Groping for God

Acts 17:22-31

22 Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way. 23 For as 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.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 24 The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, 25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. 26 From one ancestor he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, 27 so that they would search for God and perhaps grope about for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. 28 For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,

‘For we, too, are his offspring.’

29 “Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. 30 While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, 31 because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

Last Sunday we read the passage where Jesus declares that if you have seen him then you have seen the Father.  Of all the ways God has been and will be revealed to us, the ultimate revelation of God’s character - in this life - comes to us in Jesus.  When we imagine who God is, what God is like, we look to Jesus first.  

I don’t think Paul would disagree, but here in Acts he preaches a sermon which never explicitly mentions Jesus or his title, Christ.  The content of Paul’s preaching here is quite different from what we find elsewhere in Acts and in his letters, and this has everything to do with who his audience is.  He’s in Athens speaking - not to Jews who know the Scriptures - but to Greeks interested in cutting edge philosophy, and Paul adapted his message his message to fit the context.  

He begins by acknowledging that they are, “extremely religious”.  It’s unclear if Paul means this a flattery or as criticism - they are religious for idols - or maybe simultaneously both.  In any case, he takes as his launching off point an observation that me made while touring the city.  He starts not with an idea from outside, but one grounded in their own thinking: an inscription to “an unknown god”.  This inscription does not mean that they assume their is a singular God who must exist but whom they do not know - the vey sort of God Paul is about to proclaim.  Instead, they already worship many gods - think of the temples still standing on the Acropolis - and this gesture to the “unknown god” is kind of an insurance policy, a way of saying, “we worship many gods but there might be one don’t know about, so just in case we’ll make that god gets included too.”  

Paul uses this opening to proclaim, not just a god, but the God whom they do not know. We take for granted that “God”, if the title means anything, refers to the one who created the world and all that is, but the Athenians did not necessarily share that assumption.  To say that God created the world necessarily means that God exists apart from the world, out of time - that God is not an agent or an object to discover in creation, in much the same way (but not exactly the same way!) you wouldn’t expect to find my boys inside the Lego castle they’ve built.  

This fundamental category error has become increasingly common in recent decades with the rise of “scientism” - the belief that, not only does the scientific method isolate and disclose important truths, but that, in fact, there is no truth worthy of the name apart from what can be revealed by the scientific method.  Method becomes metaphysics.  Today just about everyone - including us, in many respects - takes an essentially materialistic view of the world. And the fact that God cannot be found empirically in the world is understood to disconfirm God’s existence.  But that’s simply to misunderstand what we mean when we say “God”.  

In a way the Athenians apparently operated with a similar misunderstanding.  They treated their gods as entities who lived in temples, who needed stuff, who - though maybe invisible or “spiritual” - were nevertheless part of creation itself.  But Paul corrects them, gives them a “new” picture of reality: God creates out of nothing, God gives life to all.  God is not contingent or dependent upon anything.   All peoples of every nation - rather than having their own local deities - derive from one ancestor created by the one true God.   

And then Paul gives a very brief explanation of why God created, of the point of our existence:  that would search for God, and perhaps find God.  This raises all sorts of big questions - if God wants to be found, why remain hidden?  Why does God want to be found?  What happens to those who don’t? - but we’re going to leave for another day.  

What’s interesting is that Paul cites their own philosophers and poets to make his point.  They’re part of a religious context in which, Paul says, they have been doing the very thing God created them to do: they have been searching for God, and - crucially - they have not entirely missed the mark.  They have been engaged in the very pursuit that humans cannot help but pursue, the search for meaning and truth.  Paul endorses the statements, “In him we live and move and have our being”, and “For we too are his offspring”.  His goal is not to discredit their religion so much as to say that they have not followed their insights and intuitions to their ultimate conclusion. 

I think Paul’s approach in Athens provides possibly the best model for us to think about those who disbelieve or deny God and how to engage them.  Often Paul’s preaching targets and audience very much unlike any that we can even imagine, much less encounter.  But these Athenians are perhaps not so unlike the people we know - not so unlike us.  

In recent years I’ve become convinced that all people - even the very worst, the apparently evil, people - pursue the good insofar as they understand it.  The big problem, of course, is that you can easily have a distorted, depraved conception of what the good is.   Nowadays we more or less agree that there is no universal good but rather each individual gets to decide her or his own good.  The ideal society is one where everyone is free to pursue their own desires uninhibited, and politics is largely about resolving the tension between desires in conflict.  There’s plenty criticize about this view of the world, but it’s definitely an improvement upon societies that actively impose false goods on people (this slave labor in service to some “higher” end).  

We’re free to do we want, for the most part, which is great if your life is oriented to what is truly good, but which leads to all kinds of problems for those whose lives are not.  And the real problem is that in our societies very few of us receive the kind of moral formation that makes it possible to identify and pursue the good.  

Nevertheless, to the extent that we are all pursuing the good as we understand it, however defective that understanding, we really truly are pursuing the good.  All of our desires are ultimately a desire for God, entirely irrespective of whether or not we think in those terms.  We are all groping for the truth, even if some of us are very much lost in the dark.  We all live and move and have our being in God; all creatures - all human beings - participate in God who is being as such, the source and goal of all that is.  We are all God’s offspring, made in God’s image with desires that can only be satisfied by the True and the Beautiful.

To be Christian, if it means anything, is to believe that Jesus reveals to us who God is and also what it means to be truly human, to have your desires rightly ordered.  It is to believe, as we heard last Sunday, that Jesus “is the way, the truth, and the life” - not just for the odd folks who happen to be into it, but for everyone.   

A lesson for us is that, while we should indeed believe that, we can simultaneously understand, even empathize with, those who believe those questions are answered elsewhere - not least because we too are people who often have less than holy desires, who pursue the wrong good.  This is not merely a moral failure, for those who reject God literally do not know what they’re doing.  (You cannot actually reject God, though you can certainly think you have).   Rather than simply declaring that others are pursuing the wrong good, it might at times be more productive - and closer to the truth - to demonstrate how what people are pursuing and the desire that informs it, are more fruitfully satisfied in Jesus.  

Paul concludes his sermon by creating a sense of urgency.  God has been patient with our ignorance, but now that Jesus has been revealed, those days are numbered.  Turns out that number is pretty large and still growing, but even so.  Now is the time to repent, he says, because judgment is coming - and the judge appointed by God is the very one is raised from the dead.  This is, obviously, a warning to get our act together before it’s too late, but even more it is a declaration that Jesus is the standard to which we are held and the standard to which we should hold ourselves - not just because we fear judgment, but because he truly is the good for us.