Paul Visits The Oprah Show
Acts 17:22-31
by Jim Westmoreland
My uncle Max was a die-hard Roosevelt Democrat whose ulcer flared up the minute anyone suggested voting a split ticket. He was raised Catholic, married in a Unitarian church and attended a Baptist church with his wife, my mom’s sister. My mom gave my dad a pleading “request.” Please don’t talk about politics or religion! I think a lot of families have tried to avoid those topics!
Since the 2008 presidential election began in late 2006 and early 2007, politics and religion have become strange bedfellows. Deciding that conservative evangelicals did not own the rights to talking about God, nearly all of the candidates have made a point of identifying themselves as people of faith, some more comfortably than others.
Not to be left behind, Oprah Winfrey, a one-woman
entertainment conglomerate, has also dabbled strongly in both
religion and politics this year. We know more about her
publicly endorsing and making speeches for fellow Illinoisan,
Barack Obama. Oprah also exemplifies the consumer approach
to religion and to living the good life. She not only hosts a TV
show, a radio show, a production company and several other
shows and entertainment outlets, on March 3, 2008, she began a
10-week spiritual discovery Web Seminar, with Eckhart Tolle,
author of A New Earth, a spiritual self-help guide.
Enormously popular with her audiences, Oprah is a popular personality, who seems to genuinely be interested in helping people through her TV and radio shows, through her humanitarian and charitable foundation work, and through her liberation from traditional Christian beliefs. Tolle, her latest guru to tout, says his philosophy, which includes Buddhist, Christian and Islamic influences, is "not like academic study with new information you have to absorb. Rather, it's about uncovering what's already in you, getting at that deeper level."
You can read more about this on Oprah’s web site or sign up for her web seminar and listed to all the webcasts replayed on your computer. I joined up and have listened to the first two. My response is that Tolle is just trolling for Christians and Muslims by saying they are part of his influence. You don’t have to do much reading or review to realize that his path to being "awakened" is pretty straightforward Buddhism, polished and repackaged, with some New Age Spirituality thrown in for the “I want something different and new” searcher that has made his book a bestseller, after being promoted on Oprah’s book club.
Three years ago I participated on a panel of representatives from churches and various religions in Owensboro. I had two minutes to tell the basic beliefs of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and heard from the Presbyterians, Catholics, Baptists, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Latter Day Saints, Islam, Jewish, Unitarian, Hindu, Buddhism Jain, Wicca and probably a few I missed. We have great diversity in our city. And, I’m sure there are many for whom Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth has a certain appeal.
As I was selecting texts for sermon a few months ago, I read our text for today and thought the situation would be like Paul visiting the Oprah show. Turn with me to Acts 17:22-31.
22 Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, ‘Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. 23 For 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. 24 The 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, 25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. 26 From 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, 27 so 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. 28 For “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.”
29 Since 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. 30 While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, 31 because 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.’
Paul was an evangelist of the early church. Without his work Christianity may have died as an odd sect within Judaism. Paul is responsible for responding to the call to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, which means to go beyond Judaism and go to the whole world, with all of its different religions and preach the good news of God’s love in Jesus Christ. Paul believed that Jesus was God’s self-revealed answer to mankind’s search for the meaning of life. He and the other apostles would not have gone and given their lives and sacrificed such hardship along the way if they had only believed that Jesus was an option one might consider. They believed that Jesus was God and that God had sent them to preach the good news of Jesus Christ to all people.
Of the many memorable stories Luke narrates, Paul's stay in Athens is among the most familiar, and that for good reason. Luke's vivid depiction of Athens and its curiosity-seekers creates a highly dramatic context in which Paul attempts to translate the gospel into language the locals can understand.
Verses 16-21 provide the narrative introduction, sketching Paul's activity in the city as well as his initial perceptions of the Athenians. The speech extends from v. 22 through v. 31, and comprises three sections: first, Paul characterizes the Athenians as very religious people (vv. 22-23a); second, he issues a carefully worded critique of idol-worship (vv. 23b-29); third, he calls for repentance, declares that there will be a time of judgment, and connects that judgment with God's raising "a man" from the dead (vv. 30-31). The scene concludes with a brief narrative of the responses generated by the speech (vv. 32-34).
Luke's narrative introduction immediately identifies the
problem: Paul is distressed that Athens is "full of idols."
Although Athens would scarcely have been Paul's initial
encounter with polytheism, the association of the city with idols
does find confirmation in other writers of the period
. The
Jewish monotheism that pervades Luke-Acts is equally evident
here, both in the choice of words ("idol" is already a derogatory
term) and in the identification of Athens exclusively with its
idols. In our day few would be worshiping things made with
hands, unless we would add best-seller books on religion, or our
own belief and attempts to create our own path to God.
Two things continue to make people uncomfortable with Christianity. First, Christianity is linked to the Jewish insistence on monotheism. They insisted that there was only one God. The prophets of the Old Testament spoke sternly about taking on the gods of the people around them. Most people took on the religious practices of their neighbors. They did not forsake their old gods. They just added whatever new came to them. This is called syncretism. Much of the New Age religion of today is like that. Whoever conquered Israel, whether the Babylonians or the Romans, immediately faced the Jews strong objection to worshiping any other god. It was both their strength and it made them a target.
The other problem that people have had with Christianity is called the Scandal of Particularity. Simply put, the idea that God would come and live among us as a human being is objectionable. To boil it down even farther, to say that our faith is exclusive (that there is only one God) and to say that Jesus is Savior and Lord is too much for a world that wants to pick and choose its own way.
This general audience for Paul's speech consists of any who happen to be present, but it narrows in focus in v. 18 when the Epicureans and Stoics join the debate. The Epicureans and Stoics were prominent among the philosophical schools of Athens. Particularly important in this context is the Epicurean emphasis on freeing humanity from the fear of the gods and the fear of death. Epicureans believed that the gods are utterly removed from human existence, and therefore the Epicureans ridiculed religious piety and said that the goal of human life is pleasure, “eat, drink and be merry.” The Stoics emphasized the cultivation of human virtue as the means to achieving one's goals and achieving independence from the control of the passions.
The speech opens with the conventional direct address to the audience and his introduction, saying, "I see how extremely religious you are in every way." Paul likes to start out affirming and complimenting his audience for any good thing he sees. To understand that there is a distinct difference between Christianity and other religions is not to say that there are not good aspects to be found in them.
Paul tells them that he went through the city of Athens and looked carefully at their objects of worship. One of them had an inscription written on it. “To an unknown god.” Paul told them that was why he was there, to make the unknown god known to them. What follows in vv. 24-29 carefully criticizes idolatry (man-made religion), and it does so in terms that would have been congenial to a gathering dominated by Stoics and Epicureans. Paul begins with an argument from creation; since God created the world and everything in it, it is impossible to imagine that God lives in buildings of human construction or requires assistance from human beings.
As Paul speaks, he moves from the general act of the creation of all things to the specific creation of all humanity. God not only created humankind but determined the parameters of human existence.
The point toward which this portion of the speech drives emerges in vv. 27-28. Humankind exists to seek after God, yet God is not far away "from each one of us." Verse 29 returns to the final indictment of idolatry. Since human beings are from God's own family, and are God's creations, it is simply impossible to imagine that God resembles objects created by human hands. In this argument, the speech reflects much in Jewish tradition of monotheism that finds the notion of idolatry abhorrent and unacceptable.
Up through this point (v. 29), Paul says little that would be uncongenial to his audience, the philosophically curious residents of Athens. With the final section of the speech, however, Paul moves to elements of the gospel with which his audience will disagree. Verse 30 begins by announcing that God has previously overlooked human ignorance (recalling the "unknown god" at the beginning of the speech). There is an urgency of the present time which Paul indicates with the "now" that marks the call for repentance. In other words, something has changed in the human situation "now," something that Luke’s narrative has already identified as God's action in Jesus Christ. That is why Paul is there in Athens. Paul has already been engaging people wherever he could to tell them the story of Jesus. That’s how he got invited to speak to the intelligentsia at the Aeropagus or called “Mars Hill” by the Romans.
"All people everywhere" are commanded to repent. Emphatic language here retrieves the numerous references to "all" in the preceding section of the speech:
v. 24 -- "The God who made the world and everything [Greek: panta] in it . . ."
v. 25 -- ". . . he himself gives to all [Greek: pasi] mortals life and breath and all things [Greek: panta] . . ."
v. 26 -- "From one ancestor he made all [Greek: pan] nations to inhabit the whole [Greek: pantos] earth . . ."
The unity of humankind consists not only in its common creator and common ancestor, but in its common need for repentance.
Verse 31 brings the urgency of the call for repentance into focus: God will judge the world "by a man whom he has appointed." Paul’s focus continues to be on God's actions: as God has created, so God will judge. Judgement will be by one appointed by God, and God “has given us His assurance by raising Him from the dead.”
In this story the Athenians accuse Paul of dabbling in new teachings, when it is they who merely dabble. That feature of the story may have been especially important for Luke's audience by further discrediting idolatry, in that idolatry here keeps company with people who themselves are merely curious and are seriously committed to nothing.
We live in a world that we are discovering has people on many paths to God. There is nothing new in that discovery. Religious diplomacy is never saying no to anything and saying yes to as much as possible. If we say that we are a people of the Bible, we do not find the prophets turning a blind eye and deaf ears to the people’s dabbling with adding on new paths to God. We cannot look at the church and the persecution that it faced in proclaiming belief in one God revealed through Jesus Christ and conclude that they believed Christianity was only a choice among many paths to God.
Faith is ultimately our response to a loving God who reaches out to us. We have heard the story of God’s love demonstrated in coming to the world in the flesh and living among us as a human being we call Jesus. Fully God, fully human! A mystery we cannot explain. Jesus shows us the Father. As much as our limited and finite minds can understand about the infinite God who is beyond our abilities to imagine and understand, we can know through Jesus. God does not come overpowering us, making us to believe in Him. It is up to us to respond and invite Jesus into our hearts and lives.
When Holman Hunt painted his famous picture of Christ outside a door knocking, he showed his picture to a friend before it was publicly exhibited. The friend looked at the kingly Christ seeking entrance to the believers' home through the thick wooden door. Suddenly he said, "Hunt, you've made a terrible mistake here." "What mistake?" the artist asked. "Why, you've painted a door without a handle." "That's not a mistake," Hunt replied. "The door has the handle on the inside."
If Paul were to visit the Oprah show, he’d tell us about a God who created us for His purposes. He’d tell us about loving God with all of our hearts, mind and soul and loving our neighbor as ourselves. He’d tell us we need to repent of our pride and our failure to love God and our neighbor. And, he’d invite us to accept Christ for ourselves. And, perhaps he’d tell us that the handle to the door of our lives is on the inside. Whether we choose to open our hearts to Christ or to scoff and go another path is up to us. Which path are you choosing? Amen.
Century Christian Church, April 27, 2008 - Sermon by Jim Westmoreland
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