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.