Ancient Linguistics & the God Who Transcends | Acts 17:22-31| 5.10.26

Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It is a gift to be with y'all again on this fine spring morning.

Happy Mother's Day to all of us who are remembering or honoring or grieving or giving thanks for our life givers, our mothers in the faith, and all of those people in our lives who protected and guided us as a mother hen gathers her chicks, as Jesus would say.

Today we are reading from probably one of the most commented-on passages in the book of Acts, perhaps other than the Pentecost.

It's one of the most written-about passages in all of the book of Acts, and it's quite a long passage as well.

I'll just preempt since it's a long reading, so settle in.

Paul has had to flee Berea, and he was led to Athens, where he had to wait for a while.

He had to wait for a while in Athens for Silas and Timothy to join him.

And Athens was famous even then for its ancient philosophical and educational history.

You could think of it as the Oxford or the Yale of its day, maybe.

On this same site a few hundred years earlier, uh Socrates had been put on trial at the same council.

And so in our reading today, we'll hear Luke, the author of the story, retelling of Paul's time in Athens.

But before we do that, uh let's pray and ask God to bless our time and the scripture together.

And pray with me.

Draw us close to the Holy Spirit.

As the scriptures are read and the word proclaimed, let your word of faith be on our lips and in our hearts, and let all other words slip away.

May there be one voice we hear today, the voice of truth and grace.

Amen.

Now let's listen together for God's word from the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 17, from verse 16 all the way to verse 34.

I'll be reading from the Common English Bible.

Luke writes, While Paul waited for them in Athens, he was deeply distressed to find that the city was full of idols.

He began to interact with the Jews and the Gentile god worshipers in the synagogue.

And he also addressed whoever happened to be in the marketplace each day.

Certain Epicurean and Stoic philosophers engaged him in discussion as well.

Some said, What an amateur! What is he trying to say?

And others remarked, He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign gods.

They said this because he was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.

So they took Paul into custody and brought him to the council on Mars Hill.

What is this new teaching?

Can we learn what you are talking about?

You've told us some strange things, and we want to know what they mean.

They said this because all Athenians, as well as the foreigners who live in Athens, used to spend their time doing nothing but talking about or listening to the newest thing.

Paul stood up in the middle of the council on Mars Hill and said, People of Athens, I see that you are very religious in every way.

As I was walking through town and carefully observing your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription to an unknown God.

What you worship as unknown, I now proclaim to you.

God who made the world and everything in it is Lord of heaven and earth.

He doesn't live in temples made with human hands, nor is God served by human hands as though God needed something, since he is the one who gives life and breath and everything else.

From one person, God created every human nation to live on the whole earth.

Having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their lands, God made the nations so that they would seek him.

Perhaps even reach out to God and find him.

In fact, God isn't far away from any of us.

In God, we live and move and have our being.

Therefore, as God's offspring, we have no need to imagine that the divine being is like a silver or gold or stone image made by human skill or thought.

And God overlooks ignorance of these things in times past, but now directs everyone everywhere to change their hearts and lives.

This is because God has set a day when God intends to judge the world justly by a man he has appointed.

And God has given proof of this to everyone by raising that man from the dead.

When they heard about the resurrection from the dead, some began to ridicule Paul.

However, others said, We will hear from you again about this.

At that Paul left the council, and some people joined him and came to believe, including Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus Council, and a woman named Demaris, and several others.

This is God's word for God's people.

Thanks be to God.

I'd like for you to imagine with me that you were uh chopping it up with a friend in the coffee shop one day, uh debating politics or religion, taking turns asking probing questions about each other's positions.

Some of you are already sweating because you're allergic to conflict, and I understand, but just imagine that you were doing this and you were enjoying it.

And someone walks in and grabs you by the arm, picks you up from your table, and pulls you through a doorway in the back room, and when you cross the threshold of that doorway, you are no longer in a coffee shop anymore, but you are in a courtroom.

And Supreme Court justices are peering down at you over the rims of their glasses.

You know that half of these judges see things one way and half see them their opposite, but you had been pressing your friend to see that there was a third way that no one was really familiar with, or at least not taking seriously.

Not yet.

And yet there you are, in front of the brightest philosophical and legal minds of your day.

And the judge at the center of the bench leans towards her microphone and says, We've heard you've been spreading some strange ideas.

Can you help us understand them?

What were you talking about out there with your friends?

Don't worry.

We're just hoping to understand if you're a threat to society or not.

It's hard to understate the almost ethical role that the Council of the Areopagus held in the first century.

For well over 500 years, it assisted in the governance of the city.

It heard trials on murder and religious impiety.

And it also occasionally tested the merit of philosophical ideas for whether or not they risked corrupting the youth or inciting riots.

Needless to say, it's my best guess that when Paul found himself in this place being asked such pointed questions, especially after the accusation of being a proclaimer of foreign gods, I'm sure that Paul's palms were sweaty, knees weak, arms were heavy.

I got one.

In all the many pages of scholarly commentary about this back and forth between Paul and these council, uh, over the last hundred years there's been a lot of debate about the nature of Paul's speech as it relates to its engagement with these other philosophies, and it's become sort of a Rorschach test for interpreters.

Either it's Paul confirming that truths found in the writings of these foreign poets and philosophers are also true and rhyme with his faith.

The sort of universalism approach, on the one hand, or, according to other commentators, this is Paul co-opting the words of their philosophies in order to convert them to his way of thinking.

How folks have read and preached this passage, in my humble opinion, often says more about how they already understand what faith is rather than any sort of change of mind and heart that this text might have brought about in them.

In fact, it makes me wonder sometimes how much of my own interpretation is at times a confirmation bias of biblical proportions.

That's why it's so important to us that we read the Bible together in community.

We need other people with us when we're reading this stuff.

That's why things like Sunday school and small groups and theology on tap are so important, because we need each other and the Holy Spirit in order to faithfully engage our scriptures.

But that's a different soapbox for a different day.

I want to take a couple of minutes to flesh out the two religious groups that are named in this passage, if that's okay, because I think that knowing just a little bit about these first century Epicureans and Stoics will actually help us get a better understanding of what is so cool and subversive about what Paul is doing here.

So at the risk of losing you, we're going to talk a little bit about first century philosophy, okay?

If you hear the word Epicurean today, uh it's come to kind of mean someone who's a foodie or someone who loves wine and luxury, um, someone who's a bit of a pleasure seeker.

But ancient Epicureanism was something very different.

Uh, Epicureus was writing in the 500s or 400s BC, uh, and it's it's a hard-nosed materialist philosophy.

The universe is made only of matter and void, of atoms and void.

Everything is physical, nothing is spiritual.

And their view of the gods followed from that.

They didn't deny that gods existed, but they believed that gods were material beings who lived somewhere else in a state of perfect, undisturbed tranquility.

The Greeks called it ataraxia.

Because if the gods were emotionally invested in the messy, violent affairs of us humans, then the gods would be stressed out and angry and sad, and stressed-out, sad gods violated their whole system.

They wouldn't be perfect if they were stressed out and sad.

The Epicurean gods are completely self-sufficient, entirely disengaged.

They don't create the world, they don't guide history, they don't care what you do, and they certainly don't judge you when you die.

Death is just atoms dissolving back into the void.

You can probably think of a few people today whose ideal spirituality sounds a bit like that.

Maybe some higher power exists, maybe it gives them a bit of peace of mind, but it doesn't demand anything of them, and it certainly doesn't judge them.

It's a surprisingly modern worldview.

Which is why we need to understand, to an ancient Epicurean, the idea of a god who micromanages history, who demands repentance, and especially who raises the dead to face judgment, isn't just wrong, it's offensive.

And it destroys the entire architecture of their peace.

If Epicureans, however, wanted to escape the gods, Stoics wanted alignment with them.

Stoics wanted to change themselves and their actions to be like the actions of the gods, as they understood them.

Stoicism was also a materialist philosophy.

They too believed everything was physical all the way down.

But where Epicureans saw atoms and void, Stoics saw something shot through with reason and logic.

Reason and logic were the stuff that the world was made of.

They talked about a logos, a divine, rational principle that was woven through the fabric of everything that exists.

The universe isn't random, it's ordered, and it's going somewhere.

And that same logos holds the cosmos together.

It lives in you.

Every human being carries a spark of divine reason, which means your highest calling isn't pleasure or peace, it's virtue.

Living in harmony with the rational order of things.

The Stoic gods aren't disengaged, they're everywhere.

And you are probably responsible for how you show up.

You are responsible for how you show up in the world.

You can probably hear why Stoicism became the philosophy of Roman emperors and military commanders.

Because it's a worldview that says you should accept your fate in life, your stage.

Whatever class you were born into, you should just accept that's where God wants you.

But also, you can do that because you're connected to this bigger story.

This also means that when Paul walks into a city full of Stoics and starts talking about a logos that became flesh and that died and rose, they don't laugh him out of the room immediately.

But some of the vocabulary starts to sound familiar, but it's the conclusions that Paul reaches that are scandalous.

And if I can confess something to you, it's that I actually don't find either side of the scholarly argument all that compelling about Paul's speech here.

If Paul uh is only co-opting uh Epicurean and Stoic philosophies in order to tell them how wrong they are and to convert them into seeing the world the way he does, he doesn't do a very good job.

A handful of people ask him follow-up questions, but that's pretty much it.

And also, if Paul is doing the all roads lead to God universalism move, his purpose remains unclear.

And he eventually challenges them toward repentance and remains himself fully a first-century apocalyptic Jewish follower of Jesus.

And he thinks that those things are important.

Yet here's what I think both sides of that debate risk missing.

And really, what I think we are deeply missing in our divided and chronically online world today.

Here's what we're missing.

Paul, in this story, has spent time in the markets listening well and taking in and understanding the worldviews and concerns of people who are not like him.

He has taken the people of Athens seriously.

It's back in those first few verses.

The scholars, they want to jump to the speech and argue about the speech.

But before we even get to the speech, it points out to us that Paul has spent his days in the marketplaces, talking, engaging.

Encountering is the Greek word.

The Greek word is encountering.

It literally means being thrown together.

Encountering all of these regular, everyday people who have been swimming in the philosophical waters of their day, these Epicureans and Stoics.

And he hasn't listened to them only to debate and shut down and rhetorically outmaneuver them in some sort of religious jujitsu.

He has clearly, as we see later in his speech, he's clearly listened and engaged with them well enough to understand their own arguments and concerns on their terms, not on his.

He could not have lifted up their common ground and quoted from, quoted to them from their own texts had he not taken them seriously and built real relationship with them, a relationship of give and take with people who don't see the world the way he does.

And so for far too many of us, myself included, the first thing we do when we learn that someone doesn't think the way we think, or vote the way we vote, or spend their time and money the way we spend our time and money, we we shut down our listening muscles and we start flexing our fighting muscles.

But people don't generally make their way into the community of faith because they lost an argument.

You're not going to out-argue somebody into this building, that's for sure.

People find their way into the Jesus life because of encounters with Jesus' love and grace and mercy.

Love that flows from his hands and feet, his people, his church.

So here's my challenge for us today.

How can we, as people of faith, engage our pluralistic world with the same listening and care that Paul displays here, while continually allowing ourselves to be guided by the Spirit and by the teachings of Christ in our work for a better world?

Paul doesn't walk into Athens with a pre-written script, he walks in with open ears.

And I want to stay there for just one more minute because I think we moved past it too fast.

He wanders.

That's the word work Luke uses or close to it.

He walks around, he looks, he reads the altars.

And there were a lot of altars.

Athens was a wash in altars.

And somewhere in that wandering, something caught his eye, and he read a small stone and inscription on it, to an unknown God.

And Paul stops.

I wonder how long he stood there.

I wonder what he felt reading those words, because that altar, that that hedging, that I better cover my bases against any angry God out there who might want to smite me.

I better make sure I don't offend somebody.

What if we missed someone?

That's what this altar to an unknown God was for.

That's an altar of someone who is scared.

That's a whole city's worth of longing carved into stone.

And friends, he listened to the city before he ever said a word to it.

And when he finally speaks, he doesn't open with what they got wrong.

He doesn't lead with how silly they are, or how did they not see this or that?

He opens with what they already know.

He quotes their poets back to them.

We are his offspring.

That's Aratus.

That's a stoic hymn to Zeus, and it's in our Bible.

Paul knows it.

Paul has read it.

Paul sat with it long enough to find the place where their longing and his gospel were.

Not the same thing, no, they're not the same.

But they're reaching towards each other.

Paul's desires for them, God's desires for them, and their desires as well.

When was the last time you read someone else's poets?

Jewish poets, Muslim poets, Hindu poets, pagan poets?

When is the last time you sat with an idea that perhaps you didn't agree with, or might have even made you angry, long enough not to dismantle it, not to find the holes in it, but to just understand what longing was behind it?

What was the desire, what was the fear, what was the hope of that person behind that thing that we may not agree with?

What altar was it trying to build?

Because here's what I notice about Paul in this story.

He is not afraid of Athens.

He is not threatened by the altars or the philosophers or even these very sophisticated people who call him an amateur to his face.

He's curious.

He is genuinely, generously curious about what these people believe and why they believe it, and what it costs them to believe it, and what they feel like they are getting from it.

That kind of curiosity is just it's almost extinct these days, I feel like.

I've got to uh spend time every morning trying to awaken it again in me.

I don't have time.

I don't have time to be that curious.

But I want to suggest that curiosity is not just a communication strategy, and it's not just an effective technique for evangelism, and it's not gonna win you debates and debate class at school.

It is something closer to what Paul elsewhere calls love.

That kind that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things.

The kind that he says in that same letter does not insist on its own way.

Listening, really listening, isn't is not insisting on your own way.

It's exploring somebody else's way in order to be in relationship with them.

The God Paul proclaims on Mars Hill is a God who is already there in Athens, already present in the city before Paul arrives, already near, Paul says.

Not far from any of us.

Already at work in the longing behind that altar, in the words of those poets, in the questions those philosophers couldn't quite answer.

Which means, and I need us all to hear this God is already in every room you will enter.

God's Spirit is already drawing every person you will meet to God's self, the scriptures say.

God is already in the person who sits across from you who sees the world completely differently than you do.

And your job, our job, is not to show up as God's translator or warrior or apologist.

It is our job is to show up as someone who is paying attention.

Because paying attention to someone is loving them.

Someone who has done enough listening to recognize the longing when you see it.

And maybe, maybe at some point to say, what you are already reaching for, I want it too.

And I think I know his name.

May it be so.

Amen.