“What you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you” (Acts 17:23)

This message is based on one of the readings from this past Sunday (Easter 6, year A)
– David Sellnow

So many beliefs. One truth to proclaim.

You’ve probably heard the statistics about Christianity and religious participation in America. The statistics, in one sense, show religion in decline. In 2007,  78% of U.S. adults identified as Christians of one sort or another. By 2024, it had fallen to 62%. Two decades ago, an average of 42% of U.S. adults attended religious services every week or nearly every week. Now that number is at 30%. Half of Americans seldom or never attend religious services in person. Meanwhile the percentage of Americans who say they have no religious affiliation has grown from 9% in the early 2000s to 21% today. 

Don’t think, though, that people are becoming more unspiritual in general. What seems to be happening is that our society is becoming less religiously active while still having all sorts of spiritual beliefs. Other studies show that:

  • 86% of U.S. adults believe they have a soul or spirit in addition to their physical body.
  • 83% believe in God or a universal spirit.
  • 79% believe there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we can’t see it.
  • 70% believe in an afterlife.
  • 30% say they have personally encountered a spirit or unseen spiritual force.*

There’s still a lot of spirituality out there in the communities around us. We are a society with all sorts of religious (as well as antireligious) ideas, all sorts of gods and idols, all sorts of beliefs full of all sorts of inconsistencies and contradictions.

Greek society in the first century was like that. Greek civilization and culture had various religions and beliefs. Greek thought was divided and unsettled, a myriad of moral and philosophical perspectives. On the far end in one direction were the Epicureans. Epicureans said there is no God. For them, the highest good in life was personal comfort. Seeking the most happiness and contentment one could find—that was the meaning of life as far as they could see. On the other end of the spectrum were the Stoics. Stoicism put forward virtue as the highest value in life. Be patient, endure pain, discipline your own body and mind, they advised. Stoics believed God was in everything—an impersonal force, the logic of the universe, a part of every creature and object around us. In the middle fell the rest of the Greeks. The common crowd still held to the old Greek religion. They were polytheistic. They trusted in many gods: Zeus, Hermes, Athena, Aphrodite, and more. They envisioned a god or goddess for every earthly need. But in all Greek thought, no god, no philosophy, was really there to help you beyond this life. Their perspective of the afterlife was that all went to Hades—the gloomy abode of the dead—without much hope beyond the grave.

When the apostle Paul traveled to Athens, the cultural melting pot of Greece, he could see that people were very religious, believing in many things. But they did not have a strong connection to who the real God really is. Paul wanted to speak to as many of them as he could, telling them about the Lord God who came to us in the person of Jesus Christ, about Jesus’ resurrection and our hope of resurrection with him, about the faith that the Spirit of God produces by his word.

Paul’s activity in the city attracted the attention of the city’s leaders. That’s how Paul came to stand before the Areopagus. Areopagus is a Greek name meaning Ares’ Rock or Ares’ Hill. Ares was one of the gods of the Greeks—their god of bravery and battle, the god of war. Ares’ Hill became the common name for the Council of Athens, since they originally met on that hill. At the time of the apostles, the Areopagus mainly dealt with major trials such as murders, plus the censorship of religion and education in the community. Since Paul was preaching a religion strange to their ears, the leaders of the city felt they had better hear him out.

Paul gave them an earful. He commented on the fact that religious thought of all kinds abounded among them. He pointed out their monument to an unknown God. “This is the God,” Paul said, “that I’d like to tell you about it. This God whom you don’t know is the true God.”

Paul explained who God, the Lord of all, really is. Paul said, “The God who made the world and everything in it—he is Lord of heaven and earth. … He himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things” (Acts 17:24,25). 

The Athenians, who thought their ancestors had sprung up out of the ground, did not know the full truth. Their profound philosopher, Aristotle, too, was mistaken, when he proposed that humanity simply always has been, is eternal. The Epicureans theorized that all life started with a simple atom and eventually grew to be more complex. These people made up their own ideas about divine origins, and how human beings came to be, not recognizing the greater truth about their creator. People still do this today, trying to make God in humankind‘s image—as though we could fit him into our minds and understand him, as though the creation could grasp the vastness of the creator. God is too great for that. God’s ways are higher than our ways as much as the heavens are above the earth (Isaiah 55:9). He is the source of life for us. As Paul described to the Athenians (Acts 17:28), “In him we live and move and have our being,” quoting their own poets who sensed that larger truth, saying, “We are his offspring.”

Worshiping the real God begins with acknowledging him as our creator and preserver, the one who truly governs this universe and guides all life in it. He is the Lord of our history. The lives of all people are in his hands. As Paul said to the Athenians, “From one ancestor he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God,” seeking to find him (Acts 17:26,27).

The true God is not just some impersonal force, as the Stoics believed. He is a living, thinking, personal being, very much invested in what happens to our lives. History is his story. Nothing happens without his awareness of it. He is personally involved with his creation. He knows you and wants you to know him. He loves you and wants you to love him. He reaches out to you and wants for you to be held by him.

He is not far from any of us, as Paul said (Acts 17:27). He is right there, overseeing our lives. But though God is so close, you can’t see him or find him on your own. You can’t make a statue and call it God. He “does not live in shrines made by human hands” (Acts 17:24). You can’t just speak prayers and hope somebody hears you. God, in truth, invites you to call him by name, approaching him in the name of Jesus Christ. That name is God‘s saving revelation to people. All of God‘s plans for human lives are intended to guide people toward the discovery of his name—the name of Jesus—and bring us toward repentance and salvation in him. On our own as human beings, we “fumble about” in our search for God (Acts 17:27). But God is leading us toward the day when Jesus Christ is revealed as judge of all the world. On that day, he will show us that he is truly the God in whom we find our being.

As Paul proclaimed, “God has set a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed” (Acts 17:31). Jesus is the one who provides saving justice; God has given assurance of this to all by raising Jesus from the dead (Acts 17:31). Trusting in Jesus—the living, resurrected, Lord—we have life in him and will be resurrected ourselves. As Jesus himself promised us, “Because I live, you also will live.  On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” (John 14:19-20).

When Paul spoke of his faith in Jesus’ resurrection and ours, many in the Athenian audience were skeptical, “When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed, but others said, ‘We will hear you again about this.’” And some did hear him further and became believers (Acts 17:32-24). 

Believing in resurrection—that there is life beyond this present life—is hard. It’s not something we can see evidence of when we stand in a cemetery or go to a wake at a funeral home. Yet it is our greatest hope. As Paul said on another occasion in his ministry, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile. … If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died” (1 Corinthians 15:17-20). That core truth of Christian faith is what Paul sought to share most of all. And that core truth of Christian faith is still what enlivens and invigorates us today, giving us the hope and strength to get through days of our lives on this earth that are dark or difficult. 

Like the Athenians, we also live in a country where knowledge of God is often clouded and people follow misconceptions. We ourselves are tempted to look in the wrong directions for help and hope so many times. But while there may be all sorts of paths to worldly success and wealth and prestige, the real truth, the real hope, the real blessing, is in Jesus Christ. His life-giving message that extends to eternity.

Yes, the world is already full of religion and belief of all sorts. Everyone has some god or gods that they follow, some hopes or philosophies that they think will give them reassurance. But so many have not found the confidence and comfort that is found in Jesus Christ. The God we have come to know and trust is a God who, throughout time, has done miracles for those who have trusted in him. He has put bread on the table when people had no idea where their next meal was coming from. He has brought healing of sicknesses when everyone thought there was no possible cure. He gave children to parents who thought they could not have children. And even with so many miracles that he has done, Jesus said you will see greater things than these (cf.John 1:50). The greater miracles that God provides for us are the love he brings us into together as families, the hope that he provides for us when hope seems lost, the forgiveness and grace he showers on us when all we could feel was guilt and shame, the life that he promises that overcomes death and will never end.

Those are truths that we know in Jesus, that we can speak about in our present day and age, rooted in the good news of his resurrection from death. Those are the truths in Jesus that inspire us to act in love to our neighbors. 

 

*Sources of statistics:

Scripture quotations are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition. Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

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