St Luke’s, Havelock North – Easter 6 2008 – Sermon

Readings: Acts 17: 22-31, John 14: 15-21

At our vestry meeting last week I tried something a bit different. I took two of today’s readings – the first one from Acts and the Gospel from John, and I got the vestry members to discuss them and then I asked them where the connections were.

Here on the one hand we have this moving speech by Jesus saying, ‘if you love me you’ll do as I say’ while on the other we’ve got Paul, arguably the ultimate Jesus-lover of them all – doing what he does best, talking about the Gospel, so surely there should be some connections. But it was quite clear at our vestry meeting that if there are any connections between these two readings they’re perhaps not blindingly obvious.

I initiated that discussion at vestry because for some reason – and I’m really not sure what it is – I find myself drawn to both these readings there’s something about them that makes me want to look at them together, so that’s what I’m going to do. But first, let’s look at them apart for a moment.

“Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way.” The beginning of Paul’s famous speech to the Athenians in Acts 17, and let me be clear right away that this is Luke writing about Paul, not Paul writing about Paul, which could explain why I like it and let’s also be clear that this isn’t just another ‘Paul preaching the gospel’ story, this is something quite momentous. This is Paul preaching to the Athenians. That might not sound like a big deal. Yes, the Athenians are Gentiles, non-Jews, but then that’s who Paul specialized in isn’t it? Well, yes, but not so much just yet. Up until this point most of Paul’s preaching has focused on the Jewish community, remembering that this is before the year 70 when the Christians were expelled from the synagogues. Now though we begin to see Paul branching out, moving beyond his comfort zone – and indeed the comfort zone of the whole early Christian community – as he arrives in Athens.

That well known Shortland Street phrase comes to mind here; ‘you’re not in Guatemala now Dr Ropata!’ Athens is and was a very different place to anywhere else. Athens was the home of Plato and Aristotle and the origins of philosophical debate and rhetoric, it was the centre of the Greek world which has shaped so much of what we take for granted today, and it would become the birthplace of democracy, where for the first time people would have some degree of freedom to speak their mind, share their opinions and have a say in shaping the laws and politics that ruled their lives, and the centre of debate and policy-making in Athens was the Areopagus.

The Areopagus is both a place and a group. You can still find the place today if you’re visiting Athens, a small rocky hill near the acropolis named after the Greek God Ares, or the Roman God Mars, so speaking geographically the Areopagus is Mars Hill. But the Areopagus was also the name of the most influential and powerful council of elders in the history of Athens, so-named because it met on that site. Dating back 500 years before Christ the Areopagus were nine chief magistrates who were responsible for moving Athens away from rule by a king to rule by an oligarchy that laid the foundations for Greece's eventual democracy. By the time Paul arrived the Areopagus was the place where matters of law and politics and philosophy were debated and adjudicated.

So here Paul stands, in Athens at the Areopagus, and it must have felt very strange. Here was Paul, the former Pharisee, in a place that not only allowed by embraced religious pluralism in the extreme. Walking through Athens Paul sees statue after statue of god after god, and even one – an altar – dedicated to the unknown god, to cover any god they might have forgotten. For Paul the once strict Jew, this would have been as alien and unpalatable as a butchers shop to a vegetarian. Everything Athens represented, all that it stood for, was opposed to Paul’s morality and religion, so what does he do? Does he run away and avoid this awful world? Does he rage against it and condemn it? No. What Paul does, and he does it so well, is find a point of connection.

‘I noticed you have an altar dedicated to the unknown god,’ Paul says to the Athenians, ‘now let me make that God known for you.’ Standing there on the Areopagus, on Mars Hill, Paul engages with these people in a way that makes sense for them. ‘All these other gods,’ he says, ‘they’re all so far off. But this one God – the God of all gods – this God is close at hand.’ That’s what Paul does in Acts.

In our Gospel reading meanwhile, Jesus is just getting wound up in what will turn into several chapters worth of a kind of final goodbye. It’s called the Farewell Discourse and it’s Jesus’ words for his disciples immediately before the Garden of Gethsemane and his arrest and crucifixion. Jesus is speaking to his closest friends and followers, those who have given up everything to follow him, who have risked it all because they believe he has something incredible to offer, and who have slowly begun to realize that perhaps this son of a humble tradesman from Nazareth is actually the long awaited Messiah – and now he’s telling them it’s almost over.

‘I’m going,’ he’s told them, ‘but I’m not leaving you alone. Moreover I’m leaving you with work to do, and if you love me you’ll do it, and if you love me – which means if you do as I’ve told you – then I will be with you always.’

There are lots and lots of tricky bits in this farewell discourse in John. While it offers us some of the best known and most loved passages in the Bible – verses like “do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me” and “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit” and “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” – these same chapters contain some truly difficult passages that bring to a head a theme that bubbles all the way through John’s Gospel – to be on the inside – to be loved by Jesus – you have to do this and be like this, and if you don’t, you’re out.

Compare that idea then with what Paul says in Acts. ‘We are all God’s offspring’ he tells the Athenians, ‘God is close to us all.’ There are problems here too of course, and that’s why I need to struggle with these readings, because they represent these competing tensions that can so easily lead to extremes. On the one hand getting too carried away with the exclusive inside-outside approach of John can lead to what we so often find – Christians who have isolated and insulted themselves from the world around them. So-called Christians who want to condemn everyone else while they stay inward looking and self-absorbed, rather than engaging with people, connecting with the world, just as Paul does at Mars Hill.

On the other hand though in Acts we see the danger of becoming to inclusive, too all-embracing. In the past I have been involved at the extreme liberal end of the Church and I can tell you it’s become a very lonely place to be, because it’s not well populated. The problem with embracing diversity and welcoming difference and being willing to evolve and incorporate new ideas and new beliefs is that it’s extremely easy to end up with no beliefs. Pluralism can easily become relativism, where rather than saying there’s a bit of truth in everything, you end up with no truth in anything.

These are the extremes of the tensions I see in these two readings, these are the downsides. So where are the connections? Because I remain convinced that there are some, and I know you’ll be shocked when I say I want to talk about a couple of them.

For a start both of these readings represent a struggle. There’s that wonderful term Paul uses in the Acts reading about ‘groping for God’, well in a way both these readings are about groping for things as well. In Acts Paul has to grope for a way to engage with the Athenians he encounters. For me this reading represents the struggle we have to go through to find points of connection between our world as Christians and the rest of the world around us that more often than not follows and lives by a different set of values and ethics from ours. How do we engage with a world that says anything goes without letting everything we hold dear go? How do we talk about the first being last and the last being first in a world that puts so much emphasis on winning? How do we discuss what it means to turn the other cheek in the context of the so-called War on Terror? How do we explain Jesus’ teaching about money and possessions to those who have dedicated their lives to chasing them? That’s the struggle I see represented in this Acts reading – the struggle to find our own Mars Hills where we can discover points of connection with our wider world.

In our gospel reading on the other hand I also find a struggle, but this time it’s more internal. “If you love me you will keep my commandments.” There are few struggles more difficult for Anglicans today than the working out what it means to keep Jesus’ commandments. It’s a simple sentence I know, but knowing what it means is much, much harder. Every day I have to struggle to know what the Christian response is to this situation or that. The answers may be in the Bible, but this isn’t a Guidebook for Dummies like me. It’s not easy to work out the answers to these questions, but it’s something we have to do. That’s the struggle I see represented in this Gospel reading – the struggle to know what it means to follow Jesus’ commandments.

So these two readings are connected by their representation, to me at least, of struggle, but thank God that’s not the only connection, because for me both these readings also offer hope. Hope that the unknown God can indeed be known. Just imagine what those words must have sounded like to Athenians who were used to worshipping or not worshipping a plethora of far off deities who never offered any kind of intimate interaction. Into that scenario Paul drops a bombshell – this God is not far away, and indeed is right at hand.

In the gospel reading too hope is paramount. So much of Jesus’ farewell to his disciples is focused on offering them hope to cling to during the difficult days ahead. ‘I will not leave you orphaned, I am coming to you.’ Again, this is a hope that lies at the very heart of the gospel ‘You are not alone’ even in our darkest nights, God is there. For me this focus on hope in a God who is close by is another connecting point between these two readings.

Hope and struggle. I was asked during the week, ‘when is the big cross coming down’ and I said leave it up. Leave it up to remind us that Easter isn’t just a day or a weekend, but an entire season – a season that invites us to join in the struggle, and to ask with the disciples, ‘where should we go, what comes next?’ and to draw hope from the presence of the risen Christ, hope which in turn gives us strength to struggle some more.

In two weeks time we will arrive at Pentecost and then the big cross will be gone, but the struggles won’t be. We will always need to struggle to know what direction we’re being called to move in, we’ll always need to struggle to work out what the Christian response is to this situation or that, and we’ll always need to struggle to find our Mars Hills, our points of connection with the world beyond these walls. But while the struggles will go on, so, I pray, will the hope that the cross represents. May God make it truly so. Amen.