Acts
17:22-31
John Wesley and Saul of
Tarsus – St. Paul, as he has come to be known – were both great preachers. We don’t know what Paul might have told his
associates about preaching, but we do have some advice from Wesley:
“Always suit your subject to the state of your
audience. Choose the plainest texts you can. Take care not to ramble, but keep
to your text, and make out what you take in hand. Be sparing in spiritualizing
or allegorizing. Let your whole deportment before the congregation be serious,
weighty, and solemn. Take care of anything awkward or affected; either in your
gesture, phrase, or pronunciation.”[1]
That part about paying attention to who is listening
was something that Paul knew, too, because there’s a section of the book of
Acts that shows him speaking to a tough crowd.
Mind
you, Paul had a way of stirring things up with his words that could make Donald
Trump’s midnight tweets sound diplomatic.
In the earlier part of the chapter that today’s reading comes from, he
preaches in a synagogue in Thessalonica and before the day is over there’s a
mob scene and he has to skip town, and the man who has been hosting him (in
fact, the whole hospitality committee) have to post bail for themselves.
[17:1-9] Something similar happened in
the next town and they sent him on as quickly as they could to Athens.
[17:10-15] That’s where we pick things
up.
In Athens, Paul finds
himself in a situation unlike any other that we see in Acts or in his
letters. Most places he went, he at
least began by preaching in one of the Jewish synagogues or talking to Gentile
converts to Judaism. Let me quote the
Bible’s description of what he did in Thessalonica that set the stage for the
riots.
“Paul
went in as was his custom, and on three Sabbath days argued with them from the
scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Messiah to
suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, ‘This is the Messiah, Jesus whom
I am proclaiming to you.’” [Acts 17:2-3]
In Athens he did a little of that [17:17] but mostly
he found himself in the public square, talking with people – some of them
professional philosophers – who had absolutely no knowledge of the Jewish
scriptures and no desire to know.
“Some
said, ‘What does this babbler want to say?’
Others said, ‘He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign divinities.’”
[Acts 17:18]
He found himself in a situation where he was going to
try to share Christ with people who were thoroughly educated in the Greek
classics but would not have had much connection to concepts like “sin”, “salvation”,
“atonement”, “grace”, or so forth. Some
of them even seem to have thought that when he spoke about “Jesus and the resurrection,” [17:18] he was talking about two
divine beings, one named Jesus and the other named Resurrection – in Greek that’s
“Anastasia”.
More
and more, that’s the situation that you and I find ourselves. Biblical literacy is pretty slim these days. Religious knowledge of any kind is weak. Stephen Prothero, who teaches at Boston University,
tested his students at the start of one semester to see what they did or didn’t
know. Here’s what he found:
“National surveys have shown that most Americans
cannot name five of the Ten Commandments; my students averaged four. They were equally unfamiliar with what may be
the most important piece of oratory in Western civilization; only one in six
knew that ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’ is a quote from the Sermon on the
Mount.
My class also fared poorly on the exercise that
required them to match Bible heroes with Bible stories. In their
creative retellings, the most basic elements of the most influential Bible
narratives were shuffled and reshuffled like so many cards at a poker
table. Noah led the Exodus of the
Israelites out of Babylon, Moses was the recipient of the dove’s olive branch,
Abraham was blinded on the road to Damascus, and Jesus was nearly as likely to
be born in Jerusalem or Nazareth as Bethlehem.”[2]
That was ten years ago. It has probably gotten worse. In case you’re feeling smug, I’ve copied his
test and the answer key and left copies in the narthex.
What
Paul did in that setting was look around to see what the Athenians did know and
care about, and to begin with that. In
his proclamation as recorded in Acts, he quotes Greek philosophers and
playwrights before he moves on to talk about Jesus (which is where he was
headed, of course). He even points to an
odd element of their own religion, this altar to an unknown god, set up (some
speculate), to hedge their bets and make sure that no god would be left out and
take offense at being snubbed.
In
some way, it’s very much like what God did when he came to us in Jesus – an idea
that the Greeks of Paul’s day would have found incomprehensible. To them, human flesh was something to be
transcended. There was the divine and
there was the physical and maybe a god would disguise himself to look human but
actually to become human would be an ungodlike step backward. Paul was talking about how God left heaven
behind to live among us. In the way he
spoke, he was taking the Word of God and clothing it in terms that matched the
hearers’ ability to understand.
“What
therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.”
[Acts 17:23]
In other words, don’t be afraid to be creative, as God
is creative. Use what is at hand to
express the good news of Jesus, and don’t be afraid of saying, “This example
only goes part way.”
Take
baseball, for instance. We know that God
loves the game because the Bible’s opening words are, “In the Big Inning.” And it’s okay to admit that you would not
want to draft Jesus for your lineup. On
the one hand, sharing God’s nature, he would always know what pitch was coming
next, but, having chosen to share our human nature, every at-bat would be a
sacrifice. Yes, those are theologically
suspect one-liners, but they do get you thinking, don’t they?
Remember
that it’s our place – and I mean all of us, not just the clergy – to toss out
those seeds on all kinds of soil and in all kinds of weather. It’s up to the Holy Spirit to make them
grow. Paul’s brief time in Athens is
sometimes seen as a failure. We have
letters of his to churches in Corinth and Thessalonica and Philippi and Ephesus
and Galatia, but not even a postcard back to Athens. The record tells us that most of the
philosophical crowd ended up being politely dismissive.
“When
they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, ‘We
will hear you again about this.’” [Acts 17:32]
That’s kind of like, “I’ll get back to you on that.”
“At
that point Paul left them. But some of
them joined him and became believers, including Dionysius the Areopagite, and a
woman named Damaris, and others with them.” [Acts 17:34]
That was more believers than were in Athens when he
arrived, more people who knew whom they were really worshiping when they spoke
of the One who
“is
not far from each one of us. For ‘in him
we live and move and have our being’”. [Acts 17:28]
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