. So, they reduce God to something knowable,
and if known, then controlled by our theologies, arguments, and
traditions.
It seems to me that as Christians in general, and as a
particular congregation who wants and indeed needs to renovate its own physical
space, we must keep some uncomfortable questions before us:
To
what extent do we turn our churches, our sanctuaries, and our committees into idols?
What familiar and comforting knowable gods do we
tolerate, saying that we need them in order to worship the God revealed in
Jesus?
What non-Christian symbols and powers do we snuggle up to in
our places of worship?
What selfish equivocations do we write into our doctrines
and polities that open the door to the kinds of fear, resentment, and greed that
Jesus, whom we claim to know so well, specifically condemns?
I have neither the wisdom nor the authority to declare final
answers to those questions. I do think, however, that we’re all very much like
Paul. We have the hooves of china-shop bulls on one foot and the sandals of
humble mystics on the other. We have the capacity to do terrible violence to each
other and to the earth. We can also act in ways of transforming faithfulness
and world-healing compassion. We’re both capable of and culpable for worshiping
hand-made idols whose strengths only reveal our weaknesses. And while we cannot
contain it, we can bear witness to the ineffable mystery of God who lies both
beyond our grasp and at the very core of our being.
In the 14th century, an anonymous monk wrote a
book entitled The Cloud of Unknowing. It’s a guidebook for Christian
contemplative prayer, and its basic premise states that there is only one way
for human beings to “know” God, and that is to lay aside all of our
assumptions, all of our codified beliefs and so-called “knowledge” about
God. In an act of willful surrender, we turn our minds and egos over to what he
calls “unknowingness,” and there we begin to feel, to taste, and to see God’s
true nature. According to the author, God cannot be “thought.” God
can only be loved.1
The very point of this thing called “religion” is not to know
that which cannot be known. It is to love the one who is Love. And I
think we do that most faithfully when we boldly, gratefully, and joyfully care for
one another and for the earth.
Charge to Congregation:
Care for each other and the
earth
as
you do would care for yourself
and
for any family member.
And always remember, as
Mahatma Gandhi said:
“There
are people in the world so hungry,
that God cannot appear to them
except in the form of bread.”
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