Sermon - 6th Sunday of Easter (5/17/2020)

Acts 17:22-31; Psalm 66:8-20; 1 Peter 3:13-22; John 14:15-21

The gospel reading today is a continuation of the discourse of Jesus at the Last Supper that we read last Sunday.  Jesus washes the disciples’ feet and gives them the new commandment: Love one another as I have loved you.  Jesus tells his disciples that if they have seen him, they have seen the Father – the God whom no one has seen and whom no one knows is made known in Jesus. God is made visible in the love Jesus has in serving those who were about to betray and deny and abandon him.

And, Jesus goes on to say, I am going away, soon the world will not see me, but the Father will send you the Spirit, and in the Spirit, in faith you will see me, you will do the works that I do and even more.  The world cannot receive the Spirit, but in God’s grace you will receive the Spirit, you will know my presence, you will love one another and in your love the world will continue to see the love of God made flesh.  For God so loved the world that God sent not only the Son, but a whole people who know the Son risen from the dead, a whole people filled with the same Spirit of God, a whole people living God’s love in every time and place, so that all might see the face of God, so that all might be saved.

Like many of the speeches of Jesus in the gospel of John, this vision is beautiful and, at the same time, I must confess, a bit abstract.  Of course, the evangelist who wrote this gospel lived, presumably, in a very specific Christian community, and so when he wrote about how the grace of God’s Spirit is given to particular people so they can love in a way that makes God’s presence real and visible, I’m sure he was thinking of very specific people in his own community who at that very moment were making God’s love real and visible to him.

And that’s the point Jesus is making: it’s not the idea of Christianity that makes God real and visible, it’s not the abstract concept of love in general that leads people to faith. It’s real, live, flesh and blood people who know the risen Jesus and so have been able to show you grace when you needed it. Who have known forgiveness in their own lives and so who have forgiven you, even when you didn’t deserve it. Who have received the Spirit of God and so have shown you wisdom and compassion and peace. And having received love and Jesus and the Spirit ourselves as gifts, we get to share them with others as free gifts as well, and so we get to participate in God’s making all things new. Not just in the abstract but in the actual relationships that we have in our lives.  John had real people in his life in mind when he wrote these words, and we need to keep the real people who have shown God’s love and presence to us in mind when we read them.

But if this vision is still too abstract, our text today from Acts shows us a concrete picture of a Christian who knows the risen Jesus and who has received the Spirit of God, making God known and visible not just by words but by actions.  This is the apostle Paul, in the city of Athens.  Athens, the cradle of democracy, the birthplace of philosophy, the center of ancient civilization.  Acts tells us that when Paul came to Athens, he found it a deeply disturbing place.  Every Roman city had plenty of pagan temples, but in Athens the magnificence and scope and centrality of shrines to the gods created by human beings, gods who demanded sacrifice, gods who sustained a deeply unequal and unjust social order, all this Paul found repulsive and alarming.

In Athens, Paul went – as was his custom – first to the synagogue, where his message that the Messiah had come and his name is Jesus caused great controversy, as it usually did.  The uproar led Paul to be brought to the famous Areopagus. In Greek, “Areopagus” means “the hill of Mars,” the god of war, which overlooked the Parthenon and all the great temples of Athens, which people still visit to this day. It also referred to a council that met there, sort of a cross between a Senate and a Supreme Court. So it was a bit like when Jesus said, I am sending you like lambs in the midst of wolves. Remember it was a court in Athens that sentenced Socrates to death for – remember – misleading the youth and teaching about foreign divinities.

So this was probably not the most promising venue for a good Jew like Paul to complain about idolatry. Standing in the Areopagus, of all places, and saying that the true God “does not live in shrines made my human hands” is like going to Wall Street and proclaiming “Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven,” or standing in front of the Pentagon announcing that the lion will lie down with the lamb and that swords will be beaten into plowshares. Not the most promising venue for that message.

But, as distasteful as Paul found the idolatry of Athens, as profoundly as he disagreed with and found incomprehensible their whole social system centered on the worship of gods made in the likeness of human beings, it’s noteworthy that Paul does not simply tell the Athenians that they’re a bunch of idolaters and murderers and they’re all going to hell.  No, Paul reaches out to them, tries to show them that they already know something of the true God in spite of themselves.

And so Paul says, I see you even have a temple here to an Unknown God. So even here in Athens you already realize that there are things about divinity that you don’t know, that you haven’t figured out yet, that you still can learn about.  And even your poets here know that in God we live and move and have our being, that we are God’s offspring – and so they already see thatthe true God is not “formed by the art and imagination of mortals,” as Paul says, but rather we human beings are the art and imagination of God.

And, Paul says, in the past God has been tolerant of our ignorance and lack of understanding and knowledge, but now God has revealed God’s true nature in a human being through whom God will bring true justice and renewal of all things – and we know that in this God is trustworthy, for God has raised that man from the dead.

The mention of resurrection was a deal-breaker for many in the Areopagus that day.  The Anglican bishop and theologian N.T. Wright points out that one of the classic tragedies of ancient Greece, by a 5th century B.C. playwright, is set in a murder trial conducted in a court in Athens, where the Advocate for the defense is none other than Apollo, the son of Zeus. The son of God is the Advocate in a court in Athens, interesting. In the play, Apollo says: “Zeus could undo fetters, there is a remedy for that, and many means of release. But when the dust has drawn up the blood of a man, once he is dead, there is no return to life. For this, my father has made no magic spells, although he arranges all other things, turning them up and down; nor does his exercise of force cost him a breath.”  (https://www.theoi.com/Text/AeschylusEumenides.html) But resurrection was the one thing Zeus could not pull off.

And yet a few who heard Paul became believers – Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, a woman named Damaris, and some others. And I think Paul had even that degree of impact because what he offered to the Athenians was so similar to what he himself had experienced. Last Sunday we read that Paul was present at the stoning of Stephen, that Paul assisted and approved in the lynching of Stephen. That’s what Paul’s zeal for what he thought God wanted took him to.  And then Paul met the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, and everything changed.  Paul realized that God was bigger than he had imagined, that in raising Jesus from the dead God was giving everyone the opportunity to turn back to God and to allow God to remake all things, and bring all human beings to salvation and all creation to completion.

Paul was able to reach out to people very different from himself, people he probably didn’t like very much and certainly didn’t trust, people with whom he disagreed at the most fundamental level – because he saw that what God was calling them to was the same journey that he himself was taking, from ignorance to understanding, from vengeance to reconciliation, from trying to get right with God by fighting God’s enemies to accepting that we are already right with God because God loved us all when we were God’s enemies.  In the light of that experience Paul saw that he and the Athenians were in the same boat, and I think Paul’s ability to communicate with genuine sincerity that he could share the gospel freely as a gift because he had first received it as a gift, helped people to receive it – even when it seemed, from their perspective, to make a preposterous claim about resurrection.

Paul was able to do the work of Jesus – to announce the arrival of the kingdom of God and to make it present through his own life – and so brought the gospel to a time and a place that Jesus himself never reached. That is the adventure that, I believe, the gospel passage today invites us into. Where is God in the midst of the coronavirus? Where is God in the midst of a world filled with skepticism about established authority and organized religion? Where is God in the lives of those who have only heard of God as a source of shame and punishment, and never of abundant life? Where is God for those who are lonely, who are abused, who are disrespected and treated as being of no value? Where is God in a society and a world that is still filled with profound inequality and injustice, inequality that daily is becoming ever more stark in the current crisis?

The same place God has always been present – in the flesh and blood of the One sent by the Father, and those who know him and who have been sent by him and received his spirit. In the love that they show, the mercy they show, the grace they show, the service they offer.  It is an amazing thing that we have seen such love, such mercy, such grace in our lives.  It is an amazing thing that we get to share it with others, who in turn get to see God at work through us.  May God bring this work in us to completion, and the love of God make all things right in Christ.