To an Unknown God (Sermon)

 “To an Unknown God”

Acts 17:16-31

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

5/22/22

 

While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols.¹⁷ So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons and also in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. ¹⁸ Also some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers debated with him. Some said, “What does this pretentious babbler want to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign divinities.” (This was because he was telling the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.)

¹⁹ So they took him and brought him to the Areopagus and asked him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? ²⁰ It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means.”

²¹ Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.

²² Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way. ²³ 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. ²⁴ 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, ²⁵ 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.²⁶ From one ancestor he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, ²⁷ so that they would search for God and perhaps fumble about for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. ²⁸ 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.’

²⁹ “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. ³⁰ While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent,³¹ 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.”  (NRSV)

 

A fine line can separate the trust that makes a disciple courageous, and the certainty that makes a zealot dangerous. Paul often appears to have one foot on either side of that line. In his letter to the Romans, he even seems to confess as much: “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.” (Romans 7:15, 18b) And so Paul is alternately a bull in a china shop stampeding over breakable treasures, and a humble mystic walking alongside fellow travelers with compassion and patience.

Paul’s watershed moment began on the Damascus Road. Prior to that experience, Paul—as Saul—was a militant fundamentalist. Steeped in furious certainty, he terrorized Jesus-followers. After his experiences of grace on the road to Damascus, and then in Damascus with Ananias, Paul himself becomes a follower of Jesus.

Now, he’s still Paul. He still has the capacity for decisive speech and action. And during his transformation, Paul’s actions, once fueled by certainty, become fueled by the lingering burden of guilt, as well. Eventually, Paul claims forgiveness in Christ, and, yet, because forgiveness never includes forgetfulness, he cannot shake those memories. “I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence,” he tells Timothy. And he calls himself the “foremost” among sinners. (1Timothy 1:13, 15) In all things, Paul struggles to balance his fervor as a zealot, and his desire to love as Christ loves.

         Entering Athens, Paul sees idols everywhere, and his zealot’s blood begins to boil. He heads to the synagogues and marketplaces to argue with whoever “happened to be there.”

In first-century Athens, rhetorical debate is a kind of spectator sport, sort of a cross between Sunday morning talk shows and minor-league hockey. And Paul begins to argue zealously against idolatry. And he gets attention.

         Aggravated at this “pretentious babbler,” the Athenians drag Paul to the Areopagus, and place him before the people who help to shape the mindset of the empire. And Paul, always a work in progress, speaks as both disciple and zealot. He walks with the hoof of a china-shop bull on one foot and the sandal of a holy mystic on the other.

         Speaking with compassion first, he says, in effect, You Athenians take your religion seriously, and that’s great. You even have a statue set aside to honor what you call ‘an unknown god.’

         Then Paul gently paws the ground with his hoof saying that he knows who that unknown God is, namely, “God who made the world and everything in it…[the] Lord…[who] does not live in shrines made by human hands.”

         It’s interesting: In the midst of the pantheon of named and storied Greek gods, someone in Athens had the honesty to acknowledge spiritual mystery, to acknowledge that not all can be named and explained. Not all can be known.

         Now, this isn’t Paul’s first debate. And as the Apostle, he musters the humility and the wisdom to focus on the unknown god as common ground. Such a concept resonates with a devout Jew who hears God saying things like, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways.” (Isaiah 55:8)

         Paul will remember, too, that to proclaim and preserve the inscrutable holiness of God, Israel refuses even to pronounce the name of God­­­—thus Jehovah, Adonai, and Elohim instead of Yahweh.

         If Paul has learned anything, and if he knows anything, he has learned that he knows only that God is not a created being. God is not some perfect version of us. In his teaching, Paul beautifully presents the paradox of God. 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. And at the same time, this mysterious Presence transcends all the rhetoric, all the “art and imagination of mortals.” That means God transcends any given religion. The Creator simply cannot be fully defined or known by the creatures.

         If the paradox of God as deeply intimate and yet unknowable is accurate, then building altars to God can represent our grasping for the kind of knowledge and control that we, as creatures, cannot have. Even our most well-intended altars are still human creations. And because they require attention and protection, they often do more to keep us distant from God rather than to bring us closer to God.

         Altars abound in our world, be they Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, atheist, political, economic, academic, or any other “religion.” And it seems to me that they all risk assuming a degree of certainty that claims to have solved mystery and overcome transcendence. And when that’s the case, they become idols, things that can be known, predicted, controlled, and even wielded like weapons.

         As Christians, then, we need to ask ourselves some uncomfortable questions.

         To what extent do we turn our churches, our committees, our doctrines into “altars”?

         What “other gods” do we allow into our holy spaces? Do we make the God revealed in Jesus actually dependent on those idols?

         What do we write into our theologies and polities that opens the door to the kinds of selfishness and faithlessness that Jesus neither encourages nor excuses?

         I have neither the authority nor the wisdom to declare final answers to questions like that. I do think, though, that we are all very much like Paul. We are part china-shop bull with the capacity to do things we cringe even to imagine. And yet we’re also part mystic with the capacity to demonstrate transforming faithfulness and compassion. So, we are both capable of and culpable for worshiping idols whose apparent strengths only reveal our fears and weaknesses. And we’re also capable of speaking the truth in love, of doing justice, and bearing witness to the inexpressible mystery of God who lies both beyond our grasp and at the very core of our being.

         In the 1300’s, an anonymous author wrote a book entitled The Cloud of Unknowing. This guidebook for Christian contemplative prayer states that there is only one way for human beings to “know” God, and that is to lay aside all of our assumptions and all of our codified beliefs about God. In courageous surrender, we turn ourselves over to what he calls “unknowingness,” and there we begin to encounter—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

         It seems to me that the point of this thing called the Christian “religion” is not, somehow, to know God. For we cannot know that which cannot be known. The point for us is not even “to get to heaven when we die.”

I think that the point of entering and practicing our faith is to love the One who is love. (1John 4:7-21) And don’t we do that most faithfully and effectively when we courageously, joyfully, and yet very simply love one another and care for the Creation?

 

¹http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloud_of_Unknowing

Storied Faith (Sermon)

“Storied Faith”

Acts 11:1-18

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

5/15/22

 

         Before reading the text from Acts 11, let’s look back one chapter. In Acts 10, Peter climbs up on a rooftop to pray and has an unforgettable vision. A sheet drops from the heavens, and it’s full of animals that the Hebrew scriptures declare unclean. A voice tells Peter to eat the animals. Interpreting the vision as a temptation rather than an invitation, Peter refuses. This happens two more times, and each time Peter hears the same pronouncement: “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.”

         Peter soon learns that he received this vision as preparation to receive Cornelius, a Gentile, as a full member of the church. And during Peter’s first meeting with Cornelius, the Holy Spirit descends on the Gentile and his family, and they begin praising God.

Peter and the small group of circumcised brothers who are with him are thunderstruck. Having been taught—as a matter of identity and purity—to separate themselves from Gentiles, they never expect to welcome such outsiders into the family of faith. But they can’t deny what they’re seeing and hearing.

         In what is, for that context, an unthinkably radical move, Peter says to his colleagues, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” (Acts 10:47)

         With that story in mind, let’s read our text from Acts 11.

 

Now the apostles and the brothers and sisters who were in Judea heard that the gentiles had also accepted the word of God. ² So when Peter went up to Jerusalem, the circumcised believers criticized him, ³ saying, “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?”

⁴ Then Peter began to explain it to them, step by step, saying, ⁵ “I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven, being lowered by its four corners, and it came close to me. ⁶ As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. ⁷ I also heard a voice saying to me, ‘Get up, Peter; kill and eat.’ ⁸ But I replied, ‘By no means, Lord, for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ ⁹ But a second time the voice answered from heaven, ‘What God has made clean, you must not call profane.’ ¹⁰ This happened three times; then everything was pulled up again to heaven. ¹¹ At that very moment three men, sent to me from Caesarea, arrived at the house where we were. ¹² The Spirit told me to go with them and not to make a distinction between them and us. These six brothers also accompanied me, and we entered the man’s house.¹³ He told us how he had seen the angel standing in his house and saying, ‘Send to Joppa and bring Simon, who is called Peter; ¹⁴ he will give you a message by which you and your entire household will be saved.’ ¹⁵ And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning.¹⁶ And I remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said, ‘John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ ¹⁷ If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?”

¹⁸ When they heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, “Then God has given even to the gentiles the repentance that leads to life.”  (NRSV)

 

         Did any of that sound familiar? In back-to-back chapters, Luke tells the same story. In chapter 10, Luke narrates the story. In chapter 11, Peter shares his story with the “circumcised believers” in Jerusalem. In all of this, Luke makes clear that Peter’s vision of an open and inclusive community is both a prerequisite to and a sign of a faithful understanding of God.

         There are at least a couple of things in play here. For one, biblical literature often uses repetition to emphasize the significance of a teaching or an event.¹

Now, the ancient kosher laws had important purpose. They helped to set the Hebrews apart as a kind of anomaly—a monotheistic culture in a polytheistic world. And Israel perceived Yahweh as deeply involved in all aspects of Hebrew life, telling the people what to eat, what to wear, what animals to sacrifice, and, of course, what kind of people to associate with.

While the ancient Hebrews lived as an anomaly in the world, there’s also a foreshadowing anomaly in the midst of all those restrictive laws. In Leviticus 19, God gives specific instructions on dealing with “aliens,” that is non-Israelites. “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in…Egypt.” (Lev. 19:33-34)

With telling repetition, scripture bears witness to God’s expectation that faith communities show hospitality to people from other lands and cultures.

         Peter and his fellow “circumcised believers” live in the midst of a growing tension between the laws that set them apart as Chosen, and Christ’s command to love as we are loved by him. That tension continues because the life and teachings of Jesus make clear that whatever can be gained through hospitality takes precedent over whatever might be merely preserved through protectionism.

One aspect of true faithfulness is the will to demonstrate compassion to those who get labeled other and treated with suspicion and contempt. Faithlessness tries only to keep itself safe. This lesson had to be learned through repetition—thus the recurring stories of the Pharisees learning it, the disciples learning it, Saul, Ananias, the Galatians, and the temple leaders learning it. And now, their stories are teaching us.

         That brings us to the second thing in play. When Peter shares his vision with the council, he invites them into a transforming experience—an experience that called him to defy legalism and to recognize God’s presence in and love for all people. “Who was I that I could hinder God?” he asks. By implication, he’s asking all of us, Who are WE that WE can hinder God? In defiantly grateful love, Peter opens the doors of the church as wide as the arms of Jesus are opened on the cross.

         While those who oppose Peter have plenty of scripture to support arguments against his reformist preaching, Peter doesn’t argue some new doctrine. Like Jesus, he tells them a story. He shares his purely subjective experience the way one might open curtains in a dark room. He sheds light on something hopeful and renewing in the world.

One commentator on this passage says, “Stories, not arguments, change lives…Generally,” he says, “arguments…tend only to crystalize differences…to keep two sides apart…[creating] winners and losers.”² And isn’t that the way so much of our own culture is dealing with differences now—one side trying to defeat the other side with arguments and insults?

Stories work differently. They’re invitations into another person’s life and perspective. When we listen to stories, with compassion for the teller, they have the power to move us toward rather than away from each other.

For several months now, our missions ministry team has been working with three other Presbyterian churches in Holston Presbytery to welcome an Afghan refugee family. We’re getting our ducks in neater and neater rows, and when everything is in place, we’ll get connected with a specific family.

One of the great joys of this process is that we’ve also reached out to the local Muslim community. For many years, many of us have struggled with how to interact with a population that has been associated with some very painful memories. And in working with the Muslim community in Johnson City, we have met people who are themselves reminded every day that their heritage is one that makes them vulnerable to suspicion and to the potentially dangerous consequences of that suspicion. Nonetheless, they are warm, receptive, generous, and good-humored. They’re faithfulness to the mandates of hospitality within their spiritual tradition also makes them eager to offer their gifts to help welcome people that helped to support our nation’s interests in a predominately Muslim nation over the last 20 years.

In addition to a lot of work, we have much to learn and to gain through this process, and I hope we will all help to embrace and encourage the family that gets assigned here. I hope we’ll listen to their stories, and get to know them as fellow human beings who not only want but desperately need a new place to belong and to call home.

I pray just as fervently, that we share our stories with each other, within our own families, neighborhoods, and congregations. And as we share our stories, may God heal us of the fears that drive us apart and lead to suspicion, hatred, and violence.

May we commit ourselves to living in, and to living as a sign of, God’s realm of love, justice, and peace—right here and right now.

May we truly become one in God’s eternal Christ.

 

¹Robert W. Wall, Exegetical Perspective in Feasting on the Word, Year C/Vol. 2. David L. Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, Eds. Westminster/John Knox Press, Louisville, KY, 2009. p. 451.

²Ibid. From Stephen D. Jones’ article Homiletical Perspective. p. 453.

Fatih as Art (Sermon)

“Faith as Art”

John 10:22-30

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

5/8/22

         

²²At that time the festival of the Dedication took place in Jerusalem. It was winter, ²³ and Jesus was walking in the temple, in the portico of Solomon. ²⁴ So the Jews gathered around him and said to him, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”

²⁵Jesus answered, “I have told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name testify to me; ²⁶ but you do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep. ²⁷ My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me. ²⁸ I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand. ²⁹ What my Father has given me is greater than all else, and no one can snatch it out of the Father’s hand. ³⁰ The Father and I are one.”  (NRSV)

 

 

“If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”

         That would be helpful, wouldn’t it? All too often, faith and faith language can feel like throwing unicorns and rainbows at a blitzkrieg of ogres and trolls. How does one trust what one cannot fully comprehend?

         The men who approach Jesus in the temple are devout Jews. They love God, study scripture, and practice their faith as they have been taught. And while, as Jews, they do anticipate the Messiah, John leaves it to us to decide whether the men want Jesus to be the Messiah or whether they just want to find cause to persecute him. Whatever their case, as Christians, we trust that the One for whom the men wait stands before them. If they don’t recognize him, we must have compassion for them, because we’re not that different. Faith is hard enough, and when we demand certainty, faith doesn’t just get harder, it drifts toward impossibility, because certainty is the opposite of faith—not doubt, or even unbelief.

Back in the Middle Ages, theology was called the “Queen of Sciences.” However, faith precedes and shapes theology, and it seems to me that faith is better understood as art.

Faith seeks stillness in the throes of life’s chaos. (Psalm 46)

Faith discerns beauty in spite of the world’s brutality and decay. (Romans 8:18-27)

Faith hopes in the midst of what appears to be hopelessness. (Genesis 50:15-21)

Faith trusts that which cannot be proven. (Hebrews 11:1)

         The Jewish leaders in John 10 seem to want faith to be paint-by-numbers, but faith paints outside the lines. Like artists exploring the world through colors, textures, words, sounds, and rhythms, people of faith explore the Creation as the ongoing revelation of God’s feral presence and gracious purposes. We encounter God through experiences of love, justice, mercy, and also suffering. And one way to discover the beauty and wonder of God in the world is through intentional communities that share creativity as well as worship, service, study, and suffering. In the community of faith, we are all, potentially, artists-in-residence.

         One of the compelling things about art is that the more we practice a craft, whatever it might be, the more we begin to see new things in our own work and in that of others’. We recognize a greater hand at work in our own hands, a bigger heart beating in our own hearts.

Jesus models artful spirituality when he speaks of his oneness with “the Father.” Jesus creates and reveals in a manner than mirrors the way God creates and reveals. So: From water to wine; sinner to saint; refugee to neighbor; burdened to free; law to grace; and even dead to alive. And when asked to explain what his work “means,” Jesus says, Look at it for yourself. What do you see? What do you hear? How does my work inspire you and call you to faith, to your own spiritual art?

         Over the last twenty-seven years, I’ve enjoyed the many layers of creativity involved in Christian ministry. My primary art has been reading and re-reading scripture to hear something new and to share that in sermons. Newsletters and other communications have offered opportunities for shorter pieces and, at times, a more creative voice. Visiting in homes and hospitals has allowed me to experience joys, wonders, and sorrows which transcend the ability of words to describe. In my teaching role, I’ve never lectured, preferring instead to engage as a fellow traveler as I prepared for and facilitated Sunday school classes and book discussions. Even working with committees has had its moments. When an idea hit the table, I’ve enjoyed helping to create space for it to evolve into something bigger as folks riffed on the idea with their own perspectives.

         Participating in all of those things has deepened my faith in the ways God is present and active in the world. And while I am grateful for that, right now I have to be honest. Over the last three or four years, a deepening spiritual weariness has crept its way into my being. More and more, I have struggled to find the joy I once knew. I’ve sought counsel and support from several sources, and those efforts have been helpful. Still, when I sit down to read, write, pray, or plan, I find myself feeling emptier and more distant.

         Over the last year-and-a-half in particular, that mysterious but heady blend of stillness and energy necessary for a healthy and creative spirituality has all but escaped me. Because of that, more sermons than I want to admit have been re-worked old sermons. They were significant re-works, creative in their own way, and almost always better than the original. Still, I started with old sermons because I lacked both the inspiration and the desire to begin new ones. I haven’t written songs or poetry to share with you, either. And visiting has occasionally felt more like a chore than a holy privilege.

Recently, Covid has had something to do with all that. The suspicion and meanness of our culture has something to do with it. Family concerns played into it. Maybe the fact that I’m not getting any younger has contributed to it. (I mean, I am a grandfather now. If I haven’t mentioned that, I do have pictures!)

Regardless of one’s vocation, when the passion ebbs, and assuming we still care at all, we’ll try to figure out how to rediscover that passion. We’ll try to reconnect with our truest selves—our God-imaged selves. We’ll seek to reacquaint ourselves with the Christ within us and within the Creation around us. And if we don’t do that, we will flame out—and we’ll likely do damage on the way. As Richard Rohr says, “If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it [to others].”¹

The recent communications I’ve shared about my upcoming sabbatical have offered some nuts-and-bolts information about the what and the how of sabbaticals. And today I’m addressing the why.

Now, I have no grand plan—no book to write, no pilgrimage to take. I just need and want to rediscover my passion, my art, my joy. And I have to learn to quit crying out to God, “If you’re really there, if you’re really good and true, if there really is holy justice in this world of persistent violence, inequity, environmental exploitation, and denial of truth, then tell me plainly. Convince me!”

While that may sound stark, it’s honest and real. I’m taking a sabbatical because I need time to rest and to recover the spiritual creativity necessary to live and to help lead others in the ways Christ-following faith, hope, and love.

If I didn’t think that a renewal of faith was possible, I would just quit and go some other way. But we are Easter people; we follow a risen Christ. Because of that, we proclaim faith, not certainty. And we are called to live as creative demonstrations of trust that we and all things reside, ultimately, in the hands of a God of love, justice, peace, and faithfulness.

Even through the most trying, faith-challenging experiences, may we learn to live gratefully, generously, confidently, and artfully so that we bear a joyful and compelling witness to the redeeming and reunifying voice of God in Christ.

 

¹https://cac.org/transforming-pain-2018-10-17/