Sixth Sunday of Easter

April 27,   2008

Acts 17:22-31

I Peter 3:13-22

John 14:15-21

 

Before moving to New York City to become the rector of Saint Esprit, I worked for three years in London as the Bishop’s advisor on Inter-faith dialogue, and curate of a parish in North London.   I spent much of that time with Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Sikhs, but on several occasions I had an opportunity to visit the centers of what people were then calling “New Age Religions”.   Their bookshops and their meeting places were mostly centered on Bloomsbury; the area of London where you can find the British Museum and Tottenham Court Road.  In my discussions with “New Pagans” and the advocates of “New Thought”, I often reflected on Paul’s address to the pagan Greeks when he visited Athens.  The Bible doesn’t give us many examples of debating with monotheistic faiths who think that theirs is the only true religion – with the special exemption of Judaism.  The early Christian’s relationship with the Jews was a very complicated one, and Islam would not be founded for another five hundred years or more.  But when it comes to relating the Gospel to Pagans, the New Testament gives us lots of good examples of how we might go about it.

 

The best example of the attempt of the New Testament writers to engage with paganism can be found in Acts 17.  Just three chapters earlier, Paul had been speaking to the Jews in Antioch of Pisidia (Acts 13:26-41). He put Jesus in a context familiar to his Jewish listeners; that of the Old Testament.  He spoke of the Exodus from Egypt, of the prophets of the Old Testament, and of Jesus as the fulfillment of the promises that God made to his Chosen People.  Paul proclaims the Gospel to the pagan Athenians in a completely different way.  He is speaking to a group of sophisticated and highly educated Athenians.  He begins by remarking on the number of altars to different gods that could be found in their city.  The Greeks believed in a host of different gods.  Those gods meddled in human affairs, sometimes they helped, and sometimes they were very unhelpful.  Their actions were often amoral, frequently arbitrary and very often petty. The best thing a worshipper could do was to appease those gods, and hope that the gods would treat their worshipers well.  By the time of the New Testament, the influence of the pagan gods was on the wane.  The Greeks regarded them as being more mythological than real in any religious sense.  The Athenians in particular were known for their skepticism and their high degree of sophistication. 

This is what makes Paul’s sermon particularly interesting.  He could very easily have condemned their polytheism outright.  Their gods were at best amoral, their mythology was too complicated and self-contradictory for a people who now prided themselves on their sophisticated logical arguments.  What did Paul have to lose?  But instead of criticizing the Greeks for their native religions, he seems quite sympathetic to their broad outlook.  He does not refer to the story of the Chosen People in the Old Testament, as he did with a Jewish audience.  Instead, he compliments the Athenians on their city and on their religiosity.  He quotes from their poets; he takes as his starting point the philosophical discussions about the origins of the world that the Greeks loved so much.  His chief visual aid is a pagan altar:  “To the Unknown God”.  It looks as if Paul wants to put the Gospel in a context that is completely familiar to the Greeks; a context that will inculturate the story of Jesus in a Greek milieu. 

 

But if we look a little closer at what Paul says, we see that there is one thing on which he cannot compromise.  These sophisticated Greeks – if they believed in a Supreme Being at all – thought that such a being was so distant, so unlike human beings, that we can have nothing in common with him.  Their altar to “An unknown God” was not erected in honor of that Supreme Being at all.  It was erected out of fear that the Greeks may have overlooked a god who might do them some harm if he was neglected.  The God that Paul preaches is not an abstract philosophical Supreme Being.  Neither is he someone of whom we need to be afraid.  Paul’s God has made himself known in Christ.  He is a personal God – a God who has lived and died as one of us, and continues to intervene personally in human affairs.  That is why the Greeks end up laughing at Paul.  For the sophisticated Greeks, such a God is unthinkable.  

 

The question of how we make the Gospel relevant to the different cultures of the world is one that is posed in a new way in every generation.  Paul wrestled with the implications of a Jewish Gospel spreading in the countries of the Roman Empire and with its Greek philosophers and its pagan religions.  The missionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries struggled with making the New Testament intelligible to peoples who knew neither the ancient Near East nor the Christian culture of Europe.  How do we make the story of Jesus relevant in our own day?  What sort of God do we believe in, and how does Jesus incarnate this God for us?  However we answer this question, we must make sure – just like Paul did – that we do not lose sight of a God who loves us so much that he sent his only Son to live and to die as one of us.            

                                             The Revd. Nigel Massey