Sunday, February 04, 2018
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I’d like to challenge you with a question this morning.  What do the following have in common?  In 1789, William Wilberforce stands in the House of Commons and speaks.  In Rochester, New York, in 1852, Frederick Douglass gets up and speaks.  In 1920, in the House of Commons, Lady Astor gets up and gives a speech.  In May 1963, Martin Luther King gets up and gives a speech.  You have probably gathered they all gave speeches, but they were more than that. They had a ripple effect and in many areas would change the world, and alter the way that men and women would see the world.  William Wilberforce spoke out against slavery in the Commonwealth, a speech that wasn’t very well received at the time.  Frederick Douglass questioned whether July 4th, the day of independence, the day of freedom, meant anything if you were a slave.  Lady Astor, in her maiden speech in the House of Commons, talked about the need for more women to be elected into the House and being eligible to vote.  Her speech was not well received.  Martin Luther King stood up in 1963 and gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, and we all know how that eventually ended for him.  These were great speeches made in difficult circumstances, but they were ones that challenged the status quo.
 
Today’s reading from Acts is a great speech!  It is 2,000 years old, probably given in 56 AD or thereabouts in Athens by a diminutive Jew who had become a follower of Jesus of Nazareth after an event on the road to Damascus.  The Apostle Paul was going into a very difficult situation that was challenging, but he went into it knowing his convictions and the Lord in whom he served.  It must have been difficult, and yet it was profound.  The fact that I am quoting it today, that it is on the radio, that it will be printed, read in churches throughout the world, and be on the Internet, tells you that this speech was worth repeating.  Why?  The great Thomas Halek, who I have mentioned before, the Czech theologian and friend of Vaclav Havel, a very prominent man, once said that what the world needs now is a new Areopagus, referring to the speech that Paul gave in challenging the concept of an unknown god.  He said that in the aftermath of the decline of the communist power in the Czech Republic.  Why did he feel that in the midst of political change Paul’s speech about the unknown god at the Aeropagus should be repeated?  He said a new sermon on the Areopagus was needed.  
 
I can understand why Halek said this if you read the text, the background to it must have been pretty electric.  Paul had been led from the comfort of his own home to go on missionary journeys, and he was now in the heart of Greece.  He had spoken in Berea about Jesus and the Resurrection.  He stood in synagogues there amongst the Jewish and the early Christian-Jewish community, and his speeches were fairly well received, although he did cause riots, I must mention that.  There were people who thought he was terrible because he was introducing a new god, and they wanted nothing to do with him.  Paul would face some challenges.  He is on his way to Athens, and he goes to the centre of debate within the city known as the Council of the Areopagus, the place where the Epicurean and the Stoic philosophers would debate one another.  They debated each other vehemently about matters of faith, philosophy, law, nature and politics.  They were erudite people, clever people, who understood wisdom.  Paul goes into the midst of this council and speaks to them in general terms about Athens’ many idols to many gods.  Paul can’t stand this!  He is a Jew after all.  You do not make graven images of God (the ten commandments).  Yet, here were all these different gods, and all these different temples and statues honouring them.  
 
Paul questions their idolatry.  They called him a “babbler” and said he was introducing a new god to them, and were pretty upset with him.  But then they invite him – and this is interesting – to talk more about God as he understands it.  Paul introduces them to the fact that unlike all the gods that they have, there is one god who is greater.  He notes to them, “I see that you are very religious (in other words, you have a lot of gods) and I notice that you even have another idol, and it reads ‘To an Unknown God’.”  Paul was referring to the one statue that is sort of an insurance policy for polytheists:  “If I don’t get my god right, I am going to have a statue to an unknown god, so I managed to claim everybody!”  Paul says, “This god, this unknown god, is that god that I am going to proclaim.  I am going to tell you about this God.  This is the God who is the maker of heaven and earth.”
 
Many of the Greek philosophers, as I mentioned over the last few weeks, could not grasp that God could have made the world.  Many of them questioned whether the world and creation itself was evil, and the gods were merely intermediaries between the world and themselves.  Paul says, “No!”  As a Jew, he would be thinking about Psalm 146; he’d be thinking about Exodus 20; he would be thinking about Nehemiah 9:6: that “the Lord is the Maker of heaven and earth.”  We addressed that a couple of weeks ago.  But he also said, “We do not need this God to be made out of human hands.  It is not that we now have to form and shape this God.  This God is not a figment of our imaginations.  This God is not of our creation.  We are God’s creation!”  For Paul, it was not our words about God; it was God’s word to us.  Then, in a brilliant twist, he invites them to do two things.  
 
Paul invites them to explore with him who this God is, and he does it brilliantly!  This is a piece of rhetorical magisterium!  He knows that the philosophers all have their own supporters, and that these wise people have all their ideas and myths and legends, and they spout off about them. The Epicureans argue with the Stoics, who argue with the Platonists, and the Aristotelians. Paul decides to use one of the greatest poets that they ever had, a man called Epimenides, who had written six hundred years before Christ and said:  “In God, we live, and we move, and we have our being.”  In other words, it is not how much god we have in us, as the Stoics argued, or the Epicureans who argued that we are just on this earth and at the end we are obliterated, so we will make up our gods as we go along.  No!  Paul says, “We live, we move, we have our being in this God.”  This God is our maker!  This God is our sustainer!  This God is our strength!  We live in God, and that is more important than how much of the gods live in us.  We live in God.  There is nothing beyond what God can do.  There is no one greater than this God.
 
Then he addresses the question of the Unknown God.  He does so by suggesting that the God we live in, as one theologian put it, is like our oxygen tent.  He is our source of life, of care.  He is our Maker.  Then, he quotes another philosopher, Aratus, who himself in the third century was one of the great intellectuals and suggested that we are “God’s offspring”.  Not only does God make us, but we are God’s offspring, we are created by God.  That might not sound particularly dramatic to you, but to those who were gathered in the Areopagus it was radically different, because they had forgotten that even they and their great minds had been made by God.  They would differentiate people according to the idol they worshipped, rather than the recognition that there is one God who is overall.  They believed in a multiplicity of deities, who would have sacrifices made in their honour. Paul says, “No, those gods are not the real God! We are the offspring of the One in whom we live and move and have our being.”  For those in the Greek world and intellectual world of the west, Paul’s words were dramatic and influential because ultimately they place us in and under God’s care.
 
Paul also invites them to repent and change.  He tells them there will be one who will judge them for their idolatry.  Idolatry being perhaps the greatest sin in The Old Testament as far as the Jewish community was concerned. Paul says, “You have this Unknown God and have made idols and worshipped them, become slaves to them.  We know what God is like; we see it in the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.”  He compares God, as revealed in Jesus, with the Unknown God of the Areopagus.  He compares the God who died and rose for them and was self-giving, with the gods that required people to make sacrifices that must be brought for them.  He also shook the world by pointing out that it was not just the intellectual elites and the idols of culture who had access to the divine; the divine had now come and lived amongst everyone, and this God in whom we live and move and have our being was seen in Jesus of Nazareth.  Wow, what a message, and how it transforms our view of life!
 
The French philosopher Emile Cailliet wrote in the nineteenth century.  He was a brilliant scholar, humanist, and naturalist, who understood the world and tried to make sense of it, so much so that Princeton University invited him to become a professor there.  Eventually he went back to France and fought in World War I.  In the trenches he was standing by his close friend when he was shot in the head with a bullet and died.  This was devastating for Emile.  All his life he had written and spoken about nature and the goodness of humanity, extolling all good things, but now he was confronted by evil, by death and violence and sin, and he hated it; didn’t know what to do with it.  Intellectually, he had his own gods; he was an intellectual god-like figure himself.  But he couldn’t make sense of this until one day his wife, a Christian but a quiet one (the best kind), said, “You should read your Bible.”  He did and this is what he wrote:
 
I literally grabbed the book and rushed to my study with it.  I opened it and chanced upon The Beatitudes of Jesus.  I read and I read with an indescribable warmth surging within me.  I could not find words to express my awe and wonder.  Suddenly, a realization dawned upon me ‘This was the book that would understand me.’  I needed it so much, yet unaware I had attempted to write my own, but in vain.  I continued to read deeply into the night, mostly from the Gospels and The Book of Acts.  Lo and behold, as I looked through them, the One of whom they spoke, the One who spoke and acted in them, came alive in me.  
 
For Cailliet, this was not the god of the mind; not the god of the idols; not the god of power. This was the God who came alive and changed him in such a way that the life and the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth came alive in his mind. Because of this, he could grapple with sin, understand problems, and see that there was a power greater than the power in the world, and he claimed the Resurrection as his great source of hope.  He also elevated human beings above the carnage of World War I, the carnage that dehumanized, took life, and set nation and empire against nation and empire. He saw God in whom we all live and move and have our being.  Paul’s words had hit him hard!
 
Were Paul’s words received glowingly at the time that he gave them to the Areopagus?  If CNN was to do a little research right now and say, “Was this a speech that went down well with the populace?” the answer probably would be “No”.  Paul’s speech to the Areopagus was mocked.  There were some who said, “We are going to have to think more about it”, which is very Greek philosophy.  But then, there were some who were changed by it.  Dionysius the Areopagite, a brilliant mind by all accounts, accepted it.  A woman, Damaris, accepted it, and I say “a woman” with some sense of being astounded because women did not participate in the debates at the Areopagus, but she decided that she had heard what Paul had to say and was changed by it.  Clearly this is another example of the important role that women played in the earliest Christian community. However, the speech was not a success in earthy terms, and often the Gospel does not meet with success.  
 
Sometimes the Gospel is not taken to heart by everyone, yet its power, wonder and glory reaffirms that everywhere we are and whatever we do, we live and move and have our being in God.  I can’t think of anything in the whole world that is more important than that.  Can you?  If Paul and Luke, who wrote it down, had been journalists today, they would have said, “This is the big scoop!  This is the story of all stories!”  When we forget some mornings when we get up, or when we go to bed at night, when we think that life is simply one sort or form of idol worship after another and that we have to clamour after it, we need to stop and listen to the speech from the Areopagus:  “In God, we live, and we move, and we have our being.” Amen.