The people at The First U.P. Church of Crafton Heights are spending much of the 2023-2024 academic year looking at the story of God’s people as recorded in the New Testament book of Acts. We engage in this series of messages convinced of the fact that God’s power changes apparently small and nondescript groups of people into a force that will change the world in ways that are reflective of the love and justice of Jesus. On May 12 we wandered with Paul through the streets of ancient Athens and listened to him boldly proclaim the inclusive Gospel of Jesus. You can read it for yourself in Acts 17.
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We are continuing with our year-long reading of the Book of Acts. Last week, we left Paul in a Philippian jail, having noted that this Greek town was the first community in all of Europe to hear the Gospel of Jesus. We saw that Christ’s message of liberation and inclusivity conflicted with the economic and political status quo in that burg, and so measures were taken to silence Paul. He was beaten, arrested, and imprisoned. The final verses of Acts 16, which we didn’t read last week, detail a miraculous escape from prison which leads to the conversion and baptism of the Philippian jailer. Once that happens, Paul and Silas are hustled out of town.
Today, we find the team in Thessalonica, a port just southwest of Philippi. Upon entering, Paul uses the same strategy he’s employed elsewhere and looks for a Jewish synagogue in which to begin his preaching. He discovers, however, that the religious folks in Thessalonica are really happy with “that old-time religion”, and they’re not looking for change. They point out, correctly, I should say, that the message of Jesus is “turning the world upside down.”
Like their brethren in Philippi, the Thessalonians call in the authorities, and this time, there’s a new charge added. These Jesus-followers are not patriotic enough. Paul and his companions, by virtue of their faith practices, are dangerous to the community’s political identity.
The hypocrisy here is stunning, by the way. Jews had long had trouble in the Roman Empire because they refused to acknowledge that the emperor was divine. Here in Thessalonica, a few folks are energizing a mob by saying that those who preach the Gospel of Jesus are not good Romans.
If the plot of this movie sounds familiar to you, well, trust me, it’s because you’ve seen it before.
You saw it back in Volume I of this work, the Gospel of Luke, when a bunch of religious leaders who felt threatened by Jesus thought that they could pull a fast one and get rid of him. They asked him whether it was lawful to pay taxes to Caesar. Jesus responded, as you might recall, by inviting the men to produce a coin – a piece of metal which bore the graven image of Caesar on it, by the way. He pointed out that God is bigger than the Empire, and that they should go ahead and give Caesar what was already his. The strategy of these religious leaders was not truly to profess faith, but appeal to nationalism and politics to attack someone they saw as a rival.
You saw this same story back in the fifteenth century. The good people of Spain claimed to be concerned about the spread of heresy – false teaching in the Christian church. They created a judicial system known as the Spanish Inquisition, which was allegedly created to point out and correct this false teaching, but whose true purpose was to consolidate power and authority under King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. In the name of Jesus, that nation executed or expelled countless Jews and Muslims because they were not “real” Spaniards.
And if all of that is too much ancient history for you, you saw this same phenomenon a few years ago when on January 6, 2021 a group of protestors stormed the US Capitol. These folks were holding bibles aloft, waving Christian flags, and stepped into the Senate Chamber, where they offered this prayer:
“Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government. We love you and we thank you. In Christ’s holy name we pray. Amen.”
The idea to which these “protestors” were clinging, that the United States must be reborn in Christ’s name, is central to a philosophy known as Christian Nationalism. This mindset holds that one group’s views of truth, morality, and so on are given to that group directly by God and ought to be enforced by the power of legislation. Anyone who departs from this “divine” understanding must suffer civil and criminal penalties as a result.
As we continue to read in this ancient text of Acts, and as we walk through life in the 21st century, beloved, let me beg you to pay attention when people talk about God or Jesus endorsing specific candidates, platforms, and ideologies, and how it is in fact their God-given duty to impose their understandings on the rest of society.
Make no mistake: the Gospel of Jesus Christ does have political ramifications. The word “politics” means a set of activities that determine how groups of people make decisions and share power with one another. Here, in Acts, we see how the message that Paul preached upset some people who were enjoying power and prestige at the expense of someone else. The liberation that Paul preached then became a threat to the privileged – and so Paul had to be silenced.
Paul leaves Thessalonica, and he arrives in Berea, where the same story repeats itself. He starts preaching about the reconciliation and hope of Jesus that is available to all creation and before he can get to page two of the sermon, a gang of fellows from Thessalonica arrive and rough Paul up a bit before sending him packing yet again.
The Parthenon in Athens, located on the Acropolis
His friends escort Paul to Athens, and they told him just to cool his jets for a few days while they tried to patch things up in Berea. At that time, Athens was a city of sixty or seventy thousand people that prided itself on being a world center of intellectualism and philosophy. Paul visited the synagogue in Athens, but before long he found himself, like countless tourists before and since, taking in the sights.
Paul visited the Acropolis, the highest point in the city, that was crowned by the Parthenon, housing a statue of the goddess Athena that stands 38 feet tall. In fact, there are at least a dozen temples to various Greek gods like Zeus, Apollos, and Artemis. In addition to that, there are countless statues and altars to all manner of deity. Paul must have been reminded of the old Greek proverb, “In Athens, there are more gods than men.”
After wandering around town for a few days and being unable to keep his mouth shut, Paul is invited to a place called Mars Hill, the meeting place for a body known as the Areopagus. These men form the council of elders for Athens, and they ask Paul to explain his faith to them. Listen:
So Paul stood up in front of the council and said:
People of Athens, I see that you are very religious. As I was going through your city and looking at the things you worship, I found an altar with the words, “To an Unknown God.” You worship this God, but you don’t really know him. So I want to tell you about him. This God made the world and everything in it. He is Lord of heaven and earth, and he doesn’t live in temples built by human hands. He doesn’t need help from anyone. He gives life, breath, and everything else to all people. From one person God made all nations who live on earth, and he decided when and where every nation would be.
God has done all this, so that we will look for him and reach out and find him. He isn’t far from any of us, and he gives us the power to live, to move, and to be who we are. “We are his children,” just as some of your poets have said.
Since we are God’s children, we must not think that he is like an idol made out of gold or silver or stone. He isn’t like anything that humans have thought up and made. In the past, God forgave all this because people did not know what they were doing. But now he says that everyone everywhere must turn to him.
He has set a day when he will judge the world’s people with fairness. And he has chosen the man Jesus to do the judging for him. God has given proof of this to all of us by raising Jesus from death.
As soon as the people heard Paul say a man had been raised from death, some of them started laughing. Others said, “We will hear you talk about this some other time.” When Paul left the council meeting, some of the men put their faith in the Lord and went with Paul. One of them was a council member named Dionysius. A woman named Damaris and several others also put their faith in the Lord.
Saint Paul Delivering the Areopagus Sermon in Athens, by Raphael (1515)
As Paul explains his faith in Jesus to these scholars and philosophers, he makes note of an altar he’d seen indicating that the Athenians acknowledged the presence and power of a god they did not yet know – a god who was somehow in addition to the dozens of gods they were worshiping. Paul makes the case that this previously unknown God is, in fact, YHWH, who is the creator of the entire world. Unlike Athena, Zeus, Aphrodite, or Ares, YHWH is too big, too powerful to be contained in a temple made by human hands.
As we’ve said, when Paul began to talk about Jesus in a new place, he usually started in the synagogues, where he took passages from the Hebrew Bible and attempted to demonstrate that Jesus was the next best thing that God was doing in the world. Yet here, in front of the Areopagus in Athens, Paul realizes that an appeal to Jewish scripture would be useless. Instead of asking them to validate a text with which they are unfamiliar, Paul quotes the Greek poets Epimenides and Cleanthes. These folks, says Paul, knew something about the God who’d made them, even if they didn’t know his name. Paul says that they are pointing, without knowing it, to YHWH, the creator of all, ruler of all, and giver of all good gifts.
And as Paul does this, he speaks out against the religious nationalism that he’d encountered elsewhere even while challenging some core tenets of the Athenian identity. Look at verse 26:
From one person God made all nations who live on earth, and he decided when and where every nation would be.
Now, here’s the thing about this verse: like much of the Bible, when it is stripped of its context and cultural placement, it can be twisted and misused.
The Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa, for instance, used this particular verse to establish and prop up the socio-political system of apartheid, which segregated races and gave tremendous advantages to minority whites. These theologians said, essentially, “Well, look – God made people and gave them boundaries and borders and ethnic identities and cultures. If we mix those things, then we’re going against God. It’s best if you all just stay in that place, which happens to be impoverished and under our heels, but hey – who are we to argue with where God has put us?”
This same scripture was used to justify the enslavement of human beings in the United States and was cited by religious people who opposed the legalization of interracial marriage in the US in 1967.
It’s interesting to note, however, that the European theologians never seemed to interpret this scripture in such a way as to imply that folks should just stay in their own countries and resist the temptation to go and colonize another continent…
So let’s look at this verse and see how Paul is actually making this statement in a way that challenges any view of religious nationalism.
By the time that Paul arrived, the people of Athens had long held to a belief that they were autochthonous – that is, that the inhabitants of Athens did not come from anyone or anywhere else. Their ancestors had miraculously sprung from the soil, rocks, and trees on that hill in Greece. They sometimes used the term “earthborn” to describe themselves. In fact, Athenians wore cicada-shaped ornaments as a way of saying that like these creatures, Athenians had emerged from the soil and therefore were the only genuine, authentic, “real” Greeks. They used this narrative to justify their efforts to subjugate and control the “lesser” peoples that surrounded them. In fact, in Plato’s dialogue Menexenus, he describes Socrates offering a commentary as to why Athenians so hated “barbarians”.
Because we are pure-blooded Greeks, unadulterated by barbarian stock. For there cohabit with us none of the type of Pelops, or Cadmus, or Aegyptus, or Danaus, and numerous others of the kind, who are naturally barbarians though nominally Greeks.
Can you believe that was written 2500 years ago? You can hear that same kind of “othering” in the speeches today made by politicians who want to draw a line between the “real” Americans and “those people” who are less than us. You know, the folks who are like us, and not moochers or thugs or criminals or low-lifes like them.
So in his speech to the Athenian Council, aware of this tradition, Paul dismisses any claims to autochthany. In this passage he is saying, “Look, nobody just showed up, or crawled out of the earth on their own. All of us – and all of them, in fact – are born hungry for God and are called to love and serve God. Our lives belong to God!”
I’m suggesting that Paul’s trip to Athens, as narrated in Acts 17, would indicate that God is not pleased with human attempts toward unabated nationalism, cultural superiority, or racism.
In an era in which nativism and wall-building are not only seen as political strategies but have somehow wound up, in some circles at least, being considered “Christian values”, let us seek to be a people who affirm and recognize the fact that we all belong to God!
The existence of the church in Jerusalem, Antioch, Athens, Crafton Heights, and everywhere in between serves to remind us that in Christ, we are all connected. We belong to one another. There is no place for Christian Nationalism, no room for advocating for ethnic purity or cultural superiority. As Paul says, every single one of us is born groping for God. We all, by nature, are trying to figure out some way to connect with the One who gave us life. Let us do all we can to amplify the reconciling, uniting message and work of Jesus in the hopes that as we do so, others might learn more about the One in whose image they, too, have been created. Thanks be to God for calling us to this life of service, humility, and love. Amen.
Cast Your Net 