Sermon April 27 2008 -- Acts 17:16-34

“Poetic Justice” (Acts 17:16-34)
Rick Olson, April 27, 2008

Athens was four-hundred years past its prime in Paul’s day . . . but it was still a center of learning and the arts. And what's more, it lived on its past glories . . . Rome left it pretty much alone because of them . . . after all, it was the cradle of Western civilization . . . Every philosopher worth his salt ended up in Athens . . . 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 . . . there was an incredible lot of them, flying back and forth around the marketplace.

Paul came there on his second missionary trip, and he acted like nothing so much as a tourist, doing the town, looking it up and down . . . I can imagine he was just a little in awe, probably climbed up onto the Acropolis, grabbing passers-by, having them snap his picture in front of the Parthenon. It was Athens, for gosh sake, he could touch what Plato touched, walk where Socrates walked . . . the foundations of Western thought and all that. But what got his goat, what distressed him deeply, as Luke puts it, was the sight of all the idols around. The place was lousy with ‛em.

Anyway, he went to the synagogue to teach and debate with the Jews and the God-fearers – our translation has “devout persons” – who were Gentile believers in the Hebrew God, and he went to the marketplace, the great public square in the lower part of town, and debated with whoever happened to be there . . . but it was his run-in with Epicurean and Stoic philosophers that got him in trouble. They were materialists, you see, who didn't believe in spirit, they thought even God was matter . . . albeit 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.

And it was these guys who got Paul in trouble – “what does this babbler want to say?” And the Greek for “babbler” is “seed-talker,” as in a bird who scatters thoughts at random, who eats any old kind of seed, and spits them out onto the ground at random. It was an insult to those – like the philosophers – who prized rational, orderly thought. But this other thing they said, that he's a proclaimer of foreign Gods, that was downright dangerous – it's the same thing got Socrates thrown into jail and poisoned. And the reason they thought it, had something to do with his preaching, something about the good news of Jesus and the resurrection.

Whatever it was, they hauled him off to appear before the Areopagus, a council that met up on Mars Hill, and it’s clear they weren’t ready to charge him with anything, because they asked for more information. “What you’re saying is strange; we’d like to know what it means . . .” It was kind of like a judicial inquiry, or maybe a grand jury, trying to decide whether to indict. At any rate, Luke kind of snickers at it, saying the Athenians and foreigners living there spent all their time doing nothing but hearing and saying new things . . . he saw the irony in Paul being called a babbler by these people. It was like the pot calling the kettle black.

But since they asked, Paul stood up and began to talk, and what came out of his mouth is the single most-talked-about passage in Acts. At its core, it's an argument in the classic sense, it starts from a premise – that God made the world – ands ends up condemning his listeners’ idolatry.

But first there’s the opener – every preacher has to have one, an introduction that grabs them and sucks them in. “Athenians,” he says, “I see how extremely religious you are . . .” and this touches bases with them, flatters them, almost puts them off their guard. And it also gets them wondering: why does he think them so religious? Well, he says, as he was making a careful survey of their objects of worship – i.e., their temples and idols – he saw they even had an altar to “an unknown God!” What dedication! What religiosity! They were so religious that they covered all their bases, they didn’t want to miss a bet.

And after the set-up comes his thesis, his proposition, what he’s trying to say: “What you worship as unknown is what I am proclaiming to you.” He’s being reasonable, just like his audience – he’s only telling them something new . . . but what he proceeds to tell them couldn’t be more radically different than what they believed: Paul’s God, the God who made the world and everything in it, Lord of heaven and earth, doesn’t live in shrines made by human hands . . . and furthermore, God’s not served by human hands either – how could that be true? How could the God who’s given us everything—life and breath and trees and crops and flowers—how could that God need anything? And this has his audience mumbling to themselves. This flew in the face of materialism . . . if this God made everything, all matter, all of us, how could he be a part of it? How could God be matter if God made all matter? If God made everything, God must be apart from it, separate from it, not a part of it . . .

Paul goes on to build on his creational theme: God made every nation from one ancestor, and their purposes are to live on earth, and to seek after the Lord . . . and this must have irritated them even more, because they didn’t buy the notion we’re all one people in the end . . . and as for the Stoics and Epicurians, their purposes were right-living and personal pleasure, not to seek after God . . .

What Paul is doing is stealthy, it’s roundabout, it's almost sneaky – his goal is the condemnation of idolatry, but he’s focused his audience – the philosophers and law-makers of Athens – on this unknown God, whose characteristics are at right-angles to their cherished ideas; he’s distracted them, maybe gotten them thinking about how much they disagree, so that when he sneaks up on them with his end-run, they’re taken by surprise.

And now comes the coup de grás: he quotes a couple of their poets. The first tells us that “In God we live and move and have our being;” and the says it's because “we too are God’s offspring,” and then Paul's trap shuts . . . “Because we are God’s offspring,” he says, “we ought not think that God is like gold, or silver or stone, an idol, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.” If even your own poets say that we are God’s children, how can we think that idols are God? If God made us, if we are God’s seed, then how could we have made God? Paul has snuck up behind them and slapped them up the side of their heads: If we’re God’s children, how could inanimate objects – which we have made – be God?

And now, in the wind-up, he appeals to pathos, to the emotions, specifically to fear: You may have been groping along, feeling your way to God, you may have been worshiping a god you didn’t know, and God overlooked this before Jesus came, but not anymore, now God has commanded all people to turn away from that path, to repent, because Jesus has come to judge in righteousness the whole earth . . . and this word righteousness—di-kai-súne in Greek—encompasses all he's been talking about . . . it refers to right-relationships with God and with other people. And the right relationship with God is as God's children – we are not God's makers, God is our maker. And our purpose is to seek God, not pleasure or right-living or being at one with nature. And most of all, the things we make are not our Gods. As proof of this relationship, as proof that God is the ruler over life and death, not the other way around, God raised God's Son Jesus Christ from the dead.

And the whole speech, carefully constructed within the confines of rhetorical convention, moving ahead by stealth and delaying tactics, by what the classical Greek rhetoricians called insinuato, and what’s more, the whole of the speech turns on the words of poets. Paul spoke to an audience infested with Epicureans and Stoics, believers in the dominance of mind over mood, of rationality over emotion, of thinking over feeling, and they were done in by poetry, the language of the heart. What a deliciously fine irony.

Maybe it’s not an accident—and I know I’ve told you about this before, in other contexts, but it bears repeating—maybe it’s not an accident that even in Greek, that most intellectual of ancient languages, the word for poet is the same as the word for “do-er,” for “make-er.” In fact, our English word is from the Greek – po-e-tón, poet, one who creates, one who makes. And it is through poetry, through metaphor and allusion and simile, the stuff of verse, that our minds are altered, our hearts are changed, and our realities are made.

Likewise, I think it’s no accident that everybody’s favorite book of Scripture . . . is poetry, the Psalms, where the Hebrew people talked, wept and cried aloud to their God . . . “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God” . . . “O God, you are my God, eagerly I seek thee” . . . And God answered them, answers us in the poetry, in the images and metaphors and imagination, God talks back to us, God’s people, and assures us we are not alone – “Comfort, comfort O My People, says the Lord your God.” “We shall mount up on wings like Eagles, we shall run and not be weary, we shall walk, and not be faint.” In poetry, we can say the unsaid, elliptically, playfully, subversively . . . The poets told the Athenians what the philosophers couldn’t – that we are God’s children, offspring of the Almighty.

And it’s the same way for us as it was for Paul’s accusers, as it was for those dilettantes trapped in the mind, trapped in a world where all that matters is matter, enslaved by things, by idols made from gold and silicon and stone, Gods of rubber, silver and plastic, deities of wood and glass and clay . . . idols that run us up and down the highways, pour televised commercial messages down our throats, and jingle pleasantly in our pockets . . .

But Unlike the Athenians, we know who our Gods are, know all too well . . . they live in temples in our cities, shiny buildings with names out front . . . Chrysler, Exxon, Weryerhauser . . . Our world is devoid of spirit, flattened, dull, grey . . . we may not live among philosophers, but things rule us nevertheless . . . like jealous toddlers, they are our children, but they are in fact in charge . . .

But when all our media lies, when the television and the radio and the newspaper tell us the great lie of our culture, that happiness is found in metal and glass and leaving a great-looking corpse, the poets tell us the truth, they create a radical, truthful space, and in their verse, in their playful, allusive metaphor, they dare to speak against the dominant reality, the reality of the world, of more and more money, more and more power, more and more things. In the face of all our possessions, they insist the world is possessed by God, that the “world is the Lord's and all that is in it.” In the depths of our abandonment, when all that we love seems gone, they tell us that even there God's hand will guide us, his right hand shall hold us fast.

God is revealed in poetry, God lives in it, dwells in that sweet, still space that insists things are different from what they appear on the surface, that we are God's children, the sheep of God's pasture, we are not adrift or cut off from the divine. It’s a space of truth and light, where miracles happen and God is active in our lives. Paul's lesson for the Epicures, sealed by the poet, sealed by the Spirit, is the same for us today . . . how can our Gods be stone or silver or gold? We are created by God, not the other way around, and God is in charge of us, like an infinitely patient, wonderfully tender mother, like a gentle, forgiving father, we nestle in God's arms. Amen.