Got that? Keep that in mind as we follow the Apostle Paul to Athens, where he makes known the unknown God.

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1 George A. Mason Sixth Sunday of Easter Wilshire Baptist Church 21 May 2017 Graduate Recognition Sunday Dallas, Texas Knowing the Unknown God Acts 17:22-31 Known and Unknown: A Memoir. 1 That s the apt title taken from one of the most memorable statements ever made in a government press conference. Donald Rumsfeld was Secretary of Defense during George W. Bush s presidency. The administration was building a case for war in Iraq, claiming Saddam Hussein had been supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. On February 12, 2002, Rumsfeld explained things in the pedantic way only he could: There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we don t know we don t know. 2 Known things and unknown things. Sounds like the theme for a commencement speech. You, graduates, know a lot more than you knew when you came into this esteemed institution of higher learning, but the biggest mistake you can make as you leave here is to think you know all the unknowns there are to know. There are always things we don t know we don t know. Got that? Keep that in mind as we follow the Apostle Paul to Athens, where he makes known the unknown God. Paul has to hightail it out of pretty much every town he enters on his missionary journey. When he starts telling people about Jesus being raised from the dead and what that means for the way people worship and do politics and business, some are attracted to the message and others attack the messenger for disturbing the peace. The good news is always bad news for the status quo. Jesus didn t only go around loving people one on one; he also demanded that love be enacted publicly. And that gets us to the link between love and justice that too many people like to separate. As racial justice advocate, Cornel West, pithily puts it: Justice is what love looks like in public. It s how we love our neighbor as ourselves. 1 Rumsfeld, Donald (Penguin, 2011). 2

2 Paul wouldn t go along with those who say we need to keep politics out of our preaching. But it s always a question of how we preach politics, don t you know?! Enlisting Jesus to be the figurehead of your political party is spiritual folly; on the other hand, making Jesus a disinterested party to our politics turns faith into a spiritual hobby. Both approaches are wrongheaded. Our faith in Jesus Christ includes a kind of judgment of all things in the world that rob people of life and love, of freedom and joy, of hope and opportunity. And when I say judgment, I don t mean being judgy, judgy Christians who fix a facial scowl toward everyone who differs from them. I mean judgment in the sense of wanting what is good and best for everyone. If you haven t heard me say it a thousand times, hear it now: faith is always personal, but it s never private. It touches on every single aspect of life family, religion, education, government, sports, business, entertainment, economics, science and the arts. But when you walk and talk you re your faith like that, it stirs people up. Which is why Paul is in Athens. He s been kicked out of Philippi and Thessalonica and Berea. When he gets to Athens, he walks around and sees all these idols in town and he can hardly stand it. He starts telling people about two new gods Jesus and Anastasia. Not really, but that s what people think he is saying. Jesus and resurrection is what Paul is talking about; anastasis being the Greek word for resurrection. They took it for a name, since the concept was foreign to them. So, they cart him up to the Areopagus, just down the hill from the Acropolis, where the Temple of Athena, the Parthenon, sits. Areopagus is the Greek name meaning Ares Rock, which the Romans called Mars Hill. Legend had it that the gods tried the war god, Ares, for the murder of the son of the sea god, Poseidon. In other words, Paul s preaching had him taken to court. By this time, the legal court had turned into more of a court of public opinion, a place where ideas where tested. And we re told the Greeks all loved a new idea. Curiosity had become a hallmark of their culture. And Paul was saying something new. Paul plays to his audience without watering down his belief in Jesus. This is important and we need to see what he does and how he does it, if 2

3 we are to follow his example in our time. He begins by praising the Athenians for being so religious, even though he loathed their polytheism and idolatry. He doesn t start by looking for ways to condemn them; he starts by getting underneath their superficial practices to the desires that give rise to them. He doesn t blame them for not knowing the God of Jesus and the Jews. He has such an expansive view of who Jesus is and how God works even in the hearts of those who know nothing of Jesus that he starts there. Too often we make it seem like we are worshiping a tribal god instead of the God who made heaven and earth. We set up Christianity as our religion that is at war against every other religion or philosophy, and we have to win. We re like the two seminary professors who went fishing. One was walking along the bank of the river when he spotted his colleague on the opposite bank. He saw the deep water and the fast moving current and he called out, How did you get to the other side? His colleague wasted no time answering: You re on the other side. 3 Paul understood and wants to make clear to us as well as to the Athenians of his day that there is no other side. Choosing sides is ludicrous with one God and one humanity. There s never been a contest of gods at all. God is everywhere and at work everywhere. All we do in our witness is call each other s attention to what is and always has been true. Paul assumes that every religious impulse of every human being comes from their being made in the image and likeness of the same God, who is known now to some through Jesus but has been longed for as the unknown god by everyone in every place and every time. Some of us were just in New York City this week for a Faith and the Arts conference. We saw a one-man play called The Reluctant Convert about the spiritual pilgrimage to faith of the Christian literary giant C.S. Lewis. Lewis had issues with God as a young child who lost his mother to cancer. He was drawn to atheism as a young intellectual, and he was proud during World War I to have disproved the axiom in the trenches that there s no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole. Little by little, though, his defenses were breaking down: first through the poetry of 3 3

4 the Irishman, William Butler Yeats, then through the fiction of the Scotsman, George MacDonald, and finally through the wit of the English journalist, G. K. Chesterton. None of them made him a Christian, but all of them appealed to something inside him that made him realize that the desire he always felt for something like joy must have an object or better, a Subject with a name that was drawing him ever closer. It was an unknown God he would come to know at last as the Father of Jesus Christ. Paul understood that when he appealed to the Athenians. They were no atheists; they believed in many gods. The Greek gods were temperamental and testy. You didn t want to cross them or you d fear what they might do. So, you paid them homage and took your chances on their moods to improve your fortunes. And in case you somehow missed one of them, you even offered sacrifices to the unknown god. Paul seizes on this impulse and gives the unknown god a name. He describes the unknown God as the true Creator of all things who made every person and every ethnic group from a single source, in order to treat all humanity alike. This God is not distant or capricious. This God is life itself. Paul even quotes a Greek poet, Aratus, about the God in whom we live and move and have our being. We are each of us and all of us God s offspring. That wasn t in the Bible, but it was true nonetheless, and Paul knows that whatever is true, from wherever it comes, is worthy of honor because reality itself is one, not many. That doesn t mean that all ideas are true, but those that are true are true regardless of where they come from. This is why the contest between faith and science in our time is so misguided. Why would the God, who made us all and gave us minds to understand ourselves and the world we live in together, want us to limit the source of truth to science or the Bible, either one? All discovery of truth comes by divine disclosure, as God wants us to know more than we want to know. So, whether in a laboratory or library, in a college or a church, by scientific method or spiritual meditation, the unknown God can be known. Keep that in mind, graduates, as you go off to school. Learning will not lead to a crisis of faith if you remember this. But notice when Paul gets done with all his honoring of the honest 4

5 longing of the Athenians and connecting that longing to the unknown god that he now names the Lord of heaven and earth, he brings it home with an altar call. He claims while God has been infinitely patient with humanity throughout the ages due to human ignorance, the time has now come for all people everywhere to repent. The God who raised Jesus from the dead has appointed him to judge the world fairly at the end of time. What does it mean to repent? We usually think of repenting as falling to our knees in tears to ask God to forgive our sins. But the wisdom teachers of our faith talk about it more like waking up from sleep, becoming aware of what is true and embracing the world as it is, ruled by a loving and merciful God. The other play we saw in New York this week was an adaptation of a portion of Tolstoy s War and Peace titled Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of Wonderful production. Josh Groban plays the role of a dissolute Pierre, who laments early in the play that he used to be a better man. He drowns himself now in drink. But at the climax of the play, he summons the courage to come out of his slumber and wake to love, even though he knows that that love can t be returned. He sings the fabulous song, Dust and Ashes that includes these lines: All of my life I spent searching the words/ Of poets and saints and prophets and kings/ And now at the end all I know that I ve learned/ Is that all that I know is I don t know a thing. There it is again, knowing that you don t know. But then this: Oh God, was there something that I missed?/ Did I squander my divinity?/ Was happiness within me the whole time?/ They say we are asleep/ Until we fall in love/ We are children of dust and ashes/ But when we fall in love we wake up/ And we are a God/ And angels weep. Do you want to make angels weep for joy? Then, repent, I tell you. Wake up to love. 5