Let’s say that, like Paul, you find yourself in a new city where people don’t know your theology but instead worship all these other gods, who have statues all over town. And let’s say that you get into a conversation with some of these citizens who want to know what your theology is. What do you say? How do you speak about your theology? What are the words? I mentioned last week that I grew up in the UCC and didn’t know how to articulate my faith outside the walls of my congregation, because I knew that “Christian” meant something different in public than it did in my church.
Paul does something very smart. He starts by listening and looking. He walks all around Athens and looks at all the statues to their various gods. I looked up Greek gods on a website, and there are dozens. A god of the sun, a god of the moon, a good of love, a god of wine, a god of fertility, and on and on. Imagine if you were going off to war: you would have to pray to the god of war, the god of travel, the god of good health, the god of victory, and probably a bunch more. If you had to submit your prayers in writing, the paperwork and bureaucracy would be something like filling out your taxes.
So Paul starts by learning a little bit about all the Greek gods, and then he finds an in: there’s an altar with the inscription “To an unknown God.” Clearly the Greeks are concerned about forgetting some obscure god and having to pay the consequences, so they cover their bets by creating this catch-all altar. And Paul lays claim to it.
Maybe if we were going to introduce our theology to those Greeks, we might start by learning a bit about their gods. And then we might say something like what Paul said. We might say we believe in one God, who created heaven and earth and everything in them. Our God cannot be represented in a statue, cannot be contained in an altar or a synagogue or a church or a mosque. Our God cannot be boxed in. Unlike the Greek gods, our God does not look like a human and, although God is often referred to with male pronouns, God is beyond the concept of gender.
In fact, here’s a big concept about God: God’s body contains within it everything that is, that has ever been, that ever will be. God is both farther than the edge of the universe and closer than our breath—immanent and transcendent. We live and move and have our being in God. We are never apart from God, although sometimes we try to run away or turn our backs or shut God out. And sometimes we can’t hear God.
Augustine, a fifth-century theologian, said, speaking to God,
Since nothing that is could exist without You, You must in some way be in all that is; [therefore also in me, since I am]. . . . I should be nothing, utterly nothing, unless You were in me—or rather unless I were in You “of Whom and by Whom and in Whom are all things.”
This is the God in whom we live and move and have our being. Our God is faithful and loving, full of grace and forgiveness and second chances. Even though God doesn’t need us, God desires to be in relationship with us, perhaps because of how that relationship then centers us in abundant love and impels us to work for what is important not just for our own souls but for the greater good.
As we try to wrap our hearts and minds around this God that cannot be fully known, we often speak of God as having three main components: Creator, Spirit, and Incarnate Christ. These are just a few ways of trying to picture a God who cannot be known or contained. The Creator component made all that is—and continues to birth creation all around us. The Spirit component moves in and among us. We could think of it as Flow or Life Force. And we also have a concept of God being incarnate in human flesh. God was incarnate, Emmanuel, God-with-us, in the form of Jesus, who so embodied God’s love and wisdom and healing power and yearning for justice that he rattled the human powers that be, and they crucified him. But they were trying to crucify God and, as noted earlier, God cannot be contained. So the story of God’s incarnation could not be crucified but continues in each of us down through the centuries to today. We are followers of God through the tradition of Christianity, which tries to embody the teachings of Jesus: to feed the hungry, care for the poor, treat the rest of Creation well, be peacemakers, love each other, work for justice especially of the oppressed and marginalized. And when we do these things from a place of deep relationship with God, we find salvation not only of our own selves but of our community, our environment, even our planet.
Paul says we are all descended from one ancestor, and science affirms that we are indeed all connected. And we are made of the same stardust that comprises everything else: the water, the air, the animals and plants. Our thriving, as individuals and as a species, depends on the thriving of the rest of the planet. What happens to one affects us all, and none can be left behind. So we are concerned and alarmed when we hear that people can’t afford healthcare, that immigrants and brown-skinned citizens are being kidnaped and shipped out of the country or held in subhuman conditions in detention centers or concentration camps, when people can’t access a decent education or affordable housing or come up with enough money to buy food for their kids. We are concerned and alarmed when we hear of people dying in Lebanon, Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, Israel, Russia, Haiti, the Sudan. We are concerned and alarmed when we hear that animal and plant species are going extinct at a vastly accelerated rate because humans have overhunted, overharvested, or destroyed their habitat.
So we volunteer feeding the hungry, we clean up our neighborhoods, we try to eat locally and in-season to decrease our carbon footprint, we care for those we know who are sick or struggling. We plant trees and feed the birds and create wildlife refuges in our yards. We donate to groups that are doing the work of justice and compassion. We do what we can. It is not enough to solve the world’s problems, but it is also not nothing.
Why does it matter to be followers of Jesus and people of God? What difference does it make?
Here’s a roundabout answer. In 1877, seeing the ugliness and destruction of industrialization in the Western world, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a poem called “God’s Grandeur”:
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Ecotheologian Sallie McFague writes, about this poem,
In this poem we have an argument for, a confession of, hope. Hopkins could not envision the destruction of nature that we now know, and which is epitomized in global warming, but the witness of this poem is that no matter how bad thing get, there is hope—not because of human beings or even of nature, but because the power of life and love that was at the beginning of creation is with us still as our source and our savior.
A moment ago I asked, Why does it matter to be followers of Jesus and people of God? What difference does it make? In an age of greed, corruption, planetary destruction, random wars, what does it accomplish to profess faith in God?
We proclaim our God, as Paul did, because even in the midst of destruction, the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. We worship God as our source of hope, the life force, the love force, the creating force that does not give up on humanity even when humanity collectively gives up on God. We make choices. We choose God instead of empire, God instead of greed and brokenness, God as our companion when our hearts break and we despair at the state of the world.
And we find God because we are looking and paying attention. We experience God in the love of community, in the rebirth of spring flowers, in the invitation to serve the greater good even as things are falling apart. These days, when people worship the gods of money, power, media, and greed, we worship a God who continues to show up with love, who continues to create, who continues to offer redemption to all. We worship a God who fills our life with abundance, not in the form of stuff, but in riches of the spirit. This is the unknown god of our times. May we always remain grounded in God. Amen.