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Acts 17:22-31
We don’t know if this ever took place, Paul in the square, the Areopagus as it is called, speaking to this crowd in Athens, and confronting them about divinity, pitting the the resurrected Jesus against the ancient tradition of the gods. The Aeropagus was the place people went to debate, to articulate what was important in life. It was the place where assertions about what it all means were made. I’m not sure what the equivalent today is, I know it is NOT 24 hour news or the legislature. Maybe it’s here, in the church?
Luke must think Paul a pretty good debater for in his story he doesn’t send Peter or James, he places Paul center stage to claim Jesus, the crucified one, as a sign of the action of God, the only god, the one and true God, as the sign of what it all means. It is an assertion that Paul himself calls “foolish”, this idea that the Creator of the Universe is known through this peasant born in the backwoods of the empire, to questionable parentage and from a class of people that are on the bottom rungs of the imperial ladder. It’s laughable. And the movement called “the Way” starts like this, as a joke, as a quaint and backwards group of people saying socially ludicrous things about what really matters. They claim that slaves count as people, that “in Christ” there is no such thing as the standard social boundaries that help define the way that power works and who is really capable of running things. Such talk, the justice that they demand through the application of love starts out being silly, but soon becomes dangerous, as people take it seriously and begin to see the ways it really could transform the system, what in Greek is called the kosmos, which is typically translated as “the world.”
I will submit to you this morning that the message of Jesus, the “Way” of the Gospel, stands so far outside what I see as the status quo today that I can scarcely overemphasize it. We ignore the sick, burden the poor, forget the prisoner, seek retribution over reconciliation, profits over people, try to bomb our way to peace and disregard the clear cries from people about oppression and hatred pointed at them because of who they are…all, it seems, while claiming the title, “Christian”. Hate, racism and misogyny have been justified from the pages of our scripture and, in this country, the haunting legacies of Manifest Destiny and Jim Crow have both been completely built upon the misapplication of our faith.
Paul’s message to the Greeks is announcing a new order, a new way that God is acting in the world. It is simultaneously here and on the way. One of our slogans in the UCC is “God is still speaking”, which is meant to promote the idea that God is not limited to the Bible, or tradition up to now, or any of our wonderfully crafted theologies. God is always known and unknown, not far from each one of us, as Paul says, and maddeningly distant. The still speaking part helps us come to terms with a God who is still being revealed to us, here and yet still on the way. What Paul will go on to teach, both in the imagination of Luke and from Paul’s own words, is that we learn of God not from a ritual sacrifice, but but living sacrificially. We learn of God not by merely joining the club, but by practicing the things that Jesus taught – loving him by following his commands, as John’s gospel put it. Our effort to forgive, to justly and to seek justice, to listen deeply and express love as equally as we can to everyone. This is to follow Jesus, which we learn not in one fell swoop, but by taking the journey, finding God on the way, groping for light in the darkness. This is why we do even the most mundane things here in rotation on Sunday morning. I know that when we change up hymns, sing new songs, mess with the order or liturgy, that some like it and some don’t…but it is an attempt to open us up to a God who does not come to us in the same ways, with predictable form.
In order to be on that kind of “directionless” journey, we have to be oriented a certain way. You can’t go east if you are walking west. When Paul calls at the end of his speech for repentance, it isn’t a guilt trip. Paul is calling for the Athenians (and us for that matter) to “turn around”, which is what the word literally means. This is probably not how you have encountered repentance. It was most likely more of a “get it or you’ll get yours” kind of message – a threat rather than an invitation to witness, accept and live out an incomprehensible love. It was more about fear and avoiding hell than learning how to love and being transformed by that learning. This is unhelpful, for the call to repent and be a disciple of Jesus is a call to transformation, a demand that we change our own commitments and priorities so that life becomes oriented around God’s vision and values that we see most readily fleshed out in the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
Repentance has a tone of judgment. The “read between the lines” part of his speech is this – you don’t get a free pass. In a culture like theirs, people saw a lot of injustice and Paul reminds them of what Dr. King said this way – the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. Call it karma, call it fate, call it judgment day – a time come when what you have sown you shall reap. It may not be now, but it is on the way. Now maybe that seems harsh to you, a little too “Bible-thumpy” for us here in the so-called progressive church. But I’m here to tell you that this morning I feel some comfort from that sense of God’s judgment for we bear witness to a lot of injustice, whether from ignoring the fundamental and moral right all humans have to health care and education, or from drone strikes and “collateral damage”, from children who go hungry in the richest nation on earth or from another man dead in the streets with his hands up and no weapon anywhere.
Here’s the thing with judgment. It may feel comfortable when it is aimed at other people, but that’s not the way it works. There’s always some for you…for when you point that finger at someone else, three more are pointing back at you. If we learned nothing else from our work here during Lent, it is that white supremacy is a real issue and it works on us, especially those of us who identify or are seen as “white” in ways we cannot fully appreciate. I do not think that people are making the shooting of Terence Crutcher about race, I think that it is about race. It is about the pervasive and rooted ways in which race and racial identity play a part in our interactions with one another. Racism is the United State’s original sin, built into the very fabric of our society, written into our founding documents and upheld for centuries as normal, acceptable and morally justified. And those roots are deep – that sin lives within us to an extent that we cannot even fully understand. Until we name it, confess it, repent from it and seek a new direction, it will still control us.
I am happy to hear over the last few days some voices of recognition in the seats of power, voices that seem to understand what moral issues really face us as a society. I wonder, though, will those voices be willing…will I be willing… to make the sacrifices necessary to really change things? The thing that shifted “The Way of Jesus” from a quaint movement of people dedicated to a rather laughable assertion into a dangerous group of revolutionaries is this – bucking the economic system by sharing things and forgiving debts, breaking the social hierarchy by giving all people leadership roles, reversing the basic ideas of who is in and who is out by asking slaves to be freed and working across tribal lines. All of these things and the radical notion that Jesus was Lord, which meant that Caesar was not. These are the things that made them radical, the ways that they sacrificed the “way that it is”, the social norms, the unquestioned and unquestionable systems that kept the order and made peace on the backs of the very people the systems were supposed to be built for.
The kin-dom, Jesus taught us, is here and not here. It is present and it is on the way. And he taught us that because if we were just handed the kin-dom, we’d throw it away. We must build it, sometimes by adding and sometimes by taking away. I have often thought of the kin-dom like a house, where we laid the foundation and put up the walls with our work. But lately I have been thinking of it more like a sculpture…a hunk of rock set before us and our task as God’s artists is to remove all of the stuff that isn’t the kin-dom.
Paul’s claim, the one that ought to resonate to us even today, is not for another religious token, a thoughtful way to ponder the nature of divinity, but rather for the holy made flesh, God with us, the divine revealed in our humanity. This is not just a linguistic or cultural exercise. This is the Gospel. And the Good News is this – God is here and on the way, invested in our lives and the way that we interact and treat one another. It is no longer acceptable for us to ignore one another for God has made it abundantly clear – life matters. Matter matters. And the injustices that we keep visiting upon one another because we haven’t heard that message still are upended by this transformative, resurrective love that places God’s order for the world right in our face…it is here and it is on the way. For the Gospel places demands on us, my friends, not recommendations, not suggestions, but demands that we see the world, the system, differently than the system wants to be seen. And yet the Gospel continues to reveal itself to us, as if God is still speaking…reminding us of how God created the world to be, and how far we are from that. Make no mistake, the Gospel, the truth that will se us free, the judgment of a God who is constantly making all things new? They are all on the way.
The operative question really isn’t whether or not you believe in it, its how will you live because of it?