August 15, 2021 Sermon

 

August 15, 2021            Acts 17: 22-32      Sermon Rev. Peter Hofstra

          So I was driving home along Amboy Avenue in Edison, and I drove past the Provident Bank.  There is a religious word built into that financial institution.  There is also a city in Rhode Island named Providence.  It was named by the preacher Roger Williams in 1636, according to their tourism site, because when he purchased the land, it was God’s protection when he was tossed out of Massachusetts.

          I suppose that is why the bank picked up the name.  Financial protection.  Does not hurt to tap into a divine connection when considering protection.

          Last Sunday, we considered the first line of the Apostle’s Creed, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth.”  Yes, we declare what we believe in the Creed, but why do we make that declaration?  Another way to ask that question is “What’s in it for us?”  Yes, I understand the full majesty and wonder of salvation, but that presumes a certain fundamental knowledge of the theology of Christianity.  What’s the appeal of believing in God if we do not have that information already convicted in our hearts?

          That’s where our passage comes into the picture this morning.  This passage in Acts has the Apostle Paul in Athens.  Now, Athens had been the center of Hellenic learning and philosophy for centuries.  Names like Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, they are tied to Athens as the center of the culture that allowed for the expression of such Classical learning. 

          That was then.  At this point in its history, having been conquered by the Romans, classical Greek learning, art, and culture had been absorbed into and taken up as a veneer by the Roman elite.  The Romans were the military power of the time, and they sought to tie themselves to this high point of cultural development.  For example, the founding of Rome has a mythology where it arose from the survivors of Troy after the Trojan War.  And the triumphal conquest of the known world by Alexander the Great, that was the measure by which the Romans wanted to make their mark in the world.

          So the idea of Athens was a powerful one, but the reality of Athens was something different.  Yes, there was still the Aereopagus, yes, there were still philosophical debates that went on there, but the city was past its prime.  Instead of being the beacon for classical Greek learning, pushing forth the wonders of Greek religion and culture, the pantheon of gods acknowledged in the city appears to have stretched out to include every possible deity in the empire.  It seems like a matter of ‘just in case’ there is a god out there who has power that we, the Greek learned, have not accounted for, lets cover our bases.

          And Paul, taking the religious tour of the City, comes upon an obscure altar “to an unknown god”.  That is the ultimate in covering their bases.  If there is a deity out there we have not covered, Athens has not left them out in the cold.

          It is from this altar to the unknown God that Paul makes his pitch.  And this is important to understand ²⁴The 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, ²⁵nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. ²⁶From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, ²⁷so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. ²⁸For ‘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.’ ²⁹Since 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. ³⁰While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, ³¹because 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.”

          Paul speaks of the God who made the world, the one who gives life to mortals, who began with one ancestor, I pray we know the story of God, the maker of the heavens and the earth.  Paul ties this into the knowledge and wisdom of the Greeks themselves, quoting, according to the online encyclopedia Britannica, the Poet Aratus who was claiming humanity as the offspring of the divine.

          And it seems that thus far, the Greek philosophers and wise men gathered there can follow Paul’s argument.  But then he goes from the common to the specific.  He gets at Jesus.  It is time to repent.  Judgement is coming.  But this judgement comes through the one who gives assurance to all because this one (Jesus) was raised from the dead by God the Father, Maker of heaven and earth.

          It was the resurrection of the dead that became the stumping point for the gathered intelligencia of the Greeks.  That was not a part of their cultural system.  See how they reacted, some scoffed, some wanted to hear more.  But what is important for us to consider is what Paul was doing in his exposition of Christianity before the Athenians.  He was not just laying out belief in God, that was something they understood, but he was laying out WHY they should believe.

          And if we separate out the theological plan of God for the salvation of the world through our Lord Jesus Christ to a question of God’s motivation.  If we take all the language of the Creed and put that very same question to it, ‘why does God do this?’, we come back around to the question of providence, to the reality that God does all of this to protect us as God’s creation.

          We live in the day and age of the disposable culture.  Something as fundamental as a toaster oven.  We had one in our marriage from before Lynn and I met (she had it from her days on her own).  You couldn’t kill that thing.  It finally stopped working and the tech was too old to pricefully be able to repair in comparison to the price of a new toaster oven.  The new one works great, but unlike the old one, which was not cost effective to repair, this one cannot be repaired.  When it dies, best we can hope is that the culture of recycling will have caught up with things.

          If God’s creation was a disposable creation, how much more convenient to dispose of us broken and sinful human beings and start again?  But we are not toaster ovens, we are the children of our creator.  We are made in the power of love and not simply convenience or some kind of divine fit of pride.  But the divine instinct, if we can describe it in human terms, is that God protects God’s own.

          I think that knowledge of God’s protection is built into our genetic makeup somewhere.  I think that is why we cry out to God when we do not think there is any other possibility.  We have a sense, at some level, that when there is nothing else, there is God.  Thus the cliches about a lack of atheists under extreme combat conditions or in the face of great illness or disaster.  It is my emergency prayer.  Dear Lord, I can’t, you gotta.  That may come across as rather flippant, but in a pinch, it may be all I can manage.  And although we are not at the Holy Spirit yet in our consideration of God’s revelation to us, there is a promise of protection there too.  When we are too weak to pray, the Spirit is promised to pray on our behalf.

          Why do we believe in God, ultimately?  What is the short answer?  What, in our heart and in our gut, do we trust God to do?  We trust God to protect us.  Even in the face of disaster, even when bad things happen, we trust God to be there to pick up the pieces, even if that means to carry us home.  Such is the providence of God.  And that leads to one more question.  If providence is why we believe in God, why is God provident?  Why does God protect us broken, sinful beings?  Because God loves us.

 

          This is what Paul is laying out for the Athenians.  Paul does not come out and say to the Athenians that God loves them, but what he does say is that  ‘In him we live and move and have our being’.  And the way God gives us our being in the light of the sin that has separated us from our God is laid out in the most well known verse of the New Testament, “For God do loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever should believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

          God protects us through the work of our Lord Jesus Christ.  The world may be able to break the body, but it cannot break the spirit, because that is in the care and protection of the God who makes the heavens and the earth.  So even if we humans don’t know all the details of the mechanism by which God protects us, we know, on some level, that he does.  Consider what that means for us who know God’s protection in Jesus.

          The Great Commission is go out and make disciples of all the world.  We get that idea, sharing our faith, as uncomfortable as that may be for us given how some portions of Christianity seem to be so in your face about it.  But in the light of God’s providence, of God’s protection, it adds a dimension to things.  Why do we feed the poor?  Is it simply because that is the right thing to do?  I mean, it is the right thing to do, but there is more to it than that.  When we do, we protect them from hunger.  Such is the wonder of the gifts that God gives to us, protecting us from hunger. 

          There are times when it might feel like the church has become more of a social service agency than a worshipping community.  Issues of justice and peacemaking, news releases from Washington DC and the United Nations, those come to us as Presbyterians and we might wonder why the hand of a church is involved there.  It is the proper place for a concerned citizen, but how is that Christian ministry?  It is ministry when we consider the providence of God, when we consider it in the light of the protection of God, when we realize that it is through us, God’s believers, that the work of God’s protection of the creation is made manifest. 

          “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth”, that is belief in God who is the protector of that heaven, the protector of that earth.  The ultimate protection from the wages of sin and death comes in our Lord Jesus Christ.  But the daily protection from the wages of sin, want and greed and suffering and exploitation, that comes from the outworking of God’s people, living into the providence of God for the whole world as we confess our God as Father and Almighty.  Amen.