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Reverend Timothy B. Cargal, Ph.D. The Out-of-Fashion Church For several weeks, Paul had been wandering around Athens, observing the local culture. We are told in this morning’s scripture lesson that what he found most disturbing about the place was that it was "full of idols." Such substitute divinities—concepts of God tailor-made for easy comprehension and manipulation —were not, Paul believed, the answer to humanity’s problems but rather a chief source of them. In an effort to convince not only those who knew his own Jewish religious culture but also those who understood next to nothing about it, Paul had gone around preaching in both synagogue and market place "the good news about Jesus and the resurrection." He made such a pest of himself, it seems, that he was finally summoned to the Areopagus and told to explain himself. The Areopagus was both a place (a rocky outcropping just west-southwest of the Athenian acropolis) and the name given to a council of prominent citizens of the city that had met there for centuries by the time Paul came into town. At various times throughout its long and storied history, the Council of the Areopagus had both ruled Athens and served as its most prestigious and exclusive club. Yet despite its vaunted reputation, those who gathered to hear Paul on this occasion were more confused about his teaching than anything else. Paul denounced their idols and the elaborate stories about the complicated relations among the gods and goddesses themselves that the idols represented. Nevertheless, Paul’s proposed answer sounded to them like merely adding more "foreign divinities" to the mix. They were confused as to how his message about Jesus as the Son of the God of the Jews could be a denunciation of idols rather than a call for more. So Paul decides on a different rhetorical strategy. Rather than denounce all their forms of worship, he finds one that he can commend. "Athenians," Paul begins, "I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you." As he continues, he talks about how that the God who made all things cannot be made by human hands into an idol, and requires no human hands to construct shrines to protect such a God from the elements that the Divine-self had made. To be frank, Paul at this point is playing to their intellectual snobbery. Sure, there may have been some naive folk far removed from urban sophistication and so steeped in superstition that they might have thought idols were genuine gods (although even that is doubtful). But all the philosophically sophisticated members of the Areopagus knew better. They had long known that not only the idols but the stories about the many gods and goddesses themselves were only tools to help the mind consider how the Divine was both like and unlike us mortals. The tip off that Paul understands his argument is an attack on "straw-gods" is his quote of an idea set forward by the Greek philosopher Epimendes ("In God we live and move and have our being") and direct borrowing of a line from the poet Aratus ("For we too are God’s offspring"). No doubt his audience was ‘eating out of the palm of his hand’ as Paul urged the rejection of the "ignorance" of idols derived from "human imagination." But when he once again insisted that this God had staked the divine purpose for the world on "raising Jesus from the dead," they began to laugh in his face. You can almost hear some of them scoff, "You are right Paul! A god who would do such foolishness is unknown to us, and we have no desire to get to know such a god either!" But others remained at least curious. For several weeks now I have been wandering around through the biblical texts appointed for Eastertide, preaching "the good news about Jesus and the resurrection" as the answer to the problems that confront our congregation and the whole of the church in these tumultuous times. Like I imagine it must have been for Paul walking the streets of ancient Athens, it has been both an invigorating and frustrating experience. I, too, have observed that ours is an "extremely religious" culture. We stamp "In God We Trust" on our currency, but in airports and banks and restaurants the never ending crawl of stock prices across the bottom of television screens underscores that it is really our currency itself in which we have placed our (uncertain) trust. Jewish Israelis invoke the name of the God of Abraham in their war against Muslim Palestinians who declare jihad in the name of Allah and his prophet Mohammed. It is easy to recognize such Jewish and Muslim idolatry — making God in the image of nationalist aspiration and identity — especially at a time when the ‘proper’ debate is over whether presidential candidates must wear flag-pins on their lapels and denounce those who dare suggest God might have anything critical to say about America. For many in our culture the idea of a God who is actively unleashing the power of resurrection into the world is as hopelessly out of fashion as Paul’s message was to the philosophical sophisticates of the Areopagus. Like ancient Athenians, we modern Americans are a very religious people, but religion is a personal, private, inwardly spiritual quest. Notions either that the spiritual life can only truly be lived in a community or that one’s spiritual self should find expression in the most public and pragmatic aspects of one’s life seem naive at worst and passé at best. In the here and now, God is inactive and so unknown. Consequently we are free to get on with our lives, making idols of national identity, financial security, interpersonal relationships, and self-esteem from gold, silver and other material things as long as we occasionally remind ourselves that we are also spiritual. Is it any wonder, then, that church is out of fashion? Even we who are in the church are at risk of erecting our own idols. You see, one reason these are such tumultuous times both for this congregation and the church generally is that many Christians have come to worship the past. It exists in our minds as so vibrant and lively that so much of things now seem only dead by comparison. Or perhaps the past was the time when all was right with the world, the paradise from which we have fallen. Conversely, the future may be our idol. We so long for what God will someday do among us that we rid ourselves of any and all responsibility for the present. Our pious certainty about the future becomes the very definition of our faith. But both the past and the future, however, are nothing but idols. The living God, the God revealed to Moses simply as, "I am," the God who is active in the present, has become largely unknown. We believe that God worked in the ancient past, the "time of Jesus," and that God will work again in distant future. It is easier, and frankly safer, to think of God’s actions in that way. If God is unknown to us, it is because we are more content with idols under our control than to risk encounter with a God we cannot control. But this morning, "what therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you." Jesus’ resurrection is not a thing of the ancient past, and ours is not a thing of the distant future. Resurrection is a present reality. It is time to meet an unknown God, a God who is revitalizing this church with new life—changing us from what we were to what we will be—if only we open our eyes to see it. As 1 Peter reminds us, genuinely living resurrection in the present is no guarantee of either success or even acceptance. Both those in the world and even some in the church would rather view themselves as spiritual because of their fashionable relationship with idols. But a church living in dynamic relationship with a living God can never truly be out of fashion. Copyright © 2008 by Timothy B. Cargal. All rights reserved.
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