In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
The first time I read Paul’s reference to finding an altar “to an unknown god” was 30 years ago and it hit me right between the eyes. I’d come back to organized religion after 20 years because I finally realized something was lacking in my life.
I wasn’t alone. In the 17th Century, Blaise Pascal, a mathematician, physicist, and philosopher, concluded that God placed a longing in the human soul that only a relationship with God can satisfy.
During my travels I’ve seen multiple examples of humanity’s attempts to find meaning, to explain the good and bad things in our world and to define and serve higher powers: Hindu temples with their colorful stories including a pantheon of millions of gods, Egyptian temple paintings showing all of the gods in the afterlife, giant statues all over Easter Island, each weighing more than several cars.
(After the natives on Easter Island gave up on the power of the statues they developed the cult of the bird man instead.)
Just now in the 21st century- On my last trip one woman with no religious affiliation showed us a “worry doll” she’d purchased in a local market- a small stuffed female figure you put under your pillow at night after telling her all your worries. I wanted to tell her why I don’t need a worry doll, but in today’s reading Paul tells us something about evangelism.
As Paul says, we’re all looking for God in some form- “perhaps groping for him and finding him”.
Paul doesn’t chastise the Athenians for the altars, shrines and idols throughout the city. On this, his second missionary journey, he’s already left Thessalonica under cover of night and was sent out of Macedonia as well- so maybe that’s why he took a more positive approach.
The Athenians have obviously done a good job covering all their bases by including the altar to the unknown god just in case they left one out.
He praises them for their piety and helps them to realize that the deity they are seeking is the one true God, and in that God “we live and move and have our being”. There is a simpler way, Paul says, than imagining a deity “like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals”.
The way, of course, is Jesus. In the sections of John’s Gospel text before the one we read today, Jesus is in the upper room at the Last Supper delivering a “farewell address” that drops a few bombshells on the apostles. One of them is a traitor. In addition, Peter will deny him. And Jesus is not going to free them from bondage to Rome- in fact he is “going away” to a place where they cannot come. Thomas asks, “Lord we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”
Jesus responds, “I am the way, the truth and the life”.
Today’s Gospel passage is short but simple.
”If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”
And Jesus will leave this world but will leave us with another advocate, the Holy Spirit.
Charles Spurgeon, a 19th-century Baptist preacher, reminds us how hard it would have been for the apostles to accept this news. They had been following Jesus for only a few years and now he was going away and leaving an unseen “Spirit of truth”?
Here’s an excerpt from his sermon on the text, “Let not your hearts be troubled”:
“Let me say it ought to be a great deal easier for you and me to live above heart trouble than it was to the apostles; I mean easier than it was to the apostles at the time when the Saviour spoke to them and for forty days afterwards. You say, ‘How was that?’ Because you have three things which they had not. You have experience of many past troubles out of which you have been delivered.
They had only been converted at the outside three years; they had not known much trouble, for Jesus in the flesh had dwelt among them to screen off troubles from them. Some of you have been converted thirty—forty—what if I say sixty years, and you have had abundance of trouble—you have not been screened from it. Now all this experience ought to make it easier for you to say, ‘My heart shall not be troubled.’ “
Spurgeon also points out that we have received the Holy Spirit and the apostles had not. They didn’t have the writings of the evangelists nor any of the rest of New Testament. It should be easier for us to accept Jesus’ reassurance, ‘Let not your heart be troubled.’
With only one more Sunday remaining between now and Pentecost, let’s remember what the Easter season means to us. Our God is not unknown but is known to us, has lived among us and
