“Speaking for the Unknown God”
Easter 6 May 21, 2017 Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor Acts 17:22-31
Easter 6 May 21, 2017 Community Christian Church of Springfield
Roger Ray, pastor Acts 17:22-31
22Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I
see how extremely religious you are in every way. 23For 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. 24The
God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and
earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, 25nor is
he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives
to all mortals life and breath and all things. 26From one
ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the
times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would
live, 27so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for
him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. 28For ‘In him we live and move
and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are
his offspring.’ 29Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to
think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the
art and imagination of mortals. 30While God has overlooked the
times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to
repent, 31because he has fixed a day on which he will have the
world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he
has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”
My father
used to delight in teasing the residents of his retirement home, telling them
that he could not read. Though he did attend a one-room school in rural
Kentucky, complete with a wood burning stove and a dirt floor, he could read.
However, what was true is that he did not read. I can remember seeing him read
some from the newspaper and sometimes from the Readers Digest but he did not
read books. Rather frustratingly, he didn’t even read the books that I wrote.
His relative lack of education and
curiosity did not, however, prevent him from being a remarkably opinioned
person. He would often preface his short speeches to his grown children by
saying, “I don’t really know anything about it, but…” And though he lived to be
92 years old, neither I nor any of my siblings ever screwed up the courage
necessary to suggest that if he knew that he didn’t know anything about the
subject that he might do himself and the rest of us the favor of not talking
about it. I’ve seen him hand feed
grizzly bears… I never felt that it would be smart to tangle with him.
Besides, growing up in a home
where you could simultaneously announce that you don’t know anything about a
topic before making broad declarations on the same topic may have uniquely
prepared me for a life in ministry where speaking confidently about things that
cannot be known is more or less the professional rule.
Our wisdom lesson today is one
of the assigned lectionary readings for this Sunday. It is the almost certainly
fictional account of Paul speaking on the Areopagus in Athens. Not to cast too
many aspersions Luke’s way but the book of Acts is largely a propaganda piece
written to prop up Paul’s status in the early church to give the rest of his
letters more credibility. Though the author tries to write a great deal of it
like he had first hand knowledge of the events, it appears that Acts is almost
entirely fictional.
However, if you just look at the
speech he alleges that Paul delivered to the gathered philosophers in Athens,
he sort of makes Paul sound a lot like my dad. At first Paul praises the
Athenians for having a statue to the unknown god, a sort of artistic tip of the
hat to the great mystery of the divine that is unknown and unknowable. Then he
immediately turns to tell them exactly what the unknown god is like and what
god demands of all Athenians and, indeed, everyone everywhere on earth. And,
wonder of wonders, it happens to be just exactly the religion preferred by
Paul, faith in Jesus Christ to protect your eternal soul on the day of
judgment.
Nowhere is there a connection
from the unknown and unknowable to the concrete specifics that there is such a
thing as an eternal soul, or a final judgment, or a risen savior who used to be
a Palestinian preacher.
Though, in Paul’s rather more
arrogant presumptions, he didn’t start by saying “I don’t really know anything
about it,” but in true Pauline style, he started by saying, “You don’t know anything
about it but this is your lucky day because I know everything about it.”
An awful lot of religion is
practiced in more or less this way…. naked, unsubstantiated truth claims. You
can assume that the religion of your birth is right, or you might choose a
religion because you like the rituals, costumes, or even the location of the
house of worship. People often say about their search for a faith or for a
church that they are looking for the place where they feel “comfortable.” To
which I normally reply, “If you are comfortable here then you are not
listening.”
I’m not interested in a faith
that makes me feel good, I’m interested in a religious practice that helps to
make me good, that inspires me to grow, change, evolve, and, as Ben Franklin
said, the only reason we ever change is because we are uncomfortable.
For progressives, I have this
modest proposal: stop talking about what you do not and cannot know and focus
on what you do know or can learn. I’m indebted to my friend, Michael Dowd, for
the term and the sharpness of the focus of talking about evidence-based faith.
Michael travels around the world now talking about the use of science, of
research, of facts, to construct a new worldview, a new faith, but the idea is
not original to him.
I can’t claim to know much
about Quaker tradition but our own David Ketchum is a practitioner of the
quietist tradition who just happens to be kind enough to tolerate my insistence
upon using so many words to express my faith. But a few weeks ago David chanted
an adapted quote from Jesse Holmes, an early 20th century Friends
writer that captures this thought so very well. He wrote:
“Meaningless phrases and irrational theologies
have been molded into rigid, authoritative
institutions
perverting and stultifying the
adventurous, creative spirit …
[So] I propose to a fairly intelligent
people of a partially scientific age: [May we] stop the pretense of ... respect
... for teachings which lack … evidence or probability.
[May we...] substitute a religion based
on actual repeatable, describable and testable experience, and which has some
connection with the genuine values of life:
[to] join heartily in a[n] … effort for
an uplifted humanity;
[to] refuse to continue systems which
involve contests
in indiscriminate killing and
destruction;
[to] dedicate [our]selves to ... mutual
service,
refusing all incitements to seek power
over each other
[and … ] everywhere [seek] harmony,
good–will, understanding, friendliness, [so that we may] indeed … renew and
revive the purposes of prophets, statesmen, scholars, scientists, and good
people since the world began.”
-Adapted from Jesse Herman Holmes (1863–1942), published in “‘Our
Christianity’?” Universalist Friends 39
Obviously, there are more
things that are true that cannot be proven than there are truths that can be
proven. There is room in religion for a full-throated approval of mystery, of
the unknown, of that which transcends our capacity to intellectually describe
but anything for which there is no reason probably also does not deserve
discussion and it absolutely should not be a part of assertion. If you believe
something for which you have no causative reason, that is not religion, that’s
imagination.
That is, if you don’t know
anything about it. If nothing can be known about it, have the humility not to
act like you know, or that you can assert in any creedal way what cannot be
known.
There may be life after death
though there is no evidence to prove it, so why would it make any sense to say
that the Christian, or the Muslim, or the Zoroastrian, or the Buddhist views of
the afterlife is the right one? You might become an angel and live in heaven
when you die but there is more evidence that you will become fertilizer and
until you have some reason to believe otherwise, then I think we need to assume
that we all have a future as fertilizer. Hope anything you want. Believe
whatever pleases you, but have the decency not to make promises of things you
cannot be at all certain of.
More importantly, there may be
angels and demons, but there is no evidence for them and believing in such
speculative creatures is purely a matter of personal preference. But there are
900 children in Greene Co. in foster care…. There are 500 people who are
homeless, there are thousands of locals who are addicted to either heroin or
methamphetamine…. These are facts and religious people really need to be paying
attention to what is known and not what is nothing more than wishful thinking.
And sure, anyone can believe
whatever they want but we should not be lulled into thinking that it doesn’t
matter. If you believe that women are inferior to men, if you believe being gay
is a sin, if you believe that everything that happens is somehow a part of a
divine plan, such that you are relieved of any responsibility to strive to
correct poverty or to respond to natural disasters… then those beliefs are not
simply personal, private beliefs, those beliefs are poisoning our society.
We not only can make judgments
between healthy and unhealthy spiritually, honestly, folks, we must make those
kinds of distinctions. As Karen Armstrong wrote in her autobiography: “If your understanding of the divine made you
kinder, more empathetic, and impelled you to express sympathy in concrete acts
of loving-kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you
unkind, belligerent, cruel, of self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's
name, it was bad theology.”
Look, if the bank sends you a notice that your
checking account is over-drawn, you can’t just call them and say, “That’s your
opinion. In my opinion, I have tens of thousands of dollars in my checking
account.” But what I’m talking about is infinitely more important than your
checking account. If you instinctively know how to be rational and deal in
facts around small amounts of money, why do we act like we have sushi for
brains when it comes to our core life beliefs?
All I’m saying is what many people have said
before me, when it comes to religion, keep an open mind, but not so open that
your brains fall out.
