“GOD’S
OFFSPRING”
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 the 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 out 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.”
Imagine if you will your first day in Algebra class. The teacher puts
something up on the board and your first reaction is pure panic. What is on the
board looks simple enough. X+Y=Z. But,
what is that supposed to mean? It doesn’t take long for frustration to
set in. How tempting it is to simply throw up your hands and say “I don’t
get it!” And more importantly, “How am I ever going to figure it
out?”
One of the most dreaded subjects in school seems to be math. When people
try to explain more complicated math to many of us, what we hear is not necessarily coherent language, but may sound more
like the teacher in the Charlie Brown television specials. Algebra, Geometry,
Statistics, Calculus – all of these can be stress inducing and may not make much sense to us. The theologian, Fredrick Buechner, speaks about Algebraic Preaching in his book Whistling in the Dark. He says, “x+y=z If you know the value
of one of the letters, you know something, If you know the value of two, you
can probably figure out the whole thing. If you don’t know the value of
any, you don’t know much.”(5)
What Paul offers in this speech to the Athenians
could easily be an algebraic equation. At first glance all you can see is a bunch
of numbers and letters. One of the reasons that there is the potential for confusion
is that he addresses a pagan audience. This being that he addresses people that
aren’t familiar with the teachings of Jesus or even God as people speak of God in the Jewish tradition. Because the concepts are so foreign to this audience, they easily could have had a similar reaction to
students on the first day of Algebra class. The crowd he is addressing may understand
the unknown God as X. With a little more information, however, Paul is able to
define X to the point that we understand it as God whom we are familiar with. Paul
puts the variables in and the information he tries to convey actually starts to make sense.
Let us look at the
set up for his speech. Paul is walking through Athens and remarks that the residents
of Athens are very religious. Paul
recognizes the religiosity and mentions the statues to an “unknown god”.
Paul does not put down or outright mock these statues as idols. Instead,
Paul uses what already exists in their culture to teach them about the story of God from his tradition. He also speaks of Jesus who he refers to not by name but as –
“a man whom God has appointed who will judge people by their righteousness.” Despite
the fact that these concepts may seem foreign to them, Paul puts them into a context that they might understand. He is trying
to speak their language to get his message across.
In his explanation, Paul uses a poetic reference
from their tradition to say that we are all offspring of God. Can you imagine
that? He speaks of everyone as being God’s offspring. Everyone! This means people on the other side of the world
– including Russians and Iraqis. This means people in our own backyard
– including Catholics and Lutherans and even Unitarians. Wow! No wonder they had difficulty swallowing this concept.
If everyone is God’s offspring, then
Paul and the people listening to him are siblings. Paul picks up on this theme
again later in his letters where we often hear communication addressed to Brothers and Sisters in Christ. In fact, Paul is traveling from city to city meeting his brothers and sisters in Christ, all offspring. How wonderful to truly think of people we are meeting for the first time as our brothers
and sisters in Christ. It offers a whole other level of understanding of our
relationship with people we think of strangers. It also demands a bit more respect
as well as a need to be able to communicate effectively with one another.
In this passage Paul gives us an example of
how we can talk to others, our siblings of God, about our beliefs if they people don’t share the same tradition. Certainly, you have friends who don’t go to church, aren’t affiliated
with a church or may not even have grown up around a church. To these people
church can be a foreign language. How are they supposed to understand what is
going on if what we are saying just sounds like babble to them? Unfortunately,
the only language people really understand is their own language, and unless we are prepared to translate the ancient truths
into their language that can be easily understood, we might as well save our breath. (119)
Paul is simple translating his message into terms people can understand.
Paul’s message is clear that there is
one God who made the world and everything in it. To Paul it is clear there is
one God and there is Christ who died for our sins. Paul’s translation or
explanation of the variables validates that we need to reassess our language when we enter into discussion with someone with
a faith background someone who may not share our faith background. This is not
something that is unfamiliar to our current situation. More and more we will
find people who do not have any particular faith background.
If
we are all brothers and sisters in Christ, all offspring, according to Paul, then how can we communicate with others effectively? We all descend from the same Godly parentage. How can we make what we offer as worshipping/devout
Christians attractive to those that don’t have a background on which to base this on?
In an age when we try to be respectful of other people’s faith background this text may be difficult. However tempting it might be to stomp our feet and tell people that they are wrong because they don’t
believe exactly as we do; this is not how
effective communication between religions is going to happen. This certainly is not how we will effectively draw people to church who don’t
have a church background..
It can also be very easy to assume that people know what
we are talking about. You would be amazed that some people get anxious in a church
service because they don’t know the Lord’s Prayer or they don’t know when to stand or sit or even which
way to pass the plate when the offering is collected. For people that don’t
know anything about church, Sunday morning in a sanctuary can be a very scary place.
Perhaps we need to be more like Paul was in this speech. Perhaps we need
to rephrase some things so that people understand what is going on.
It could be very easy for the Athenians to ignore this message and return to
their everyday lives. Why bother with this new stuff? They have their things to worship. The reaction to his speech
is, of course, mixed. Some readily dismissed his teachings and some recognized
that this was not the last they’d hear about this stuff, but still moved on. Miraculously
there were even people that took enough stock in what he was saying that they followed him.
What is our job in all of this? Because we have personal relationships with God, our responsibility is to pass on this knowledge to others. We know what some of the variables stand for in the equation, even if each of us is
still working out the intricacies of our own beliefs. Being in relationship with
God means answering the call to share this good news with others. The most important
lesson we take from Paul’s speech to the Athenians is to meet people on whatever level makes the message most accessible
for them. What we do as Christians may indeed seem foreign to people who are
not. Because of where they come from our beliefs and our worship may be puzzling
and we have a responsibility to help clarify the confusion as much as we can. If
it means drawing parallels to knowledge they already have, so be it. If it means
being patient, so be it. Sometimes it is as simple as telling people what something
represents. Reintroducing an idea in layman’s terms can allow for greater
understanding.
In all of this, learning to teach our faith is essential
even as we follow others and continue to learn ourselves. Teaching is part of
knowing the good news. The good news of God and Christ in our lives is frankly
too good not to share. How well we know that learning and teaching matters of faith is not exactly easy. We can remind ourselves, however, that long after we left their classes, that we remember the teachers
and professors that taught a particularly difficult subject. Because of their
approach and patience, by the grace of God we somehow understood. As challenging
as it may be, we too need to learn how to teach the variables and equations of our beliefs.
Marraine C. Kettell – Student Minister
May 1, 2005
