Seeking Beyond Our Grasp

Seeking Beyond Our Grasp - A sermon based upon Acts 17:22-31

Good morning. It is a pleasure to be with you today and share in worship in a different way since I'm usually facing the other direction... And might I say it's quite a different view from this side instead of my rear corner view.

Briefly, for those of you who don't know me, my name is Lavender and I'm a member of St Pauls and being nurtured in the care process of ordination. I'm also a full time chaplain at Children’s Memorial, where I've been for several years now. My seminary training was at Louisville Presbyterian and I graduated 5 years ago this week. And if you can’t tell, in my spare time, I do charity events like the one where I shaved my head 3 weeks ago to raise money for cancer research.

Well, enough about me… How about this scripture? I should say that this passage fascinates me. I mean, here we have Paul walking about Athens, one of the most diverse places in history. And this is a guy who is all about strict adherence to the law so all the idols and shrines throughout the city were truly disturbing to him. But rather than start shaming people and beating them over the head for what he would have judged as sinful, he does something quite different.

Paul says, “I see how very religious you are in every way...” He goes on to honor them for their attempts to seek and understand God even though he believes they have gotten some of it wrong. Next, he connects to a particular shrine the Athenians have built “to an unknown god” and claims that this is the God and creator of all. Then he says that this God actually created us in such a way that we would be compelled to seek the One that breathed life into all creation. Finally, Paul calls for the Athenians to make sure their beliefs are of the Holy when he proclaims that there will come a day that this God of all will judge all.

So, what do we make of this? Well, I think it's safe to say that this passage has much to say to us today. We too live in a culture full of idols and a sense of groping for God. We too need help sorting through what is our idol worship and failed seeking. And we too need to be honored for our attempts rather than shamed and made to feel guilty for being limited.

So, how do we unravel this message? Well, first of all it I think the issue of Paul’s approach is particularly important. He knew that if he were to stand up and condemn the Athenians for what he judged as idolatrous, they would become defensive and shut him out. He knew that it is never through shaming and quilting that genuine change is made. Shame and guilt may coerce behavior but they are not foundations for beliefs. So Paul starts talking to them by honoring their attempts at seeking God and their deep passion around religiosity. He wants them to know that their attempts are worthy and that God has even had grace on our groping and reaching for the Holy even when we come up short.

To me, this is an amazing insight. I mean Think about our own lives… If Paul were to walk into our church, down our streets, and into our homes, what kinds of idols would he see? I dare say that he would see many that span our attempts at seeking something greater than ourselves. Our cars, job titles, the famous people we’ve placed on pedestals, the monuments to ideals that are not quite holy… they are everywhere in our lives. We might be tempted to dismiss many of those idols as ones that represent greed or selfishness. But should we dismiss how they came to be idols? Maybe we should look at what we saw in them that made us lift them up in the first place.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that even though our idols reveal much about our failings and brokenness, they also reveal much about our attempts to fill a God sized void in our lives. If it is that the accumulation of wealth or monuments to immortality are all some of us can claim, then it’s because the appetite for God is so great rather than so small. So, starting from Paul’s model for addressing idolatry in our culture, we would do well when looking at our own lives and the lives of others to start with some grace. We should honor that the emptiness in us is that of a deep yearning for God. Even when we’ve claimed false idols, it was because we wanted so badly to see something greater than us… something bigger and timeless. Guilt and shame won’t reveal God’s true presence but grace and honor sure will.

The second thing I think this passage has for us today is tied up in that yearning and search for God that all too often results in the creation of idols rather than the worship of the holy. Paul tells us “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… 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, 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.”

This is a powerful message to us. The whole reason we need to be grace filled and honor even our failed attempts to search for God is because it is actually God who implanted in us that desire. This passage says we were made in such a way that our whole experience would be marked by the search for God… and that sometimes we would even catch a glimpse or two.

And the way Paul frames this whole thing by connecting them to one of their very own shrines is pretty amazing too. He refers to the shrine “to an unknown god” and tells them that God doesn’t live in things built by our hands because the God that breathed life into all creation is just beyond our grasp and yet never far away.

So if we are made to yearn for and seek God but struggle to do so because it’s somehow beyond our abilities, what does this mean for our lives? Well, it may serve as some good guidance for us in our search. A marker of an idol rather than the Holy might be to realize that our glimpses and experiences of God can never be fully captured and pinned down. If we are somehow trying to recreate an encounter of God or claim a particular path to experiencing God, then we are probably missing the fullness of God.

Also, if God is both beyond yet near, another lesson for our daily lives might be that if someone else has experienced the Holy in a different way, we might do well to seek understanding rather than judgment. With God so full of mystery, there’s likely a whole lot that we just don’t understand but someone else just might. So another marker of our seeking should be humility.

This brings me to a closing point I think this passage is telling us today. Somewhat wrapped up in the first point, Paul proclaims that there will come a day that God will judge us for our searching and what it has yielded in our lives. Now given the recent botched prediction of some sort of rapture or second coming, I think it’s safe to say that we need not concern ourselves with what this judgment will look like or when it will be but rather we should hear the call to be vigilant and continue our journey of seeking here and now.

It is not our job to judge but God’s. Our job is to seek, to journey, to join together in creation, to respect that deep calling of God, and to honor the glimpses of the Holy that we do encounter. Our job is to uphold that desire in one another that is yearning and seeking for something more. We should do this in such a way that even when we get it wrong, we can take that experience and journey with greater clarity rather than being mired in shame and guilt.

Sisters and brothers, today’s scripture passage calls us to be grace-filled with one another when we see the fruits of our yearnings for God rather than shaming of our failings. It calls us to know that God is both beyond our ability to pin down and yet oh so very close. In the midst of that presence, we are invited to be humble in our experience and honor our paths and the paths of others. And we are called to be ever vigilant to weed out idols and false beliefs that would take up the place of God in our lives.

As we leave here today, our calling is to identify those ways we fill our lives with idols, look at what led us to believe in them, and use that yearning to find what is truly Holy. Our calling is also to help others in their attempts to seek and catch glimpses of God. And you know what, I suspect that if we are truly engaged in that work and those relationships, we’ll see God more than we have in a long time. Amen.