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I wonder what Paul would have to say to us today after walking around in our culture reflecting upon our objects of worship. In Paul's day usually the only things portrayed publicly by images of persons were gods or rulers. Therefore, I think he would mistake nearly every billboard and every advertisement he saw as an icon of some god. They would lead him assume our gods would be food, radio stations, automobiles, real estate agents, financial institutions, athletes, and underwear models. Some of the same gods would still be around like Nike. He would think that we had a god for every activity in life just like they did in ancient Greece and Rome; gods of partying, wealth, power, sex, family, trades, cities, kingdoms, war, sports, etc. I would also be interested in hearing his thoughts about these handheld smart devices to which we are so glued. Would he think they are a portal into the realm of the gods? I’m certain he would think that we are possessed by them, that through them some unseen powers control us. I suspect that in the end, he would conclude that we are as extremely religious as the Athenians were and be troubled.
Paul described the Athenians as being extremely religious. The Greek word for that basically means an excessive fear or excessive respect of supernatural powers which they called daimones. It’s the word we get our word demon from except to them a daimon could be either benevolent or evil. For us, post- the vivid imagination of Medieval Christianity, we talk about blessed angels and evil demons. But, to the Greeks and Romans the daimones were lesser deities or guiding spirits who could help you or hinder you and even possess you. People believed that the daimones were a present help for the things of daily life because the big gods on Olympus didn’t care. And so, in Athens there were shrines for just about every god and daimon imaginable to which the Athenians went to perform the prescribed rituals in the hopes of keeping the spirits appeased and on their side.
As Paul walked through Athens on a preaching tour, he noticed all these shrines. Among them, he saw a shrine with the inscription “Agnosto Theo”, to an unknown God or an unknowable God. FYI, the Greek word agnosto is the word from which we get our word agnostic. Some philosopher types who heard Paul preach took him up to the Areopagus, “Philosopher's Hill”, for him to present his “new ideas” of Jesus and the Resurrection. He started talking about the shrine to the unknown or unknowable god. He suggested that this God whom they thought of as unknown or unknowable is actually the one true God, the Creator and Lord of Creation who has revealed himself to humanity, indeed, truly made himself known and knowable to humanity in, through, and as Jesus the Jewish Messiah who continues to be knowable to us by means of the Holy Spirit.
Paul hit a core nerve with the Athenians that we would do well to ponder. The reason the Athenians were so extremely religious was that they believed that knowing a god personally was impossible. God and the gods to them were essentially unknowable and could only be managed by rituals or through the help of daimones. A person could have experiences of daimones, but a true honest to God encounter with God or a god was impossible. To the Athenians, encounters with gods were the things that myths were made of similar to how some people say that only the people in the Bible had experiences of God but not us today. Because they believed that gods were ultimately unknowable, they built shrines where they went to perform rituals that were supposed to incite the daimones to regard them favourably and grant their requests.
Returning to our culture, Paul's diagnosis of the Athenians' excessive religious-ness fits us quite well. If Paul were to walk through our cities and countrysides he would see Christian symbology everywhere particularly the crosses people like to wear and think us very committed to Jesus. But he would also wonder why there are all these churches that have become community centers or are just boarded up or have so dwindled off in membership they are about to become community centers. His diagnosis would be that after nearly 2,000 years, even we the disciples of Jesus have bought into the idea that God is ultimately unknowable. We too have become agnostic and because of this, the church is dying and people are yet again seeking spiritual experience by means of the daimones (guiding spirits). Palm readers, spiritual guides, mediums, witches, crystal vendors, marketers of the magic of ancient peoples, and your corner drug dealer all have a guaranteed clientèle these days; and most common to just about everyone are our little handheld portals to the realm of the gods (smartphones). Our culture as a whole, head over heels and foot in mouth, believes God cannot actually be known, but yet we blindly seek something more than “this”, something “beyond” ourselves, that good life that our little portals to the realm of the divine continually advertise and which we hope to experience with every next swipe.
Paul just might tell us that we have a theological problem and by theology I don't mean the academic study of religious beliefs about God or the gods. The word theology means the study or contemplation of one's personal/experiential knowledge of God. In the first couple of centuries of the church, theology was first and foremost the act of prayer and sitting with the awareness of God’s presence and a sense of God’s goodness, faithfulness, love, beauty, and joy. Then in the second place, Christian theology was pondering and talking about how God has made himself known in, through, and as Jesus Christ who continues to make himself known to us by means of the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, theology culminates in our prayerfully pondering that God is the loving communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who has graciously adopted us each into God’s very self so that we know we are God's children just as Jesus is.
Theology works with the basic premise that God is knowable and can be known albeit by revelation. We in our pride and brokenness are prone to create gods in our own images and would not know the True God from a tree apart from God getting a hold of us and shaking us down with an overwhelming sense of God’s love in the face of our having to face ourselves in all our false successes and glorified failures. We are never going to understand God fully, but understandability is not the same thing as knowability. God is knowable. The fact that most Christians think that theology is the academic study of religious beliefs about God or the gods drives home the point that the average Christian believes that God is ultimately unknowable and just a matter of dogmatic belief and rituals.
God is knowable, but not knowable as some sort of experience of the supernatural powers or the daimones. The Christian faith is that, not believes that, the Christian faith is that God has revealed himself to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit unites us to Jesus so that we share in his relationship with the Father. This is what our reading in John is all about. True theology, true spiritual experience is to personally know that God the Father has been steadfastly loving and faithful to you, to me, to all just as Jesus himself knows it and to share in Jesus' own love for and faithfulness to the Father. And, empowered with their loving communion living within us each and in us as a community of faith by the presence of the Holy Spirit we share in the Jesus' mission to go into the world obeying the commandment that we love one another so that the world may know what God looks like and want to enter into the community that bears the image of God the Trinity and come to know God.
Speaking with regard to myself, my personal practice of theology (prayer, sense of God’s presence) culminates in the awareness that I am God’s beloved child. Even when I have thoroughly blown it, God does not abandon me but guides me to grow up and fix it. When the feathers come flying out of left field and then hit the fan and life comes crashing down in hurt, especially then when it seems more apparent that there cannot be a god, God finds me to whisper “You are my beloved son. My delight. I will work this to your good. Sit and rest. Weep, wail, and rant if you need. I’m here. I'll listen.”
Let me share with you one of the first lessons I learned in parenthood. When William was just born, I was in to see my doctor and reflected on that parental fear of absolutely blowing it. He said, “Don’t worry so much about that. You know how you feel about your father. Your son will feel the same way about you.” Through his mistakes, failures, and success, he was still my dad. There’s a bond of love there that’s hard to put words to. And for mother’s I suppose it’s even deeper we little beggars grow inside you and feed off you. It’s a completely unique bond I can't pretend to understand or romanticize.
Not long after that conversation when William was just a few months old it became the pattern that around 5:00 AM he would begin to stir and grumble and complain. We learned that we could usually get another hour of sleep out of him, if one of us went and got him and brought him to bed. After a couple of good kicks to the stomach, he would snuggle in and fall back to sleep. I didn't sleep much for that hour but it was just good to hold him. That bond of love is good. So is the bond of love that we share with God in Christ by the gift of the Holy Spirit. That bond I feel about my son and my daughter, that’s a small taste of how God feels about me, about us all. God is knowable and makes himself known to us by making us to know we are his beloved children. Amen.
