“SPEAKING OF UNKNOWN GODS”
Acts 17:16-34
(04-27-08)

A couple of weeks ago I asked the question,
“What makes a church compelling?”
I suggested a variety of reasons why people might find a church to be compelling.
But the truth is that we live in a time when most churches are not very compelling
to the majority of our population.
How many people do we know at work, in our neighbourhoods,
in our circle of friends and acquaintances, and even in our own families,
who don’t go to church,
not just this church, but any church?
For just about all of us we probably know more people
who don’t go to church than do go to church.
And so in this day and age, many churches find ourselves struggling for members, wondering what the future holds for the church,
whether and how long we can keep our doors open.

It used to be far simpler to be the church.
It used to be that the church lived by the old adage, if you build it, they will come.
We built churches and expected people to fill them.
We expected that people would know what churches were and why we needed them
and we offered what we always offered,
in the way we always offered it.
But something happened along the way.
The people stopped coming.
They no longer understood why they should come,
and even when they did,
they often didn’t understand what we did, or why we did it the way we did.
We need to change the paradigm.
What does it mean to be the church today?
The church has too often and too long been associated with a building, a place,
somewhere we worship, someplace where people gather.
But really, hasn’t the church always been about a people?
And if we admit that people aren’t coming to church,
to the church as a building, as a place,
then what about being church where the people are?
If they’re not going to come here, then we better be willing to go there.

It seems that’s what Paul was doing.
In our text this morning, we find Paul in Athens,
on one of his mission tours,
in that great ancient capital of philosophy and culture.
Paul and his co-worker Silas, had been going from place to place,
proclaiming the gospel and teaching the scriptures.
In many of these places they founded faith communities, churches,
some based in synagogues, some in homes.
While in Athens, Paul was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols.
In his distress, Paul engaged the people of Athens in conversation about their beliefs,
in the synagogues as well as in the marketplaces.
A group of Epicureans and Stoics, philosophers, debated with Paul.
They called him a babbler, but others were interested in what he had to say.
They brought Paul to the Aeropagus,
which was the cultural and philosophical centre of the city.

Paul spoke to the Athenians, noting that in addition to their own gods,
the Athenians also had erected an altar to an unknown god.
Paul charged the Athenians of being ignorant of the very thing they were worshiping
and proceeded to teach them about the God of Jesus Christ.
The God Paul spoke of would have been very different
from the gods that the Athenians would have been familiar with.
If you remember your Greek mythology,
you will understand that the Greek gods were very capricious in their behaviour.
Even though they were endowed with supernatural abilities,
they were quite human in their follies.
They were jealous of each other, they constantly fought among themselves,
in fact Zeus, the king of the gods, became king by overthrowing his father Cronus,
who had managed to swallow his children
to prevent one of them from overthrowing him,
just as he had overthrown his own father.
Into this congested milieu, Paul introduced the idea of a loving God,
who alone made the world and everything in it,
who is Lord of heaven and earth,
and does not live in shrines made by human hands,
nor is served by human hands, as though he needed anything,
since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.
Paul continues to speak about God,
not as a petty deity whose relationship with humans is often nasty and small minded,
but as one who created humanity so that they would search for God
and perhaps grope for him and find him—though as Paul notes,
indeed he is not far from each one of us.
For ‘In him we live and move and have our being.’
Ultimately God showed his glory by sending the one he appointed,
who he has raised from the dead.
Upon hearing Paul’s teaching, some of the Athenians scoffed and sneered,
but others wanted to hear more,
and still others became followers and believed.

Being the church where the people are.
Isn’t that what Paul was doing that day in Athens?
And isn’t that what we should be doing today in Calgary?
To be the church in our present culture
means to be engaged in the world around us
and it means to be a people whose lives can testify and be witness to
the unknown god that so many people around us might have a sense of,
but don’t really know.
But to do so, we first have to be willing to engage.
We need to embrace a sense of evangelism as followers of Jesus Christ.

Eric Michael Bryant, who is a pastor at a church in Los Angeles called Mosaic,
writes in his book, Peppermint Filled Pinatas,
that we Christians have a peculiar problem.
Our personal relationships often betray our feelings for the world.
Rather than befriending and loving those who do not yet follow Christ,
it seems that the longer we follow Christ,
the fewer people we actually know who believe differently from the way we believe. Even though, as I said at the outset of this sermon,
that we know more and more people who don’t go to church than do go,
we find ourselves attracted to the ones that do,
rather than seeing an opportunity to connect with the ones that don’t.
Instead of engaging with the world,
to embrace opportunities to share with them about their unknown gods,
we create our own little world within a world,
a bubble in which we live with everything we need.
Christian books, Christian music, Christian movies,
Christian sports leagues, Christian stores of every kind.
Why go to a coffee shop just anywhere when you can go to one within a church?
And the church is often the most obvious symbol of this disengagement.

This is the ultimate place for insiders, where we know what we can expect.
We know one another, there are very few surprises here.
Ultimately the church becomes a place of refuge from the world,
when we are in fact called to be lights on a hill.
We are called to be in the world, but not of the world,
but it seems that we have gotten that command confused
and we do our best to not be in the world at all.
But isn’t that what Paul was doing at the Areopagus?
Areopagus means the Hill of Ares.
Ares was the name of the god of war, in Roman myths, he is referred to as Mars.
So the Areopagus is also called Mars Hill.
And on this hill, Paul engaged the world, as a light on the hill.

There are many people just like the Epicureans and Stoics of Paul’s time,
today they might be called agnostics, new-agers, spiritualists, what have you,
and just like in Paul’s time, they hold to numerous beliefs,
including for many, a belief in an unknown God.
We need to be speaking of this unknown God,
we need to be engaging in the opportunity God has presented to us to be lights on the hill.
For those who might cringe every time they hear the word evangelism,
I want you to notice something.
In the text, it is clear that even before Paul has spoken to the Athenians about God,
they already have a sense of this God, whom they label unknown.
The point is that God is already present in the Athenians,
he is already at work in them,
after all God is the one who made the world and everything in it,
and he uses Paul to clarify and continue the work he has already started.
The encouraging news for us is that God is already at the work of evangelism,
but he invites us to be useful to him
as we engage those who may be seeking to respond to his initiative in their lives.
We don’t have to make cold calls, as it were.
There are already plenty of people who are interested,
but we can help clarify what God has started in how we live,
in how we serve, in how we sacrifice, in how we share our compassion, in how we love,
and yes, even in how we speak and share our faith through words.
But in order to do so, we need to go where the people are,
we need to engage people on their own turf.

Have you noticed that most of the big mega-churches in our society today
are built in the suburbs?
That shouldn’t be too surprising,
and its not just for a lack of affordable land in the city.
The suburbs were created by evangelical Christians
who found that the city was becoming too unsafe for their liking.
So they moved to other communities
with greater safety and convenience and better school districts.
And we keep on doing that,
getting farther and farther from the people who are unlike us,
from the people who perhaps we should be engaging most.
We end up looking at our neighbourhoods, just like almost everything else,
for what we can get rather than what we can offer,
what we can contribute, give and serve.
(Eric Michael Bryant, Peppermint Filled Pinatas)

Why is Grace Church here, still here after 102 years, in the midst of the city?
Why haven’t we packed up and moved out to the suburbs?
Is it maybe because God wants us here,
because God is inviting us to engage with our community,
with our neighbours, with those who are seeking and searching,
who may have an inkling of an unknown God,
but who might need the friendship, the love,
the care of people like you and me
to crystallize that inkling into a conviction?
Is it maybe because people like you and me are being invited by God,
being equipped and sent out to where the people are,
in the marketplaces, in the boardrooms, in the classrooms,
in the community centers, in the coffee shops, in our neighbourhoods,
to speak of a God who some have never heard about,
to be the church, not a building, not a place, but a people?

I get the sense that what people are looking for in this day and age aren’t just more words. We have our fill of words, from Oprah to Dr. Phil, from The Secret to Deepak Chopra. What I sense people are hungry for is something tactile, something tangible,
something that they can get their hands on and get their hands dirty with.
Imagine sharing the good news of God’s love
by being present with someone who is lonely and depressed,
who thinks that they are worthless and unlovable.
Imagine bringing the good news of God’s love
through a sandwich or a bowl of soup offered at the Mustard Seed,
or even just by taking the next hungry person you meet for a coffee and a bite to eat. Imagine what being engaged with someone who is homeless, who is hungry,
who isn’t like us, might do for them, for us.
Before you know it, they might want to know why we care,
why we bother, why we love them.
We need to be able to share the knowledge of a God who loves us,
who loves all of us by giving us Jesus Christ as our Saviour and as our Lord.
How many times have we had the opportunity
to witness and model the love of God in us this past week, but chose not to do so?
Are we going to save it all for Sundays?
God talk, Godly living, isn’t only for the church,
we need to live it, we need to speak it, especially outside these walls.

At the beginning of the sermon I asked the question,
“What makes a church compelling?”
The most compelling reason anyone would want to be part of this community
is the people, its people like you and me,
and how we allow God to work through us.
You are the most compelling reason why your friend should come to this church.
Its not the music, its not the preaching, its not the programmes,
it’s the people, its you and me and how we engage our world,
how we live out and speak out about the reality of the living God,
in whom we live and move and have our being.
We, who are the church as a people,
we are the most compelling reason
why anyone would want to become part of the church community.
Study after study shows that the vast majority of people who come to church
come because they were asked by someone they know to come.
Family, friend, colleague, co-worker, neighbour.
Its the people who are the most compelling reason the church can offer
for why others should come and be part of this fellowship.

Now, for us, it all begins here, in worship, encountering the risen Christ.
Henri Nouwen has said that when we have met our Lord
in the silent intimacy of our prayer,
then we will also meet him in the camp, in the market, and in the town square.
But when we have not met him in the centre of our own hearts,
we cannot expect to meet him in the busyness of our daily lives.
This is where we meet God, this is where the risen Christ encounters us.
But he also sends us out, to be the church,
to live out his love and to speak of the unknown God
so that he will be known.

So my friends, this week, God invites us to practice what we confess,
to engage with the world in which we live,
in the marketplaces, in our workplaces, in our school classrooms, in our neighbourhoods, to love the people who we interact with daily,
to care for those who are hurting, confused, angry and lonely,
to serve those who have little or who need assistance,
to speak and share the good news of God’s love for the world in Jesus Christ.
Some will scoff, some will sneer,
but others will want to hear more
and still others will follow and believe.

Thanks be to God, and to God be the glory, now and forevermore, Amen.