Building Idols (Acts 17:21-32)

Sermon as Preached at Lambs and Evington UMC  on 5/25/14

image courtesy of Vanderbilt Divinity Library

Today in our scripture from Acts we find Paul in the midst of his second missionary journey. Paul is visiting from city to city across the known world, and in each city is trying to spread the good news of Jesus Christ and help establish churches in the cities.  This is Paul second missionary, he has already helped to start churches in other cities in this trip and in his first journey, and he even visits some of the same cities again such as Antioch. While Paul saw many successes in his journeys he encountered many challenges and failures too. Where Paul finds himself in our scripture for today however may be one of his most difficult challenges.  Paul is not in Phillipi or Thesolonica, or even Antioch or Corinth where he saw some mixed results, Paul in the heart of Greece, Paul is in Athens.  If you have studied any Greek history or watched any movies about the Ancient Greeks such The 300   then you are likely aware two of the major cities of Ancient Greece, Sparta and Athens. In movies Sparta is usually depicted as the warrior city while Athens is depicted as the city of wisdom and intellectual thinking.  I’m sure that this is probably and over the top caricature of the cities, but yet it does seem to hold some merit. After all Athens is the city of the great philosphers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.  

            By the time Paul arrives in Athens, these philosophers had been dead for hundreds of years, the wonderful wars that are depicted in the movies are part of Greece’s history. Still, many of the influences of Athens’ history still played a large role in the life of the people of the city. Wisdom and ethics were still the watchwords of the people and new philosophical strands had emerged as the dominant way of thinking and living.  There were two in particular that Paul had to deal with in his journey. The first is called Epicureanism, which is the belief that pleasure is the ultimate goal of life, and that the way we obtain perfect pleasure is through the removal of pain in our lives. The other strand of philosophy may be more familiar to us, it is called stoicism. You may have heard of someone being very stoic, and that comes from this line of thinking in which emotions are things to be conquered in kept in control so that one may live an ethical life. These strands of philosophy were not just intellectual mumbo jumbo as we sometimes think of it now, but these beliefs truly shaped the way that the Athenians spoke, thought, and even lived their lives.

            And as if these philosophies weren’t already hard enough for Paul to engage in with his news of the Gospel, as Paul enters into Athens he is taken aback by all of the statues of idols that he finds in the city.  While the people of Athens are extremely philosophical, at the same time they are also very devout and pious people. As Paul strolls along the city he studies many of the idols and notes the fervency of  the Athenians piety. And so here in our scripture we find Paul in front of the Areopagus preparing to speak to the Athenian people, who many are Epicureans and Stoics like we talked about earlier, and he is here to tell them about Jesus.

            What a daunting task, and yet Paul’s response in our scripture is a shining example of how we can tell the good news of Christ in the world.  It is no secret that Paul is appalled by the amount of idols and false worshiping going on in the city. Scripture tells us that he was deeply distressed by all the idols.  Yet Paul does not come out in full condemnation of the people of Athens. Paul does not cast the city off as a city of heathens, of sinners. In fact Paul’s first words to the Athenians do not condemn the people, but rather commend them.  “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way.” Paul actually commends them for their piety, but what Paul does next may be the true lesson of this story. Paul talks about how in his traveling around the city he studied and observed many of the idols, and he lifts up one idol that he finds particularly interesting, that is the statue of the unknown God. Paul sees this idol as an opportunity to reach the people where they are. He says, “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.”  Or in other words what you worship as unknown, is not unknown to me.  I worship a God who is creator of heaven and Earth, I worship a God who has given us everything and needs nothing from us. I worship a God who chose one ancestor from whom all the world is their offspring.  I worship a God who is God of all of us. I have seen and commend your devout religiousness to this unknown God, but to me this God is not unknown, this God is the Lord.  Paul meets the Athenians where they are, he even uses something that they believe in, to help teach about God.

            This scripture reminds me of my time in South Africa. While we were visiting some of the villages and townships in the mountains, one of the most difficult parts of the journey was simply getting through the streets. I say this not because of the condition of the roads but because of the amount of goats that ran wild in the roads, even sometimes jumping on top of the cars. Our driver and guide was very careful not to hit one of these goats, and first I thought simply for a respect for the animals, but later he told us that many of the people in the villages believed that their ancestors were actually somehow linked with the goats, that somehow the goats were a tie between this world and the next. In fact as we visited houses around the village we found some with goat horns about the entry way into the house. Our guide told us that many believed that those bones helped those ancestors to find the home of their family. While for many Westerners like us, this idea seems very foreign, the missionaries in these parts took a page out of Paul’s playbook. Instead of flat out rejecting this custom they used it to teach about Christianity. The ancestors tie to this world through the goats helped to teach about an understanding of the Communion of Saints, those who have already lived a life of Christ and now commune with God and yes even sometimes with us.  The understanding of the spirits of ancestors visiting houses also made it much easier to understand how the Spirit of God can live and dwell among us, maybe even easier to understand than it is for us here in the  States.  Like in our scripture, these cultural beliefs were used as a way to reach and teach Christ to people where they were.

            We fool ourselves if we think cultural beliefs are something that is only different in a foreign country halfway around the world. There are many culture’s different than what we are familiar with even in our own backyard, in our own community. While we live in an area that gives off the vibe that the whole area is Christian, and evangelical Christians to boot, the truth is that there are many in our community who are not. There are some who are from other religions, there are some who are actively atheistic, but one of the growing trends in America is a group of people who identify themselves as “Spiritual but not religious.”  These are people who believe in God, maybe even believe in Jesus, but have a disdain for organized religion. They believe that Church as we know it is something archaic, sometimes even evil, and that all they need is their own personal belief. This group of people is rising in numbers especially in my age group and the middle aged. There is a wide array of people in our own community that for one reason or another have not embraced the good news of Jesus Christ.

            So the question then  for Christians seems clear, what are we going to do when it seems our culture is changing, where now there seem to be more options for people, where going to church is not a given, and where the good news of Christ continues to fall on deaf ears? Sadly, it seems like for too many churches our response to this culture around us is to just sit and complain.  “Back in my day you just came to church because that was the right thing to do.” I don’t understand why these young people aren’t more active in the life of the church, when I was their age I already held three positions.” We wine like children that things aren’t going our ways and then we sit back and simply do what we’ve always done.  Somewhere down the road we adopted a field of dreams approach to ministry,  “If you build it they will come.” If we hold this event they will come, and yet this is not the example of evangelism that we get from the Bible. Jesus says, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰ and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” Jesus doesn’t say stay, sit, or wait, Jesus says, go! The field of dreams approach does not work, we are called to go out into the world and make disciples.

            And that is why the Book of Acts is so helpful to us as Christians because we are able to look at it and learn from the ways in which the earliest leaders went into the world in ministry. We can glean insight from their stories of ministries, just like our story of Paul and the idol of the unknown God. Paul did not sit at home trying to spread the Gospel, he went out into the world, but maybe what is  more important than that for us to learn, is how he evangelized once he was there.  We can learn from Paul’s teaching on the idol of the unknown God and see that in order to reach others who are culturally and ideologically different than ourselves then we have to meet them where they are. We need to find out what is important to them, what really matters in their lives, and try to use that to explain the goodness and mercy of God.

            And yet this is dirty and sometimes scary work. When we go out into the world for Christ we will encounter many people who live and think very differently than we do. I don’t think that’s the scary part though. The true scary part what if we are successful, what if we do succeed in bringing these people to Christ, what if they become part of our church, what if our church even changes because of who we bring in?  Evangelism for Christians is fun until the things we cherish start to change. We may lose some power in the church, there may be changes made to the parts of worship that we have grown up loving. There may be more disagreements in Sunday school because people are reading the Bible from a different perspective than we are used to. Sadly for many Christians these fears are enough to hinder our attempts at evangelism. We will gladly evangelize until it affects us; we want to bring in people to the church as long as they are just like us. When we evangelize in this way then we ourselves are building our own idols. Our idol may not resemble the altars of stone or gold that Paul encounters in Athens, but our idol takes on a different shape. Our idol is not an unknown God, but rather a God that is all too familiar. When we squander opportunities for evangelism because we don’t want our efforts to disturb the status quo, then our idol is none other than ourselves.

            For as Paul explains in our passage for today, “ 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.” Paul gets it,  that all of us are offspring from one ancestor, all of us are made in the image of God. We are denying the world from seeing the full beauty of that image when we pretend that everyone else should be just like us. We sings songs like Jesus loves the little children where we sing red and yellow, black and white they are precious in his sight, and yet our sanctuaries and our evangelistic efforts don’t reflect that sentiment. While Paul uses the idol of the Unknown God to reach the people of Athens on their own level, the passage reaches to us as well. That too often we build our own idols, our ideas of what the church is supposed to be, and we deny entry to anyone who may believe differently or threaten that image. When churches act in this way they are no different the Athenians for they too are worshiping an unknown God. For our God is the God created the original humans from whence all humanity came. Our God is the God who invited a Moabite named Ruth into the Hebrew family to become a foremother of Jesus himself. Our God is the God who sent his son into the world not as a king or Pharisee but as the son of a Carpenter, and who established his kingdom not through military conquest but through death on the cross. And our God is the God who used a converted persecutor of Christians named Paul to teach the good news to the Gentiles at a time when other Christians refused to.   If we fail to obey the call of Christ to go into the world, if we fail to learn from Paul’s inclusion of others into the Body of Christ, if we are not working with Christ in building up the Kingdom of God, then we too are simply building idols.

Just Like You (Acts 7:55-60)

Sermon as preached at Lambs and Evington UMC 5/18/14

Image courtesy of Vanderbilt Divinity Library

How many of you have heard the Harry Chapin song, “Cats in the Cradle”?  It truly is a powerful song, one about a dad and his son.  The song starts out saying, “My child arrived just the other day, He came to the world in the usual way But there were planes to catch and bills to pay
He learned to walk while I was away And he was talkin' 'fore I knew it, and as he grew
He'd say "I'm gonna be like you, Dad You know I'm gonna be like you"  The song continues with lyrics like this where the son wants to spend quality time with his father but  his father keeps talking about how busy he is and how he wish he could, but just can’t.  The song ends with the father later in his life, he is now in retirement and has time to spend with his son, and we once again hear a conversation that he has with his son, “I've long since retired, my son's moved away, I called him up just the other day, I said, "I'd like to see you if you don't mind", He said, "I'd love to, Dad, if I can find the time, You see my new job's a hassle and kids have the flu, But it's sure nice talking to you, Dad, It's been sure nice talking to you" And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me He'd grown up just like me My boy was just like me.”   This song is a painful and haunting song that teaches a powerful lesson;  the way in which  we live and act matters, because we have no idea who may be watching us. We have no idea in fact may be emulating us. The father in the song loved his son, but through his actions sent the message that work comes first, and we hear in the end of the song the pain of the father’s realization, that that message was passed on to his son. And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me, he’d grown up just like me, my boy was just like me.

            It is easy to forget that the way we live our lives matter.  Especially in this day in age where face to face conversation  seems to be becoming a thing of the past, where people feel as though the can hide behind a wall of social media and not truly interact with each other. And yet the truth is, more and more we are able to see more of each other’s actions and daily life. What used  to seem private is increasingly becoming more public. We can just look at Donald Sterling, the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers who made several racist remarks in a phone conversation with his mistress, and now the whole world has heard it, and he has faced the ramifications of his actions.  All of this reminds us of the fact that what we say and do maters, that what we do matters, because we never know who may be watching, learning, and emulating the way in which we live our life.

            And yet when we remember this, it can create in us a sort of inner struggle. We want to show our best, we want to be the best example we can be for others, and at the same time we don’t want to put on a show. We don’t want to be like the Pharisees who would pray in public so others would see them, and yet we want to teach others the importance of prayer by showing them how much it means to us. It almost feels like a catch 22, We want to live in a way in that others can learn from and be inspired by, and yet we don’t want to lives to be dictated by how others perceive us. The only answer to what seems like a paradox, is that our lives must be authentic. Others can learn and experience Christ through us, not because we are intentionally teaching them, but rather because that’s who we really are. It is as C.S. Lewis puts it, “Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.”

            As Christians, we often already have an understanding of living a good life, of living a proper life. However, far too this leads to a moralistic view of living. We live be a set of guidelines, a set of rules to follow, if we follow them we are good, if we don’t then we are bad, but is this truly the best way to lead an authentically Christian life. Does this really change the essence of who we are, does this help us to be truly authentic?  It surely is a help, but as Christians it is not the end all be all. As Paul explains we are not saved by the law, but the law points us toward our sin. The law points out our sin, it helps us to see the wrong that we are doing, but what makes us truly authentic in the ways we live our life. How can we go from leading a life in which we make decisions based upon what we are told is good and bad, and make those decisions simply because that is who we are.  How can we learn to live this authentic Christian lifestyle?  Well, just as the boy in the song did, we can learn from watching, studying, and emulating those who already live that way.

            And so as we begin to think of what example can we use to learn from, who has lived a holy and God centered life, the answer becomes quite obvious to us, it is an answer that even our young children could answer, who do we want to live like? Jesus, of course.  And yet when we say this we get a little nervous, a little uneasy, because though we know Jesus was fully human he was also fully divine, that is Jesus is God. How can we possible live like God?  And yet in our passage for today we see a shining example of an ordinary human, like you or me, who lived their life emulating Christ.

In our passage for today we read about Stephen. As the early church grew and more and more people were being baptized into this community, The disciples of Christ realized that they could no longer lead alone; they would need to appoint some new leaders. Stephen was one of the men appointed. Stephen is described of being full of faith and the Holy Spirit, full of wisdom and power, and yet Stephen was no different than you or I am. Stephen went amongst the people just as Jesus did, he helped those in need just as Jesus did, and he taught about the good news about Jesus Christ. While Stephen did many wonderful things, two things in particular are described in detail in the book of Acts.

First, just like Jesus, Stephen spoke the truth. When I say this I’m not talking about the polite manners that we as Southerners have been taught, don’t lie and tell the truth. While this is certainly a good thing, when I say Stephen spoke the truth, I mean that he saw injustice in the world and he named it. He saw a people who were once again ignoring God in their presence, and he calls them on it. Stephen spoke the truth, Stephen was a prophet. While we often think of prophets as people who predict the future, a prophet is simply one who speaks the word of God.  Stephen is arrested on false accounts of blasphemy and instead of defending himself he tells a story. He tells the story of the Israelites and how and multiple steps throughout their history they had rejected the prophets who lead them, from Abraham, to Moses, to David, and Stephen proclaims to them once again that they are once again rejecting the movement of the Holy Spirit, that this new movement called Christianity is spirit led and yet like their ancestors they reject it.

            Stephen does the difficult thing; Stephen speaks the truth even knowing what fate waits for him if he does. Stephen emulates the life of Christ and speaks the truth, speaks the good news of God and rejects injustice, and speaks it in spite of the consequences. We can truly learn from Stephen’s courage.  Prophets are not a thing of the past, but some of us are called to be prophets, and all of us are called to speak out against injustice. We are called to look around in the world around us and see the injustice ahead.  We are called to bring awareness to the fact that on average black convicts receive longer sentences than white convicts who commit the same crime.  We are called to speak to the fact that on average women are paid 77 cents to the dollar that men receive for the exact same position. We look in our community and see the great poverty and we must call out the fact that 400 Americans, 400 Americans have more money than half of all Americans combined. When we see injustice in our community and in our world we must speak out in truth; yet this can be a quite terrifying experience. It is something that haunts and frightens me, what will happen if, what will become of me, and yet if we are emulating Stephen we see that those are not the right questions to ask. We are called to speak the truth, whatever may befall us.

            And yet we are called to speak the truth with love.  Too often when Christians speak the truth it is spoken with condemnation, in harsh ways, and even with hate.  We see injustice and instead of speaking out in a way that calls for reform, that even calls to draw the people causing the injustice away from their sins and towards Christ, we simply reject them. We cast them off as sinners, we say they are heathens, and that they don’t deserve love or forgiveness. Recently I was reading an article about a horrible incident in which an 8 year old boy in Richmond was killed trying to protect his sister from being raped.  Now rightfully so this type of incident causes in us outrage, pain, and sadness and yet I experienced just as must shock when I read some of the comments on the articles of people, some even professing Christians who said that they want to personally be the one who flips the switch on the murderer, or that lethal injection was too kind, or even that they hope the person burns in hell.  We must speak out against injustice, but we must speak it in love.  For after Stephen finishes he speak, he himself is taken away and stoned, and yet in the midst of being killed he cries, “Lord do not hold this sin against them.” If it sounds familiar it should because it echoes the very words of Jesus on the cross, “Father forgive for they know not what they are doing.” In the midst of death, Stephen prays for his murderers forgiveness. How can someone act in that way, unless that was authentically them? In that moment Stephen didn’t weigh the good and bad, he didn’t consult the law to figure out what the right thing to do was, Stephen lived a life emulating Christ, and in that moment Christ was revealed through him. As Christians this is what we are striving for, that our hearts are aligned with Christ’s, that in our darkest hour we may love as Christ loves. That each day we may emulate the life of Christ, that we speak the truth in love, that we may live the truth in love, that we may learn from the examples of the saints who have gone before us, and that maybe, just maybe, someone may learn to live like Christ through us.

            For there is one aspect of this story that is rarely mentioned. That one of the members observing the stoning of  Stephen was a young man named Saul. Saul, who would later become the horrible Jewish who he himself dragged Christians from their homes and stoned them. Saul the great persecutor of Christians, but also Saul the man who on the road to Damascus was struck blind. Who in that moment had Christ appear to him and who at that moment was converted to the very religion he persecuted. Saul who then changed his name to Paul and became of the greatest leaders of the early church, who helped to share the gospel with Gentiles, and whose letters account for the majority of our New Testament.  This great leader tells of his conversion later in Acts, and while the experience on the road to Damascus can be understood as the defining moment of his conversion, guess what event he talks about as being formative in his life. That’s right, the stoning of Stephen.  Like the father in “Cats in the cradle” we don’t always know who is watching us, we don’t know what impact we can have on someone’s life. Stephen’s great act of prophecy and compassion played a profound role in the life of one of the greatest Christian leaders; and it is all because Stephen lived an authentic Christ-like life. So the question is who’s watching you, and what are they learning.  Are you living a life striving to emulate the love and compassion of Christ? Is that how you live when no one is watching, it is part of your very being so that what people see is the true you. Others are watching and emulating us even when we aren’t aware of it; are we showing a Christ-like life?  Does it make us proud or give us chills when that person tells us I want to be just like you.