May 14, 2023 Sermon
Sermon title: "Paul Preaches to the Greeks"
Scripture: Acts 17:22-31
(Other lectionary suggestions include Psalm 66:8-20, I Peter 3:13-22, and John 14:15-21.)
Acts 17:22-31
22Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, "Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. 23For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.' What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 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."
The Greeks to whom Paul preached in Athens had to be among the toughest audiences the Apostle ever faced. The reason is that they liked to debate, and they liked to hear new ideas - but they never wanted to DECIDE on anything. An evangelist wants you to DECIDE something, to DO something. But the Athenians just wanted to talk about it! And think of this: there is no letter of Paul (or anyone else) to the Athenians. We have letters to the church in Corinth, the church in Thessaly, the church in Ephesus, the church in Rome - but nowhere do we have a letter to the church at Athens. Those people apparently had a tough time coming to a DECISION. It takes guts to decide something, and it's a lot easier to HEAR about stuff and to CONTEMPLATE stuff than to take a STAND and DECIDE something!
And they were very superstitious! Paul says he saw a statue "To an unknown god". What's that about? Six hundred years before Paul was in Athens, a deadly pestilence had fallen on the city. A poet from the island of Crete, a man by the name of Epimenides, came up with a plan. He suggested that a flock of sheep be let loose from the Areopagus, and wherever each sheep should lie down, it should be sacrificed to the nearest god. And if there was no idol nearby, then that sheep should be sacrificed to an "unknown god". I don't know if the pestilence went away, but that statue to an unknown god was still there when Paul arrived on the scene. Before I go on, let me just say how terrible it would be to live in fear that you had displeased some god you didn't even know about! And there are people on the earth today who fear that they must have upset that spirit over there that lives in that tree, or the god who lives in that scary forest down the road! Belief in the God of Israel and his son Jesus can really relieve a lot of that fear, and I think that's what the Apostle Paul was trying to do at Athens. Imagine! They had a statue to an unknown god because they were afraid that they might have left one out! Belief in the one true God solves all sorts of problems and can really bring about that peace that passes all understanding.
Something else that Paul's Athenian listeners had a tough time with was the idea that God would raise flesh from the dead, and that, of course, is what Paul and the early Christians believed. And it's what most of us believe, too. The Greeks had this idea that the flesh was somehow evil, but the spirit was good. That idea may have originated with Plato around 300 years before. By the way, that's one of the big differences between ancient Hebrew thinking and Greek thinking. If you remember Genesis, you remember God seeing all that he had created and it was GOOD. For the Greeks, no. Spirit may be good, but the flesh was evil. So, there's a big difference right there: God's PHYSICAL creation is GOOD, not evil. And look how importance BAPTISM is to Christians. Baptism puts the whole physical BODY in the water. If we didn't believe in the physical importance of that ritual, we'd just say a few spiritual prayers and call it a day!
The Apostle Paul also "knocks" the Greeks for worshipping something, those idols, that THEY MADE. The Old Testament prophets had already made fun of those who fall down and worship something that they made with their own hands! We might take note that it's possible to worship something of our OWN creation, such as wealth and status. Let us NOT be like some of the ancients who worshipped things that they themselves had created! Idol worship doesn't affect simply those who lived a long time ago! We have to be on guard, too!
Paul makes the point that all humankind has searched for God. And mankind could be forgiven if we groped in the darkness up until the time of Jesus. But now, Paul proclaims, God has appeared in Christ, and nobody has any excuse any more!
Says the Scottish scholar William Barclay, "The day of judgement is coming. Life is neither a progress to extinction, as it was to the Epicureans, nor a pathway to absorption to God, as it was to the Stoics; it is a journey to the judgement seat of God where Jesus Christ is Judge." For the Apostle Paul, the resurrection is the key. "It is no unknown God but a Risen Christ with whom we have to deal."
Barclay says that some of the Athenians "were amused by the passionate earnestness of this strange Jew." Apparently some believed what Paul had to say. There was a guy named Dionysius the Areopagite, who is mentioned in the next section. And a woman named Damaris is said to have become a believer. The fact that a woman is mentioned is an indication that the Gospel message made its mark on all kinds of people.
But not everybody believes, and preachers, including the Apostle Paul, need to remain humble. And speaking of humility, let me close with an amusing story. There was this preacher who thought he was pretty hot stuff, and one Sunday after delivering what he thought was a rip-snorter of a sermon, said to his wife on the way home, "How many really good preachers do you think there are in America?" She said to him, "One less than you think!" Amen.
Pastor Skip
