There’s perhaps no more complicated character in the New Testament than the Apostle Paul. He is the supposed author of nearly half of the New Testament books, spread the gospel near and far, and shaped what it means to be a Christian more than anyone besides Jesus himself. He led a fascinating life, punctuated by a dramatic conversion. He had many friends and even more enemies. He was a Jew and a Christian, a citizen of Rome, a missionary, a tent-maker, an agitator, an enemy of the state, a theologian, an apostle, and eventually a martyr. But before all of those things, when it comes to what we have in his letters and the stories told of him like this one in the Book of Acts, we need to remember that Paul was, first of all, and for better or worse, a “preacher.”
It is a humble profession. It can be awkward socially, like when people apologize for using profanity around you. Paul was a pretty good one, but he was still smart enough to have something to fall back on, making tents. My stand-up comedy hasn’t really taken off, as you can tell. But all of this is to say is that Paul was a communicator, and so he paid attention to his audience. He took care to use language familiar to them that would invite them in. Which is why his letters are filled with a rich tapestry of images describing the life of faith and the mystery of the church. It’s like putting on new clothes, he says in one place. Heck, it’s like you’re a new creation, he says in another. Don’t you know that you’re a temple of the Holy Spirit? You’re the body of Christ on this earth. You’re like strangers in a foreign land who have been welcomed in and found a new home. Children who’ve been adopted by loving parents who’ve given you their name.
Jesus, too, was a preacher and took the same concern for his audience. How do you describe the Kingdom of God to a bunch of farmers and country folk? You say it’s as free as the lilies of the field and the birds in the air. You say it grows like grapes on a vine. What do you say to persuade a group of folks who’ve been told in so many ways that they’re small and insignificant to the world that they are beloved children of the God of creation? You tell them what God is doing in them and around them is like a tiny mustard seed that grows and grows; it’s like yeast working below the surface in the loaf of bread on your counter each day. You say blessed are the poor. You say blessed are the grieving. Blessed are you. You speak to their heart’s deep need: Know that God is with you. God is present to you. Know that you matter.
I.
And so, Paul, the preacher, standing there at the foot of the Areopagus, this ancient memorial to Athenian government and philosophy and wisdom, speaking to a crowd of “cultured-despisers” who we’re told just a few verses before have written him off as a backwoods “babbler” and “proclaimer of foreign divinities”—read, “religious fanatic”—Paul is standing there before these cosmopolitan skeptics and after stroking their ego a bit—another preacher’s trick—appealing to their gods and altars and philosophies, and speaking in phrases grand enough to make Plato blush, he then makes a turn and speaks to their heart and its need, and it turns out it’s not so different from those bumpkins out in the Galilee: Know that this God of all creation is with you. God is present to you—“indeed God is not far from each one of us.” Know that you matter.
This sermon of Paul is sometimes lifted up as a model for how Christians can engage “secular,” modern culture and its skepticism. He refrains from quoting scripture at the Athenians—and this is often how scripture is quoted when encountering difference, not “to” someone but “at” them—and instead he turns to their own philosophers and to observations of the natural world, speaking to them in their own language.
But what strikes me is not so much that Paul made an effort to speak the language of these pagan Gentiles or city-dwelling intellectuals, but that in the end what spoke to them was the same thing that speaks to any of us: that nagging suspicion that there is more to this world than what we see on the surface of things. That awareness of the mystery of things that is activated within us from time to time. That part of us that searches for meaning, or for answers, or maybe even for better questions. The part that feels, intuitively, that there is something more, something greater, and that we are all a part of. I think that’s a pretty powerful place to begin any conversation about God, be it with our closest friends or with those whom we might assume to have nothing in common.
This is the real genius in Paul’s encounter with the Athenians, these Gentiles who were far outside the Jewish mainstream that defined those earliest believers. It wasn’t so much that he spoke to them in their own language; it’s that he realized that when it comes to matters of the heart, we all speak the same language.
II.
Some 20 or so years ago, Jane Fonda, whom I thought about this week in the death of Ted Turner, was interviewed by Rolling Stone Magazine and asked about what they called her “most recent and perhaps most dramatic transformation”: becoming a Christian after living most of her life as an atheist. Even with your flair for controversy, that’s pretty explosive? they said. She responded by talking about how she was drawn to faith because “I could feel reverence humming in me.”1
The hum of reverence—isn’t that it? Isn’t that what we’ve felt and long to feel again? Generations earlier, St. Augustine spoke of this nagging “hum” in his Confessions, this profoundly stirring and, well, confessional account of his spiritual journey—the years of running away, and the slow, at times painful process of being pulled back in by forces he could only call the grace of God. He writes, You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.2
John Calvin had another word for it. He called it the sensus divinitatis, the “sense” or “awareness” of the divine. He said that God “implants” in every human being a “certain understanding of divine majesty…a seed of religion…this part of us that’s drawn to the transcendent, that feels in some indescribable way there is something more.” For Calvin, this was wrapped up in the mystery and beauty of creation and the marvel of human beings. Each person, he wrote, is a “rare example of God’s power, goodness, and wisdom, and contains within [themselves] enough miracles to occupy our minds, if only we are not irked at paying attention to them.”
Do you hear that? Each of us contains miracles, if we would pay attention—if we could get past all the other stuff, all the stuff that can annoy or frustrate at times, in ourselves and others, we would see them and ourselves for what we are: miracles.
Even “infants,” he said, “while they nurse at their mother’s breasts, have tongues so eloquent to preach [God’s] glory that there is no need at all of other orators.”3 We can remember on this Mother’s Day that a baby is a marvelous preacher.
III.
But we have to be careful here, because these images can slip into the arena of Hallmark melodrama—over-sentimentality can make faith a little too saccharine sweet. As I’ve heard it put, some things that are true in a whisper, when shouted, begin to fall apart.4 And yet to write off this impulse toward the divine, to tune out this hum, is to choke faith before it has a chance to breathe. We must take these moments of awareness to the divine, to the more-ness of it all, seriously; perhaps more seriously than we’re used to taking them. And more than this, we must share them with each other, more than we’re used to sharing them.
Tom Long tells a story about an older gentleman who came up to his pastor one Sunday and said, Pastor, I need you to correct my theology. Last Sunday, when we came up to receive communion, I felt, in the strangest way, my late wife kneeling on one side of me. And on the other side, I felt our daughter who passed away many years ago. And I know that just can’t be, so I need you to correct my theology.
The pastor said to him, No, I think you had it right.5
The sanctuary of the church Audrey and I grew up is in the round with a balcony, and I remember, as a child, when the congregation would sing a hymn, how it felt as if you were surrounded by singing. And I remember how, when we all bowed our heads in prayer, it felt as if we were surrounded by prayer. And I would imagine that if we all concentrated really hard that we would, somehow, be lifted into heaven. Now looking back, I wonder if I didn’t get that quite right, and if instead of being lifted up to heaven, when we all prayed together, heaven didn’t come down to us.
Small things. A hunch. The sensing, the awareness, of something bigger than us that we can’t explain— moments when we’re overcome by joy or relief or gratitude or simply possibility. The poet Christian Wiman says, Religion is not made up of these moments; religion is the means of making these moments part of your life…Religion is what you do with these moments. It’s a means of preserving and honoring [them].6 Our own personal experiences of the divine or even the unexplainable are so critical to our faith, and yet they alone can take us only so far. This is where tradition and scripture step in and provide us a framework to incorporate these moments of joy or pain or gratitude or calm or relief of peace into our lives and understanding of the world, instead of dismissing them as some superstition, and thus making our world as small as our own limited perception of it.
The word religion is derived from the Latin word for “ligament,” the tough, fibrous tissue that connects bones and holds the body in place. Religion is meant to be the thing that holds us together, the connective tissue that allows us to move in the world with strength but also flexibility. That keeps us steady and secure when things fall apart, but also what allows us to hold together all that we know with all that we do not know, and even all that we cannot know.
Paul senses the Athenians’ sensing of God. Their awareness of something more, their restlessness. And he says, I’ve sensed it, too. I, too, have looked at the world and wondered about its author. I, too, have searched and fumbled around for this God who is “indeed not far from each one of us,” this God who is as close to us as our own breath, this God “in whom we live and move and have our being.”
“The God in whom we live and move and have our being.” Paul isn’t quoting from scripture here, but from Greek philosophy and poetry. And yet in his quoting it and our reading it, it has become scripture. As Augustine put it, “All truth is God’s truth.” Wherever it comes from, if it is true, it is of God. And this line has become high scripture for me. It described the God I know, the God I sense, the God I do not understand, but the God I’m drawn to. The God that’s so big as to create the universe with all its mind-blowing expanse, yet who is as close as a newborn’s breath, rich with his mother’s milk; as the beating of our own needy heart when it rushes through our chest.
“The God in whom we live and move and have our being,” meaning if our being is in God—us and all people—then we’re never truly separated from the people we love whom we see no longer.
IV.
Paul tells them the good news is that this God whom we’ve sensed in the miracle of creation and in the mysteries of life and experience, the God who is as close to us as our own breath—the good news, he says, is that this God came and breathed with us. That as much as we search for and seek to know this God, this God is searching and seeking to know us. And so this God came and lived with us. This God was put to death and was raised—in ways we can’t fully understand but nonetheless proclaim. This is the good news he tells them: that this is the God your lives are searching for, and that in this God, death is not the end.
And for many of them, this was too much. It says in the verse to follow that “some scoffed.”
But others said, “We’ll hear you again about these things.”
And that’s enough for any preacher.
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1 As told by Rob Bell in his book, What We Talk About When We Talk About God, p.10
2 Confessions, Lib 1,1-2,2.5,5: CSEL 33, 1-5
3 As found in Matthew Myer Boulton’s Life in God, 87
4 Fred Craddock says something like this in a meditation entitled “The Protest March” from his A Southern Folk Passion album.
5 I heard Tom Long tell this story in a sermon given at the First Baptist Church in Chattanooga, TN, as part of the Mercer Preaching Consultation in October of 2015.
6 Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss, p.70