Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter

Preached at Canadochly Lutheran Church on May 25, 2014
Preaching text: Acts 17:22-31

On The Voice recently, they had a little montage of all the times when coach Adam Levine claimed that a song or musical artist was his “favorite ever.” In just this season alone, they came up with a good two dozen or so examples for their little joke, let alone all the other times in the past five or six seasons. As I was watching this little bit, I realized that you could probably do the same to me only with passages of Scripture. Even I’ve lost count of the number times I’ve claimed a given text is one of “my favorites.”

Well, I’m not going to break the trend today, because yet again, we have one of Pastor Allen’s favorite texts as our first lesson today: Paul’s visit to the Areopagus in Athens. I will however give you the benefit of telling you why I like this story so much.

To do that, I have to bring up that other thing that I never tire of mentioning to people: the fact that I am a nerd. Specifically, I was a nerd that grew up in the mountains of West Virginia. And while many of the stereotypes about Appalachian people are utterly false, there is one that’s true. Only a handful of people who grow up in those mountains ever leave them, even for brief trips. They hardly see any of the wider world, even if the wider world is Pittsburgh or Virginia Beach or York county, PA.

Many of them simply have no experience, no knowledge, of anything that goes on beyond those mountains. And what is unknown is feared. I grew up hearing about how every single hobby I was into, whether it be Japanese anime, D&D, rock-n-roll music, or science fiction, was going to send me on the path to devil worship. This is a place where even Christian rock concerts drew protests from people desperate to save our souls from damnation.

Of course, I’m obviously not a devil worshipper. None of the things that I was supposedly in danger of ever happened. Those largely well-meaning Christian people didn’t understand that my hobbies really were nothing more than harmless fun. Conversely, many of the gamers and nerds I associated with were threatened by the church and its people and not without reason.

But imagine put a typical nerd and a typical Appalachian Christian in the same room together and have them talk to one another. Even though both would be speaking English, I can guarantee neither would understand the other. There’s no obvious common ground. There’s a gap between them and someone somehow would have to bridge it.

Which is precisely what the story of the Areopagus is about. Paul is devout Jew-turned-Christian. He is steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures. He knows, by heart, the stories of Abraham, Moses, and King David. He knows the words of the prophets and the psalms. But now he finds himself in Athens. Athens, home of democracy, home of philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, home of the Parthenon, a temple dedicated to pagan gods like Zeus and Athena. There’s not a soul in this place who understands anything about the Patriarchs and the Torah. There’s a gap and Paul’s got to figure out how to bridge it.

He finds his answer in the Areopagus. Here, he finds shrines to all the deities of the polytheistic religion of the Greeks. Now the Greeks were exceedingly pragmatic in their religious thinking. They had traveled the world, conquered much of it under Alexander the Great, and in doing so had encountered other religions. Perhaps the Gods of Olympus weren’t the only ones out there. Perhaps it would be good to have shrines to Isis or Marduk, gods of other peoples. And on the off chance, we’ve still missed one, we’ll dedicate a shrine to the god or gods who are still unknown to us.

Paul sees his chance. “Hey, you say you don’t know this god. Let me tell you about him. His name is Jesus Christ.” Paul finds his bridge, he finds a way across from his experience, his knowledge, to reach those he might otherwise not be able to talk to. It takes cleverness, bravery, and effort for him to do that, but when you consider the salvation that he’s offering, the peace and hope that comes from faith in Jesus, it’s worth it.

Two thousand years ago, Paul figured this trick out, but in a lot of ways, it is today when we most need to hear what this text is saying to us. We have technological wonders in the realm of communication: the internet, cell phones, email, Facebook. And the world has shrunk as a result. I can go to my computer right now and strike up a conversation with my friend Rich in Thailand. But for all that wonder, we’ve also found new ways to isolate from one another.

For now, we need only consume that media which agrees with what we believe. All of us can cloister ourselves away and surround ourselves with only those things that tell us how right we are. We don’t need to talk to people who disagree with us on issues of politics or religion or pretty much anything. I can live in my little bubble and never be challenged, never be made uncomfortable, never have to rethink my views about anything. And a lot of people have done just that.

So the gaps between ourselves and others are wider than ever. That’s a problem, when our mission as a church is to go out there and make disciples of people who are different from us.

If they were the same as us, they’d already be here. We’re not called to evangelize the already-baptized, which is what the church seems to be doing right now. No, we are called to go out there to them and that means we have to find ways to bridge those gaps. Find ways to talk to one another even when it seems like we’re speaking different languages. Old to young. Young to old. Boomer to Millennial. Conservative to Liberal. Liberal to conservative. Christian to atheist. Christian to Muslim.  Bridge the gaps, so that God’s word can be spread.

We have to learn how to talk to one another again. We have to stop being afraid of being embarrassed. We have to stop being afraid of being challenged on positions long held that might be wrong (or might not be.) Someone has to take the first step to cross that gap and it ain’t gonna be them. It has to be us.

Because we’re the ones who have the gift to be shared. We’re the ones who have been brought to the font and the table. We’re the ones who have heard and read God’s holy word. We’re the ones that know what this unknown god is about. And unless we tell them about how this God came to earth and died for them, they will never know. Amen.