Paul
got thrown into jail a lot. He was always getting arrested on some
trumped up charge or another. There were
those two long-term prison stays of a couple of years or so apiece, one in Rome
around 60 CE and another in Caesarea, about the timeline of which we aren’t
certain. Paul himself mentioned them in
his Second Letter to the Corinthians, comparing himself to everything,
where he boasts just a wee bit: “Are
they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they descendants of
Abraham? So am I. Are they ministers of Christ? . . . I am a better one: with far
greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless floggings, and often
near death.”
And
to that I say . . . well. If trials and
tribulations are the measure of how great a minister you are, then I must not
be much of one . . . don’t say it . . . but I’m a pretty typical, well-fed,
well-looked-after American yuppie whose only trial is when they run out of
black ice tea at Starbucks. But for
Paul, floggings, shipwrecks and imprisonments were just the cost of doing
business, of proclaiming the gospel.
It’s been estimated that over and above the four years he spent in Roman
and Caesarean prisons, another two years might have been added on by all the
more minor, short-term jailings he endured.
Many of those episodes are
described in Acts, and today we have one of the most famous: his speech on Mars
Hill, in Athens. Athens! Cradle of Western Civilization! Home of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle! Home of Spiro’s Gyros, juiciest gyros this
side of Corinth! Or so I hear, anyway .
. . But even without such delicacies, Athens was quite the place, even some 400
years after its prime. It was still a
center of learning and the arts, and it lived on its past glories. Even Rome left it pretty much alone because
after all, it was the Cradle of Western Civilization . . . Every philosopher
worth his salt ended up there . . . they were as thick as thieves, they
literally wandered the streets . . . philosophizing. It was a heady atmosphere
. . . ideas perfumed the air like hyacinths, or like jasmine on a summer’s eve
. . . they flew back and forth across the market square like demented
shuttlecocks: an idea was thrown up by a Heraclitian, folded, spindled and mutilated
by an Aristotelian, and then lobbed back the other way. This was considered fun, but more important,
serious business.
And that's what got
Paul in trouble . . . philosophy, if you can believe it. He'd gone down to the Marketplace—the Agora, in Greek—to do what anybody with a
rhetorical bone to pick would: he set up on a corner and began to declaim. And to dispute. You know . . . standard philosopher stuff. And it's important to understand why he felt
compelled to do so: he was deeply
distressed, Luke tells us, at all the idol worship going on. The little critters were everywhere, almost as thick as the philosophers, and it hurt his heart to see folks venerating those
cold, dead things.
So he heads for the
Agora, and begins to speechify, and there were some Epicureans and Stoics listening
in—Epicurean and Stoic philosophers,
that is, not food-lovers and guys not in touch with their emotions. And they took especial umbrage at what Paul
was saying. They were materialists, they
thought everything was made of matter,
even the Gods . . . Just really,
really good matter. Epicureans believed that the highest good was
pleasure, and the highest pleasure was that of the mind . . . their gods were
so interested in their own pleasure that they ignored people. For the
Stoics there was a divine, rational principle in everything, and their
goal was to live in harmony with it, which amounted to living in tune with
nature. Both Epicureans and Stoics were rationalists, who thought the mind was
superior to the emotions. In this, of course, they would have made good
Presbyterians.
Anyway, these were the
folks that Paul irritated, enough so that they hauled him before the
council—the Areopagus—on Mars Hill. And though Luke doesn't tell us what he had
said in the marketplace, he does give
us his speech before the council. He
opens with a complement: “I see how religious, how pious y’all are, you even have an, ah, object of worship” (he meant idols,
which were getting on his last nerve) “you have an object of worship dedicated
to an unknown God.” And I can just see the look of piety on Paul’s
face—he’s only there to serve, you understand—“I can help you out there, I can tell you who that unknown God is, it's
the one who made everything, the
whole shootin’ match, who's Lord of heaven and earth, and who doesn't live in
any old shrine, let me tell you.”
And now we can begin to
see why he made the Stoics and Epicureans so nervous: they were materialists,
they didn't believe in spirit, and
they began to work it out in their heads . . . If this god doesn't live in shrines made by human hands, if it
didn't need any food like other gods
did, just where did this so-called Lord
of heaven and earth live? And more
important, perhaps, what was it made of?
Well, as to the first question, Paul makes a remarkable statement:
quoting their own poets he tells them
that this deity is not far from each and every one of us, and further, that in that unknown god “we live and move
and have our being,” and this is a extraordinary claim on multiple levels, not
least if all its stunning universalism.
God's not far from any of us and in that god we—each one of us—love and
move and have our being.
This was a far cry from
the dominant view of the day . . . the prevailing notions of the Divine were
very . . . territorial. Each nation had
a separate deity, each peoples their own god.
And those gods were not only different, but they were exclusive as
well. With those ancient gods, you were
either in or out, and if you'd were in, the god would help you. But if you were out . . . Well. It would be best not to meet another peoples’
god in a dark alley.
What's more, each god
had a place where they hung out, a place where they lived. It was possible to meet them face-to-face, or
walking down the road as Abraham did the Hebrew god at the oaks of Mamre. Or Moses did on that mountain. Or Elijah, who got a glimpse of that god’s
backside on yet another mountain.
But Paul’s “unknown
God” was radically different . . . he was near to each one of us, Paul said, each one. Not just the Jews, not just the Medes or the Greeks
or the Phrygians, but everyone. And if this God was near everyone, how could it
be localized to one place? How could it be locked up in a little idol, a
little effigy made of wood or gold or
clay, one that you could up and take with you everywhere you went? Far from us moving God, we move within God. We walk in God, talk in God, chat with our
neighbors in God, we are bathed in
God. But more than that, we have our being in God, we are sustained by God, we
are shot through and through with God.
In fact, without God we would not exist.
Today, we call this
view panentheism: pan (all) en (in) theis (God), and
it did not become the dominant view in the Christian church. Soon, God was in heaven—which was up there—and
we were down here, as reflected in the Lord’s Prayer, where we pray to God “who
art in heaven” and that God’s will be done, “on earth as it is in heaven.” But in this episode from Luke, we can see
that it was alive and well—at least in Paul and Luke—in Christianity’s earliest
days.
Swedish film director
Ingmar Bergman was famous for his atheism.
Or that's what he claimed anyway, but I always thought he protested just
a little too much, because a good chunk of his films are about God’s distance
or absence. And how could you rail
against God not being there if you didn't believe in God? It seems to me that this is one consequence
of our self-imposed alienation from God, our distancing of ourselves—promoted
by our own religion—from the divine: we imagine God out there, away from us,
who deigns to “come down” to help us.
Eastertide is a time of
reflection on the nature of the Divine . . . It's why we "What if"? What if our idea of
God is wrong? Or not wrong, so much as inappropriate—I don't that we can't get our finite minds totally around the notion of God. A lot of us think of God as up in heaven, a
bearded Santa Claus, who we call upon when we need something, and who may or
may not respond, according to some obscure rules that we don't understand . . .
What if God were all around us as Paul thought, within us, even, as Jesus taught
in John's gospel, in the person next to us, as he teaches in Matthew? How would it change the way we live our lives,
treat one another, treat ourselves? Amen.
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