Knowing God Among the Unknowing

Acts 17: 16 - 31         

 

Let’s begin by grounding ourselves in the arc of the storyline we’ve followed over the past many months.

 

Way back in the Fall, we read texts from the Hebrew scriptures that reminded us of our common ancestry with Judaism and the Islamic tradition.

 

We watched generations unfold from Abraham and Sarah’s covenant commitment to go where God sent them.

 

We witnessed Moses’ interaction with God as he sometimes reluctantly followed his call to lead God’s people out of Egypt and through the wilderness, in pursuit of the promised land.

 

We followed the Israelites growing dissatisfaction with tribal leadership as they clamored for a King who was more like the political kings they knew in surrounding strongholds. While God never thought that Kingship was a great idea, God also worked to call people into righteous leadership.

From Christmas through Easter, we explored the big story of God through the lens of John’s gospel. Each gospel writer has a unique take on Jesus’ mission, on the order of events in Jesus’ life, and on the way people around Jesus responded to his teaching. Without a birth narrative, John’s gospel proclaims that in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. This places Jesus with God throughout time.

 

Jesus performed an ever-more-impressive series of miraculous signs throughout John’s gospel – and these reveal something about who God is and who Jesus is to those who witness them. We recall changing of water to wine at Cana, healing a Roman official’s son and a man who was born blind, and then finally, raising his good friend Lazarus from the dead. These signs all demonstrated ways that Jesus wielded God’s power to shape and save lives – quite literally.

 

Against the backdrop of those signs, John’s gospel highlights a tension between Jesus, his followers, and the Temple authorities. To our modern ear, that can sound antisemitic, and so we’ve had to read carefully. We must remember that Jesus was a devout Jewish man, a rabbi himself. The tensions that show up in the gospel are often tensions between the priority of ritual and law, and the realities of lived life. Again and again, Jesus stresses the fact that life in the here and now is by God’s intention both abundant and eternal – essentially GOOD.

 

As a final generalization about John’s gospel – Jesus’ trial and crucifixion are not framed as a sacrificial atonement for our sins. Instead, these are understood as things Jesus had to go through as part of his glorification – his elevation to the kind of King that God has always longed for in the Kin-dom of God.

The full arc of the story sets us up in this season for considering what it means to follow Jesus’ kingship in our daily lives.

 

Today, we have another episode from the Acts of the Apostles. Many of you know that the book of Acts was most likely authored by the same person who wrote the Gospel of Luke.  Unfortunatley, we haven’t been studying Luke’s gospel since before LAST Easter 2025. If you are feeling some sense of dislocation in these texts, that might be why!

 

The book of Acts follows the apostles - disciples who are now sent out to share the story of Jesus - as they connect with new communities, encourage new followers, and recruit, equip and send out new leaders. Essentially the book of Acts is about how the early church – Jews and Gentiles gathered to follow Jesus – was formed and moved out from Jerusalem.

 

In prior weeks, we have met Paul, once an angry Jewish leader seeking to quell the movement of Jesus followers at all costs. After his life changing encounter with the risen Christ, he’s become a powerful preacher testifying to the redeeming power of Christ.

 

In prior chapters, Paul has preached primarily to Jewish audiences. His message is consistent from town to town – God’s salvation is available to all through the death and resurrection of Jesus.

 

Today, Paul is in Athens. Athens at this time would have been like a big University town – full of thinkers thinking big thoughts. His audience would have included Jews but also Greeks and probably others representing a range of perspectives. The text paints a picture of Paul deeply distressed by a city filled with so many idols, so many altars for sacrifice and honor. He’s made this point in the local synagogue and in the marketplace. And he’s not getting a great reception for his arguments.

 

We’re told the responses include, “What does this pretentious babbler want to say?”

And, “He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign divinities.”

 

Not the greatest uptake of a message, eh?

 

BUT he IS invited by some who listen to share more.

 

In his message, he connects with what he has observed as he’s walked about the city. He mentions their altar to “an unknown god (with a lower case g) and he connects the God they do not know to the God that he knows well. He uses poetry from their context to help them see God as the source of everything that lives. He teaches using references and allusions that are familiar and to which they can relate.

Is everyone convinced by what he says? No. Not at all.

But some hear and understand and some even join the Jesus movement.

 

In this text, I am struck by a couple of things:

Paul is very clear on who God is, why Jesus matters, and what it means for our lived lives. While we haven’t as a congregation tackled all of his sermons throughout the book of Acts, there is a consistent message that he keeps coming back to.

 

Paul has his own lived experience of God and Christ in which he is deeply rooted. And that rootedness is the basis for his sharing.

 

Paul speaks to folks in a way that connects with their lives. He draws on the culture into which he’s preaching.

 

Finally, his success is NOT absolute – but some lives are changed and that makes all the difference.

 

I wonder how we here at Faith might follow Paul’s lead?

 

Maybe our work begins the way it begins for Paul: with paying attention. Not with contempt for what we see around us, but with curiosity. With a holy kind of noticing. Where are the altars in our own city— the places we pour our time, our money, our worry, our hope? What do we sacrifice to without even realizing it? And where, in the middle of all that, is there an “unknown God” space—an ache or a question or a longing that the world can’t quite name, but that God has been inhabiting all along?

 

And maybe the next step is to keep getting rooted. Paul doesn’t speak out of thin air. He speaks out of encounter—out of a life interrupted by grace, out of prayer and community, out of scars that became his testimony. If we want to bear witness in a world full of competing stories, we cannot do it on borrowed faith alone. We need to know—deep down in our bones—what we have seen God do. We need practices that keep turning us toward Jesus: worship that tells the truth, scripture that stretches us, friendships that hold us, service that softens us, and prayer that steadies us.

 

Because the good news is not just information we deliver; it is love we embody. Sometimes that love will be welcomed. Sometimes it will be dismissed as naïve or strange or “foreign.” And we don’t get to control that. Paul didn’t. Jesus didn’t. But we can choose to speak in ways people can hear—using language of everyday life, honoring the questions that are already present, trusting that God is already closer than breath.

 

So here is a simple invitation for this week: notice one altar in your community, name one longing, and offer one small act of witness. Maybe witness looks like asking a neighbor how they’re really doing. Maybe it looks like showing up for someone who is tired of being invisible. Maybe it looks like telling your own honest story—what you’re carrying, where you’ve found help, why you still come back to the table. We don’t have to win arguments; we are called to love people toward life.

 

Let’s gather at that table now. Just like the church has done from the beginning.

 

We gather at this table not because we have everything figured out, but because God has drawn near. The God who is “not far from each one of us” meets us here—in the mystery of ordinary bread and cup—making us one body, giving us again the life of Christ for the life of the world.

 

This is an open table: Christ our Lord invites all who love him, who earnestly repent, and who seek to live in peace with one another. Inevitably at this table we will meet those whose world view is wildly different; let us seek to live in peace and trust in God’s presence.

 

May it be so. Amen.

Let us prepare for the meal by singing Near to the Heart of God (UMH 472), trusting that the One we seek is already holding us.