Sermon:  “Air, Flesh, or Stone?”

Prayer:   “May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of our hearts and minds here together be acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.”

I don’t know about you, but the Apostle Paul was not a man I’d like to join me on my summer vacation.  His intensity must have been kind of hard to deal with – as he ends today’s sermon to the Athenians by preaching that “³⁰God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, [but] now commands all people everywhere to repent, ³¹because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness ....”  This is where Paul ends up, by gaining a number of new converts with that seemingly harsh sermon.  It’s kind of hard to imagine – just as it’s hard for most of us to imagine how that other California prophet of “judgment day” got so many people to buy his book and give him money to put up billboards proclaiming May 21^st to be the end of the world.

But to understand it fully, I think it helps to know there have always been prophets of the “Lord’s Day” – from major prophets like Isaiah and Ezekiel to so-called “minor” prophets like Zephaniah and Malachi. Even Jesus and Paul had their say about the end times.  The subject fascinates us – even though the literal resurrection of the body sounds a little weird, or even gross, to most people at first.  It did back then and it does still today.  Even back in ancient times, the idea of people being taken up bodily into heaven – as scripture says Jesus did at the ascension – seemed a bit unlikely.  Ghosts and a spiritual afterlife many people can believe in – even the pagan Greeks had an “Elysion Fields” of paradise – but believing in bodies renewed and changed by a physical resurrection is a whole other thing.  Of that final, great “Day of the Lord” predicted by scripture, Jesus says in the Gospels “none of us knows the day or the hour.”  What miraculous “new creation” awaits us on that day, no one can know. 

But the renewal of human bodies in this life, we do know about.  So the real scandal of the Good News of Jesus Christ – God’s Holy Word made flesh – is the flesh-made-divine part of the resurrection story.  That scandalized most Greeks – who believed in a Platonic universe where flesh was profane and spirit was divine.  The two were separate but not equal.  The world of ideas was considered superior to the world of matter.  The Jews, while they believed all Creation was good, believed that the Holy One properly belonged in God’s Temple in Jerusalem – the Lord did not go walking around in the human flesh of a carpenter from Nazareth, much less in his grubby and ill-educated followers who were claiming now to be God’s living and resurrected body as the church.

That’s why Paul, Silas and Timothy got thrown out of two Greek towns already by the leaders of their local synagogues.  They had offended the religious elite and they were on the run – they had taken Paul to Athens to HIDE in the crowd – where we meet him in our scripture today. It was as if Paul had preached in New Milford and Brookfield and got run out of BOTH towns, and ran off to New York City to lay low for a while. Just imagine how Paul’s church members must have felt, after risking their own necks and probably investing their own money in getting him to safety.  He evidently just could not shut up and stop preaching about Jesus and the Good News of the Resurrection.  He couldn’t just take in the sights and enjoy himself like a normal tourist.  Getting up to speak at the Areopagus – which is a big windy boulder at the foot of the Acropolis and the Parthenon – it’s as if he went to Manhattan to disappear into the crowd and then went on all the morning talk shows.  Can you imagine?  This nobody from the seaside town of Tarsus took on some of the greatest thinkers of his day and actually won them over.  After two strike-outs in smaller towns, he makes it big in the big city.

The third time was the charm.  Paul must have figured on getting a better hearing when he preached in the synagogues to his own people – faithful, religious Jews like him whom you might think would want to hear the Good News of the coming of God’s Messiah.  But they didn’t like the threat of new ideas upsetting the status quo of their well-established faith, their so-called “organized religion.”  It makes you wonder if that success at the Areopagus wasn’t a turning point in Paul’s ministry, when he began in earnest his missionary work among the Gentiles.  And aren’t we glad Paul took the Good News on vacation with him to Athens?  Maybe we could do the same this summer.

Sharing the Gospel is not nearly as hard as most of us think.  We don’t all have to be religious scholars and stand up here in a pulpit.  What we can know, and what we can proclaim – because we have witnessed it in our own lives – is that human flesh can be resurrected in THIS life.  Deflated and discouraged, hopeless human flesh can receive new life when the love of Jesus Christ is pressed upon it.  Haven’t we all seen human beings come back to life through the power of God’s grace, unconditional holy love and forgiveness?  We love because we first were loved, before we did anything to deserve it.  Sometimes God’s grace arrives in the simple breaking of bread – the Protestant “holy casserole” just passing into a home where someone is sick or grieving.  This is the work of the church of Jesus Christ, whom we proclaim to be his risen body in the world.  The Holy Spirit, God’s abundant love, is known to us in human flesh – and the names in our Book of Remembrance bear witness to our experiences of God’s love in the love of wives and husbands, parents and grandparents, aunts, uncles, and friends. We know love best when we have been loved by human flesh – which we proclaim to be precious and holy. 

And so, it is profoundly true what Paul says here to the Athenians, quoting their own philosopher Epimenides from the 6th century BCE.  God is the one in whom we all do “live and move and have our being.”  But the God Christians proclaim is more than simply Spirit.  We proclaim sacred human flesh as the vessel in which Holy Spirit is carried.  It is in flesh that we go through this earthly life – it is in flesh that we “live and move and have our being.”  We proclaim this truth in our corporate worship each week, as we come together to give thanks for all of God’s abundant blessings.  We know that God is not just something theoretical and invisible like air nor something material and permanent like stone.  God is not enclosed in any church or temple BUILDING, but the Holy One is carried in our flesh – living, breathing, changing, even aging and decaying flesh – and this truth is what we proclaim with the ministries of Christ’s church.  As Jesus blessed the skinned knees and runny noses of the little children, Jesus also blessed the lepers and the lame, the bleeding women and even the dead. 

But religious people are often more concerned with formality and propriety than they are with messy humanity.  When I first arrived at my last church – the new associate pastor – my kids were 2 and 5.  And one of my first Sundays, some visitors also had a toddler.  So I got down on the Fellowship Hall floor with my kids and theirs and played what my kids loved – the “push me over” game.  I pretended to not be strong enough to fight them when they jumped on me to push me over.  They loved it.  They squealed with laughter.  But of course, some of the important church members had to take my behavior to the Deacons, because they didn’t think it was “appropriate” for the new pastor to behave like that at church.  But that’s how children know God’s love – in their flesh, in laughter.  They aren’t going to sit still and read the Bible and debate theology.

Because we believe in the power of bodily resurrection, in the truth of God made flesh in Jesus Christ – because we believe in the sacredness of human life, we Christians teach Church School, we feed the hungry, we clothe the naked, we visit the sick.  We don’t just debate religious ideas and go through the motions of religious ritual.  Church is a place where people of flesh come together to breathe, pray, think, and sing together.  It’s also where we pool our money and organize to go out into the world – where we walk to raise money for cancer research, we dance to raise money for mission trips where we take up hammers to build and repair homes for those who are in need. 

“Organized religion” is what ties us one to the other in the traditions and rituals of corporate worship.  We are a community of sacred memory – even people of little or no formal faith usually want some holy words said at a graveside, or over a newborn baby, or on their wedding day.   That is because the love we come to know in flesh is so strong.  We say, quoting John’s first letter, “God is love,” but God is more than airy sentiment – God is love made flesh, that love is something we DO with our bodies. 

So let us give thanks for our call to serve Christ and His church, because this is the place we move air in and out of our flesh in praise of the living God – I love how John’s Revelation predicts that at the end of time that’s all there will be left to do – to join the choirs of angels in songs of endless praise as we become one with the light. 

Thanks be to God for this Good News and for the courage to share it.  Amen.

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Acts of the Apostles 17:16-34

¹⁶While Paul was waiting for [Silas and Timothy] in Athens, he was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols. ¹⁷So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and also in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. ¹⁸Also some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers debated with him. Some said, “What does this babbler want to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign divinities.” (This was because he was telling the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.) ¹⁹So they took him and brought him to the Areopagus and asked him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? ²⁰It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means.” ²¹Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.

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.”

³²When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, “We will hear you again about this.” ³³At that point Paul left them. ³⁴But some of them joined him and became believers, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.