The Sixth Sunday of Easter

May 1, 2005

Peace Lutheran Church

Las Cruces, NM

Pastor Steve Loy

Text:  Acts 17:22-31

Athenians

As a student of religion and sociology Paul must have been fascinated by Athens.  Both Socrates and Plato were Athenians and their work formed the foundation for philosophy and rhetoric.  The Olympic games started in Greece and the marathon is traced back to the story of Pheidippides running from Marathon to Athens to announce the Greek victory over the Persians.  Greece led the world in its contributions to art, culture and democracy.  But what caught Paul’s attention was their devotion to religion.  With literally hundreds of Gods, the Greeks left no aspect of life untouched by the deities.  But the big twelve got the most attention.  Gods like Zeus, the lord of all the gods, the ruler of the sky, noted for the thunderbolt he hurled at those who displeased him.  Athena, Zeus’ favorite child, the embodiment of wisdom, reason and purity.  Hades, Zeus’ most unfortunate brother, the God of wealth.  After drawing the short straw Hades was made lord of the underworld where he ruled over the dead and his greatest concern was with increasing his subjects.

Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. …I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’

As people devoted to hearing new ideas, people tolerant of other gods, Paul would have been widely accepted by the Athenians as an interesting fellow, a good speaker.  Paul only became a problem when he insisted his was the only God and the others weren’t really gods at all.  That’s not how we do things in Athens.  We are broad thinkers, open to lots of ideas and lots of gods.

We are a lot like Paul’s Athenian audience.  We like to hear ideas and discuss interesting topics.  We are a university town.  We are accustomed to new things.  We each have our interests, our work, and our hobbies.  We are rarely at a loss for things to talk about.  Acts pokes fun at the Athenians saying they would “spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new” and it pokes fun at us too.  It pokes fun at our openness, our tolerance and our thoughtfulness.  It pokes fun at some of the things we hold sacred when we hold them sacred ahead of God. 

I am reading a book called The Golden Shadow an exploration of Carl Jung’s psychology of shadow.  Jung suggested that each of us have aspects of ourselves that are undeveloped or underdeveloped.  Here’s how one author explains shadow. 

It may be helpful to envision the process of our development as though we were shopkeepers assigned to selling ourselves to a highly selective and discriminating public:  In the process of growing up we continually place various aspects of our potential personality on the trading counter with the hope that the public will buy them.  When a certain trait or characteristic fits the expectations of the public it becomes a part of our developing personality because it is acceptable.

When a parent says, “That’s a good boy” an aspect of our personality gets reinforced.  When a teacher says, “Good girls don’t behave like that” an aspect gets squelched.  The process of development and repression is formed by the values and priorities of significant and influential people in our lives.  Some potential characteristics, attitudes and aptitudes are ignored entirely because we get no feedback at all and others are entirely repressed because of negative feedback.  Those unexplored, undeveloped dimensions of our personality Jung called our shadow.

What interests me this morning is not the shadow, but the personalities we have developed.  We assume that the things we do, our accomplishments, our abilities, our talents and our gifts are who we are.  Jung would say no, that’s only a part of who we are.  Much of who we are remains a mystery even to us. 

In a culture like ours that values perception over truth, appearance over reality, we realize that we know very little about each other and probably very little about ourselves.  In some ways our ideas about the world, our ideas about ourselves, the image we project to others all serve as idols.  We hang on to our ideas as if the world depended on it.  We cling to our perceptions of ourselves as if we can’t survive without them.  Our accomplishments, our paychecks, the cars we drive, the friends we have become extensions of ourselves – the part we show others.  Until pretty soon that’s all we know about ourselves.

The story of Paul in Athens begins earlier in the book of Acts.  The section begins “While Paul was in Athens, he was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols.”  If he was deeply distressed by Athens, can you imagine Paul’s reaction to our culture?  Is there any aspect of life that we have not idolized?  From the basics of life like food and shelter to transportation and work, we have given nearly every dimension of life a value beyond itself.  Status symbols include the clothes we wear and the brand of coffee we drink.

I heard a lecture this week in which the speaker said the primary challenge facing the church is that we have to decode our language.  Much of the culture has little or no religious education and doesn’t understand us.  I found that to be true when I was writing my dissertation.  One of the members of my doctoral committee after having read a portion of my paper said, “You are going to have to give me some handles on what you mean by grace.”  I knew that I was working in a secular institution, but I couldn’t imagine that a widely published author and a leading scholar in rhetoric and communication didn’t have a working definition of grace.  While I agree with the speaker that we may need to do some decoding, more importantly, we will also have to do some recoding. 

Our primary work will have to focus on giving value to the things that are important and dethroning the things that are not.  We are being told every day that accumulation is more important than building relationships, money is more important than integrity, frenzy is more important than contemplation, entertainment is more important than thoughtfulness, aggression is more important than compassion and anything is more important than God.  

More important than decoding we will have to recode our language, reprioritize our lives, reimagine a world with the God of grace at the center.  Like the Athenians, our lives are filled with idols, ideologies, and ideas that we put ahead of God, ahead of grace, ahead of forgiveness, and ahead of love.  Paul says, God is not in our things or our thoughts.  We don’t find God by our groping or grasping.  We are held by God.  Indeed God is not far from us.  For in God we live and move and have our being, an understanding of the world we all desperately need.