Christ on Common Ground

Acts 17:16-28

Sunday, 11 June 2017

Mowbray Presbyterian Church, Cape Town, South Africa

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen.

There is within me a drive to explore what I call the Other: that which is not my own. This drive is embodied in many a way in my life, but I think that it becomes most prominent when I hear stories from people that are willing to share with me a piece of their life and what it means to “be.” I believe that there is always something to learn from the Other, even those with whom we share little in common. I am here to hear your stories and share my own in the hopes that we will grow in our similarities and through our differences. It is through our mutual telling of stories and sharing of life that we will become more fully human.

When we hear stories, we begin to grasp how diverse a place the world really is. John Koenig, an inventor of words, has a Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, in which he defines a new word: “sonder.” Sonder is “the realization that each random passer-by is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.’”

I believe we experience sonder when we hear stories. But I have experienced it just about every day that I have been with you in the Western Cape. I have come to realize that my friends and family in the States continue with their lives to no less a degree in my absence. I am not the protagonist of their lives. Likewise, your lives did not resume with the arrival of my flight on the nineteenth of May. I am not the protagonist of your lives. But at the same time, let us not forget that our stories converge with our Creator.

For the past few years, I have tried to remain aware of sonder in my life. It was not until arriving here that I became aware of sonder’s hallowed relative: the philosophy of Ubuntu. “I am what I am because of who we all are.” This universal interrelatedness recognizes both the diversity and unity of humanity. We need not have the same skin colour, nationality, or socioeconomic background to witness that being human has no requirements or specifics. I truly believe that we each bear a tremendous responsibility in shaping the lives of those with whom we interact, regardless of the strength and scope of our interactions. I am more of what I am—more real, more human, more of the image of God—because of you. As C.S. Lewis put it: “I became my own only when I gave myself to Another.”

What a blessing I have received in the opportunity to travel halfway around the world to join you, my new Mowbray family, in worshipping a God that is fully present here and fully present in my hometown. While we are mere human, living in the time and place that God allotted for our existence, the eternal Trinity is beyond time and beyond place. There is no thing greater than our Lord, who is revealed in all of Creation: from the redwood forests in California to the streets of New York City, from the deepest mines in Johannesburg to the top of Table Mountain.

I’ve been here, with you, for three weeks, which has been enough time to learn some of your names, where to get a good cup of coffee, and on which side of the road I am supposed to drive. I’ve heard bits and pieces to some of your stories, and I look forward to hearing more as our time together continues. And even though I am an outsider looking in, an American in the presence of Africans, we are part of the great family of God. It is because we are human—equal in every way—that I can stand here, share my story, and speak to you as a brother in Christ.

This was Paul’s approach as he visited the Athenians. As we see in Acts 17, to them he preaches the good news that Jesus, as the Church in Southern Africa’s Declaration of Faith puts it, “became human and lived and died and rose in triumph to reconcile both the individual and the world to God, to break down every separating barrier of race, culture or class, and to unite all God’s people into one body” (UPCSA, 2008). Paul arrived as I did, as an outsider seeking to break down walls, to overlook race, culture, and class, and to find the common ground of all people. He was definitely aware of sonder throughout his ministry.

So, Paul was not an imperialist. His message brought life, not death. We should understand cultural diversity to be the manifestation of the Creator’s inspiration in the lives of us mortals and co-creators with Christ and to be, thus, acceptable and pleasing to God. Throughout Paul’s letters and ministry, we see that he did not seek to Judaize the Gentiles. In fact, he essentially says the opposite through the Book of Romans and as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles.

What am trying to say here?

Central to Paul’s mission is his understanding of Christ’s relationship to culture. He says in Romans 2 that “a person is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart—it is spiritual and not literal.” The Gentiles needn’t become physically Jewish to become spiritually Christian. They need not adopt the Jewish culture or the Jewish story. There is no one-size-fits-all way about doing Christianity, because salvation has no bias. Christ died for all, no matter if you are a Jew or a Gentile, black or white, woman or man. Conformity is not Christianity. If we are to believe this, we must understand that each person is their own protagonist. When we see through a lens stained sonder, our worldview expands and starts to reflect the inclusivity of Christ.

Paul enters Athens with faith, hope, and love. In fact, he recognizes, albeit their many objects of worship, that the Athenians are a religious people who have inadvertently worshipped the real God in their shrine to an unknown god. Instead of casting aside the lot of it, Paul extracts from within their idolatry the acceptable worship of Jehovah.

And when Paul is offered the floor, what does he preach? I do not see fire and brimstone in his words. There is no condemnation. Instead, Paul has compassion and preaches appropriation. He even compliments the Athenians for their religiosity. He speaks to Greeks in Greek and to philosophers with logic. This would have surprised the Athenians in the same way as if I were to speak to you this morning in Afrikaans or Xhosa. Because of Paul’s adapting and accepting nature, their curiosity is cultivated.

With their attention drawn, Paul tells them that every person searches for God in God’s time. As I read in a commentary by Johannes Munck, “Instead of pronouncing God’s judgment on those who, in thus arrogantly refusing God and preferring polytheism, had fallen deeper into iniquity, Paul, in the first part of the Areopagus speech, describes God as the bestower of all good gifts, as one very near to humanity who would gladly allow Godself to be found.” We search, we grope, and we find. Paul affords them a space to probe, and in so doing, forgives them their polytheism and invites them to recognize that God “is not far from each one of us. For ‘in God we live and move and have our being.’”

Paul points away from their shrines and into their hearts, because it is from within that we find God. The theological term for this is “imago dei,” which is Latin for “the image of God.” For me, this term demands that we, like Paul, not only recognize that God is within ourselves, but also that God created our enemies. Everything was created by God; the Devil has no power to create; the only power granted to evil was to deform created things from glory. And this is what sin is in our lives: distortion, vanity, chaos. Sin is not creative. Sin is not productive. And yet, we all sin, Christians and non-Christians, Jews and Gentiles, Paul and the Athenians. The only thing that sets us apart is in whom we place our faith.

What I’m trying to say is this: goodness come in my forms, because that which God created is Good, and all things are created by God. Therefore, we must try, though it may be undeniable difficult, to see God-given potential in every person. I think Loaves and Fishes is a great example of ministry done with the image of God on mind. They rehabilitate persons who have fallen into sin. But through love and patience and diligence, people’s lives are turned around. Not every resident leaves Loaves and Fishes a Christian, but they hopefully leave better knowing that they are beautiful creations of God. To reveal the beloved-ness of another is to embody the love of Christ.

So far, I have outlined how Paul saw the Athenians with sonder, through a philosophy of Ubuntu, and with the recognition that all people, without exception, are made in the image of God. I believe that we should strive to do likewise for the Others in our lives. We ought to search for the image of God in our enemies as they search for God. The Christian call is not to transform people to be like us, but to transform people to be like Christ.

This might seem challenging—and so it should be! No two people are the same. And it would be foolish to think that either my Anglican way or your Presbyterian way is the only way to live life according to the will of God. In fact, if we really think Christianity should be done singularly or that the Church could take one form or one denomination or if we were to reduce creation to a uniform, then we would deny the very reason behind our existence. See, our God is a God of communion, of three persons in one. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct members of the Trinity. The Church is one body in one Spirit, but consists of many distinct members, some different from you, some different from me, but all loved by God and saved by Christ Jesus. So, yes, accepting diversity will, at times, be hard. But we must.

Let us now move on to the content of Paul’s speech, specifically his description of God therein. He tells the Athenians that God “made the world and everything in it,” that God reigns as Lord over heaven and earth,” and that God neither “lives in shrines” nor can be served by human hands. Paul’s view of the Divine is extremely high; his proclamation sounds like a well put together Christian creed.

But Paul is not teaching the Greeks a new lesson about God. These statements—that God is the Creator and Giver of Life and in no dependence on humanity—are core tenets of Epicurean and Stoic thought. By explaining that the unknown God fulfills these things, Paul finds common ground between the Christian faith and Greek philosophy. As FF Bruce stated in his commentary on Acts, “Paul consistently endeavours to have as much common ground as possible with his audience.” Paul’s message and Paul’s mode are Hellenised: they reflect the Greek world. Through his adaptability, he reminds his audience of Socrates, one of the greatest philosophers to have lived in Athens. Don’t get me wrong—Paul is still a staunch Jewish Christian, but he becomes for the Greeks what they needed him to be to better find God.

Then Paul goes on to reference the one ancestor from whom all nations were made. He is referring to Adam in Genesis 2:28. The point is not to stress how we are to read the Creation stories. He is actually criticizing the Greeks for being racists. They tended to label themselves as more civilized than and superior to non-Greeks, so much so that they constructed a binary in which you were either a Greek or a barbarian. With this mention of humanity’s humble origins in Adam, Paul undoes the basis from which Greeks elevated themselves. But we, humanity, are united in Adam and in Christ. For in Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek. As it says in Romans 5, “just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned. Death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam. But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many.”

How glorious our equality in Christ! I celebrate redemption as a sinful human being. And I know that I can praise God alongside the saints, alongside women and men who are far holier than I—because the blood of Christ does not discriminate.

Paul shows us how to live in this world. Without disregarding our own perspective, we are called to be willing to dialogue with others so that common ground may be found. First Corinthians 9 says that Paul was to “become all things to all women and men, that he might by all means save some”—so too must we see ourselves in all that we do and say to those who surround us. For they, too, are God’s offspring.

Now, before I mention verse 27, let me address Paul’s use of these next lines, in which I find oh so much beauty. “In God we live and move and have our being…for we too are God’s offspring.” Here’s the thing: these lines were not originally written to reference Christ. No, the Greeks would have understood these words in their original context: as written about Zeus, the king of the Greek pantheon. Paul, thus, takes the Greek understanding of the highest god—that being Zeus—and converts mythology into Christian reality. Instead of Zeus, who is not omnipotent, not omnipresent, and not omniscient, Paul reveals that the unknown god worshipped in Athens is greater yet. It is not Zeus but the unknown God in whom we live and move and find our being. Paul does not discredit the Greeks; he takes what pre-existed and reaffirms that they were on the right track. Sure, “all roads may lead to Rome,” but all hearts lead to God. Paul simply clears the spiritual road on which the Greeks were traveling.

Now, verse 27: “They search for God and perhaps grope for and find God—though indeed the Lord is not far from each one of us.” Paul interprets Greek mythology as a search for the one, true God. In God’s time and in God’s way, through the power of the Spirit, some saw that the unknown God was the answer found. It was predestined that Paul would arrive to the Athenians when he did to share with them the truth that was revealed in and through Christ.

In Romans 1, Paul states that “what can be known about God is plain to us, because God is revealed naturally. Ever since the creation of the world, God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things the Lord has made.” Two important distinctions can be drawn from this fact. One: because of Christ’s redeeming and encompassing love, no culture or people can claim to have exclusive access to God, for God abounds. And two: we all become, through the free gift of salvation, the beloved children of God. God’s being revealed in Creation brings to all an awareness of the Divine. But as William H Willamon puts it in his 1988 commentary, “Something else is needed. Paul mentions the resurrection. In nature things die, decay, decline. Death is death. What is done is done, over and finished, ended. Yet Paul concludes his speech with the assertion that for Christians the resurrection of Jesus is our assurance. Not grass growing in spring, the return of the robin, the opening of the cocoon, or any other naturalistic drivel; the resurrection, something beyond the natural, is the final assurance that this one is ‘Lord of heaven and earth.’”

This is the gospel. It produces life. It offers salvation. It brings about peace. Those who praise the one from whom all blessings flow worship a God that does not find pleasure in pain and a God of which we are all offspring, in whom we live and move and have our being.

And this message, as Paul delivers it to the Athenians, does not demand a unity of culture or the denial of the Greek way of life. No, Paul’s message meets the Greeks where they are. For Christ came not to abolish our diversity, but to accept us in it. When we are willing to see the image of God in the Other, when we realize that they have a story entirely their own, in which we may only be a moment passing, when we embrace sonder, when we live a life Ubuntu—only then do we begin to live into the understanding that God is love.

From common ground, for the Epicureans, Paul preaches that God needs not a thing from God’s Creation; for the Stoics, he preaches that God is the Giver of life; for us, his ministry is recorded throughout the New Testament so that we might live according to the Word as it was spoken through Paul and to Gentile Churches. As the beloved of God, may we continue Paul’s mission in searching for common ground, not to distort or destroy our diversity, but to live fully human in the many ways that being human takes form.

And in a spirit of finding common ground, I would like to close with a quote from the retired South African Anglican Archbishop and social activist Desmond Tutu. He once remarked, “Isn't it amazing that we are all made in God's image, and yet there is so much diversity among God’s people?” May we live with full understanding that each and every one of us is made in the image of our Creator.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.