Pandemic: No Time for Idols
What I have just read is the most famous missionary sermon ever preached. A missionary sermon is by definition a sermon preached to outsiders, people who don’t know the truth and maybe never heard of it. In Acts 17 we are watching as a man, Paul of Tarsus, takes a historic first step out of his comfort zone. God is bringing the gospel from the mid-east and Asia Minor into Europe.
He is a man of the book, the Hebrew scripture, who knows from Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and the one God Yahweh. Now he is speaking to an audience of cultured despisers who know the pagan poets and philosophers, but not Paul’s scripture.
He’s a synagogue kind of guy. The synagogue is his home court. He is at home in the synagogue debating his fellow Jews about the messianic significance of Jesus. But now he finds himself standing in the open air with a stunning view of the Parthenon, on the Areopagus, the cultural and judicial center of Athens, in the cradle of western art, philosophy, and politics. The glory that was Greece has faded, but it’s still Athens, 400 years earlier, the home of the two most famous philosophers in history, Socrates and his pupil, Plato.
So, you have a right to ask: if this is a missionary sermon, why is it appointed to be read among insiders in an already-Christian church? We already understand about Jesus and the resurrection. We’ve read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. We are supposed to be the missionaries, not the audience. We are the arrows, not the target!
You suspect the answer.
What is Paul doing in Athens? Paul is killing time (and if you have time to kill, Athens is not a bad place to do it). He is waiting for Timothy and Silas to arrive. It’s his first visit, and like a tourist he takes a stroll around the city, down the famous agora, the marketplace. So here is the Jew, who grew up with the great Shema Israel, “Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is one God,” and he doesn’t like what he sees. Everywhere gods, a profusion of idols: a god for every occasion. If you don’t see it, ask for it: a god of war, a god of love, a god of wine, a god of beauty, a god of the hunt, the hearth, a god of agriculture, a god of the sea, a god of the sky. But just in case we missed one, we have a divine safety-net. He spies an altar inscribed “To the unknown God.” Theos Agnostos (from which comes our word, agnostic).
When his chance comes to preach, it will be unlike any sermon he has ever preached. Instead of quoting scripture, he will quote a poet named Epimenides. Instead of beginning with the God of Israel, he will allude to the universal awareness of the deity. He starts from where he stands and from what he sees around him. O, Athenians, Paul says, I see you are very religious, his voice no doubt dripping with sarcasm. This is where we insiders join the audience, we, with our highest church attendance among all western countries and our religious reputation. “O Americans,” we can hear him say.
We have our gods as well. We don’t call them gods; we don’t call them idols. We don’t have a name for them. What shall call them? Values? Commitments? Non-negotiables? Whatever they are—they are what we love and trust most, and what we most fear losing. And I want to say as clearly as I can, they are not bad. It is not wrong to love and trust someone or something, and it is not wrong to fear losing what we love and trust the most.
Can they become God-substitutes? We know they can. Just as God is expanding the scope and range of the gospel, so faith in Christ teaches us to look at our non-negotiables in new ways.
We love our country and take great pride when the flag goes up or the Blue Angels fly over. We love the taste of Americana in a high school marching band on Friday night. We are moved to say, “Is this a great country or what?” But God is always expanding our loves and our notions of greatness: what makes a nation great? The prophet Micah answers with a question: What does the Lord require of you but that you do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God?
We value (to say the least) financial stability. We are all financially nervous in these times. Who wouldn’t be? When Bill Clinton ran for the presidency, his personal motto was: “It’s the economy, stupid!” which is a way of saying, “Focus, focus, focus on what is most important to most of the people.” We speak of “the market” as though it were a person. What was the market doing today? Was it taking a nap or working out? Which of its two emotions is it expressing, Fear or Greed? Yet, even in these times, especially in these times, God is calling us to think of the financial needs of others, which will almost always be greater than ours. Everybody knows somebody who is really struggling. How can we use what is left to us to help others?
For others the concern is family: Ask anyone: What do you miss most these days. My guess is they will not say, “the mall,” or “my favorite restaurant.” “I miss my putting my arms around my grandchildren” (instead of reading to them on Zoom). I want to see my parents who are getting up there in years and need my support.”
Perhaps you know this strange story in Mark 3. Jesus is doing miracles and saying some radical things, so much so, that the authorities call his family to take him home. His mother and brothers arrive and bid him to come home. Pointing to his followers sitting in a circle around him, Jesus expands the meaning of family. “You are my family,” he says. “Whoever does the will of God is my mother and my brothers.” Even in these difficult times, especially in these times, we have been able to say of our church, this is my family. Once again, God is expanding our instinctive love of family and making it larger. We have marveled as health care workers going to extraordinary lengths to treat total strangers with a level of care and risk you I might extend to a member of our family. I heard a health care worker on TV encouraging those who have been infected and recovered to donate their blood in order to share their antibodies with others. He said, “After all, we are all of one blood.” I wondered if he knew he was quoting Paul in Acts 17. I bet he did.
Sixty years ago, there was another missionary preacher of sorts. His entire fourteen-year ministry was a sermon to insiders, to people who already knew the truth but were unwilling to act on it. He forcefully named yet another kind of god among us. You might call it the “god of skin,” white skin, that is. His name was Martin Luther King. In 1956 he began preaching a missionary sermon to America. He called it “Paul’s Letter to American Christians.” In it he pretends to be the Apostle Paul writing a letter to the America. Let me read just a couple of sentences: “I have heard of your great medical advances, which have resulted in the curing of many dread plagues and diseases, and thereby prolonged your lives and made for greater security . . . You can do so many things in your day that I could not do in the Greco-Roman world of my day. But America, as I look at you from afar, I wonder whether your moral and spiritual progress [is keeping pace] with your scientific progress.”
Later he wrote another letter, again in the guise of Paul, this time from a jail not in Asia Minor, but in Birmingham, Alabama. It too is a letter to American Christians. In it he tries to understand how some of the greatest supporters of segregation are Baptist and Methodist Christians in the south. He tells of driving by their high-steepled churches and beautifully manicured lawns, and asking himself a searching, Pauline question: “Who is their god?”
In this regard, I worry that, today, those who are campaigning for full, shoulder-to-shoulder churches at the risk of the health of the very people they have been appointed to shepherd are, in fact, making an idol of church.
We insiders could all use a missionary sermon these days. We are living in a period of time when in the space of three months the death toll from one disease has gone from 12 people to 80,000, and 36 million are unemployed. This is no time for idols. The old gods have put us on indefinite hold. They cannot protect us from fear, discouragement, or despair. They have no word about the future.
On the Areopagus Paul unveils the true God. As if pulling back a sheet: Presto, behold-- a crucified Jew. This is when the crowd of cultured despisers begins to thin out. But how important it is that we have a God who understands our suffering and anxiety and has come down to join us. In coming down, it’s as if God is reconceiving—expanding—what it is to be God. And he has not only come down to be with us, but he has given his life for us. And how important is it that our God is more than a downward spiral into death and nothingness. He is our triumphant God who leads his people forth in joy. He is the God of resurrection. He is the vanguard of God’s victory over all that seems to be defeating us. What the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers didn’t understand, we do: the conjunction of “Jesus and the resurrection.”
Even among us so-called insiders, there are those who, as Paul says in this remarkable sermon are “groping”or feeling their way toward God. Last week my wife was telling me about a story she had read in the Times about an Italian priest. He said that in his whole ministry whenever he entered a hospital room with two beds, and one was occupied by a parishioner and the other a self-identified unbeliever, after he prayed with his parishioner, there was never a time when the person in the other bed didn’t ask for prayer too. The world is full of people who are “groping,” feeling their way, toward a God they don’t quite know. In Christ, God says to them/us all: “Come.”
This is what the Italian priest would do: he said after praying he would lean over the other bed and whisper in the patient’s ear, “Peace, you too are headed toward the light.”
May it be so for us as well. For we are all of one blood; in him we live and move and have our being; and we are all leaning into the light of our Savior.
God grant you grace and the courage to face each new day. Amen.