27th April 2008EASTER VI

Fr Julian Browning

Acts 17 : 22 – 31 ; 1 Peter 3 : 13 – 22 ;  John 14 : 15 – 21

Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious.  Acts 17.22. 

This God does not live in shrines made by human beings, because he needs nothing from us, he himself gives to all people life and breath and everything.

The Acts of the Apostles is one of those books that never gets to the top of the reading list. We turn first to  the Epistles and the Gospels. But we have been reading the Acts of the Apostles every week since Easter, so it deserves a sermon. Somehow we have the impression that the Epistles and the Gospels are the teachings of Jesus Christ, while the Acts of the Apostles are sort of background material. Bits of history, with a lot about the travel arrangements of St. Paul. When I was first taught about the Acts of the Apostles, it always involved the drawing of a map.

It is about maps, but not that sort of map. It is about us, about living Christians, drawing some sort of map of our lives in this world, deciding how to play it. The experts conclude that the Acts of the Apostles is part Greek history, part Biblical history, part biography, part novel, and part getting Paul off the hook and out of court, and that the book is by the same person or persons who wrote St.Luke's Gospel, but that might not have been St.Luke. In other words, there is no conclusion at all. None of this need bother us in the slightest. The Gospels are about Jesus. The Epistles are letters of advice to Christian communities. The Acts of the Apostles is about people talking about Jesus. It is about those who  spread the Gospel. It is about a minority moving outside its safety zone, into the multicultural civic communities of the Roman Empire. The Christians are moving on, beyond the boundaries of Palestinian Judaism. And because of that, the questions change, the challenges change, the way of describing God changes. How are Christians going to maintain any religious identity in the rough and tumble of Asia Minor, let alone in Rome, and beyond? Do you see what this book can offer us? It is about our challenges. What do you do when the world about you changes, when instead of having an honoured place in a temple, you have to make yourself heard on a street corner in Athens? How do we Christians make ourselves understood in a secular world ? Have we anything left to say? It's so easy to be left high and dry, feeling bitter about the loss of tradition and our place in society, and that's good for nobody.

The Acts of the Apostles should boost our morale a bit. Here is a collection of strange individuals, even stranger than we are, who allowed themselves to be possessed by God, and as St Paul says today, In him we live and move and have our being, we are his offspring, his children. There's no time for me to explore all he says, but what he says is adapted to his audience, the Greeks, he draws in what interests them, their poets, their gods. It's not him against them. Paul is exploring words, explaining who God is in their terms. Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. He's been wandering around, doing the sights, and he's come across an altar 'To the unknown God'. This was a Greek thing, the unknown god or gods, just in case we left one out. Whether these gods were important to the Greeks, I'm not sure. Those Greeks were a bit like the population of Great Britain today. If you had a poll, there would be a large turnout for God or some invisible Deity, but in daily life this God would have no influence at all.

What Paul is saying to these Greeks is more or less, “I am now going to tell you about the God of whom you are only vaguely aware”. And he does. And this is the same God whom I try to preach to you today, and whom all of us must tell the world about, in terms which the world can understand. Our God is the creator of the world. This God does not live in shrines made by human beings, because he needs nothing from us, he himself gives to all people life and breath and everything. We believe that everyone, including the Greeks with their altars, or their modern equivalents, is on some sort of quest for this God. This God is not far from us, in him we live and move and have our being. That is our reality, and the sign of all this being real, being true, was the raising of a man from death to life, to show us how God works, and what He can do for us.

St. Paul, like me, goes on a bit. The religion he taught has lasted two thousand years, has formed or transformed the changing culture of the world, and has mapped out (to use my first metaphor) the lives of countless generations. In spite of the disappointments, the sadnessess of life, the depression we sometimes feel about the way things are going, we have reason to rejoice. The truth has been entrusted to us, it is our turn now to be apostles, and to explain - maybe in what we are and do, rather than in what we say – to explain that our God is not an Unknown God. He is a God whom we know, and the God who knows us as the children he loves to the end.