Tomb of the Unknown God

This sermon was delivered by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to The First Reformed Church of New Brunswick, NJ, on Sunday, May 14, 2023. It draws from Acts 17:19-28.

Do you know what the hardest question is to ask in the modern Christian church?

I'm sure we could all think of a few really tough ones, right?

There's the deeply existential questions, like "what exactly happens to us when

we die?”

Or we could ask something profoundly complicated in terms of theology, like

"how many angels could dance on the head of a pin," or "can God create a rock

so heavy that no one, even God, could ever lift it?"

Or perhaps we could ask ourselves process questions, like "how do we combat

church decline," or "how do we encourage people to come back to church post-

COVID."

We're never lacking in good questions that we might ask, especially in this extremely unstable, uncertain time in the life and ministry of the universal, organized church. But out of all these questions, untold thousands of things we could ask, what do you think the hardest question actually is to ask? One question, so difficult to wrap our heads around, so emotionally charged that even confronting it, even considering it, sends shivers down our collective, corporate spines?

It's a question as simple as it is terrifying, especially for those of us who have spent our whole lives in the loving embrace of that great, corporate, social, cultural entity that we call the church. And as scary as it might be, I would hardly be fulfilling my calling to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" if I didn't actually ask it, right? I mean, especially after all this setup!

So….here it is.

What, out of all of this, is actually important? Out of all the things we have and do in our organized practice of faith - from ritual and liturgy, to hymns and homilies; from ancient steeples reaching skyward to the crumbling graves of saints long gone by; from the prayers to the preacher, from holy sacred space to the ever-present ham-buns, from Calvin, to confessions, to the holy catholic church; what, out of all these things, actually matters to God?

Yeah. That's the terrifying shiver down the spine I was talking about.

You see, for more than two thousand years, we Christians have invested lifetimes building up our ever-growing idea of what Christ's church, as an institution, should look like in the world. It hasn't always been the same, of course. Sometimes the state has served the church, sometimes the church has served the state; we've even tried to make them the same thing on a few occasions - fun fact, that never goes well. But no matter how many different ways we've tried and failed, this has always been the goal; one institution, one church - broken and fallible, to be sure - but united in general under the idea that the institution, the collected body of Christ in the world, is the most important thing.

So, since we're trying to figure out what's most important to God, why don't we start by first asking what is most important to the hands and feet of Christ here on earth. What are the values that the greater Christian church, in the broadest possible sense, holds most dear?

Well, I think most of us in the church could probably agree that no matter what else we might disagree over, things like unity, fellowship, and the all-encompassing welcome of church mirroring, to the best of our flawed and human ability, the impossible love of almighty God; these are the core values of the church universal.

That's what we'd say, anyways. But we're already here. We've done our baptisms and professions of faith, gotten our membership cards, picked up our tithing envelopes, and are sitting happy and content in the warm embrace of Christian community.

So we know what we mean to value most. But whatever our intentions might be, what do those values look like from the outside?

Now, as many of you know, when I'm not hanging out in this TV, my primary ministry is focused specifically on making space in the church for those who have been cast out, for those who have been unable to find a home in this place where all of us here have been so readily welcomed and lovingly embraced. And if you ask them, ask those who've been shown the door rather than the love of Christ, what it is that the church truly values, what it is that the mainline church, the progressive church even, values most dearly well…they'll tell you. And for all our efforts to follow Christ in being loving, welcoming, even safe spaces, the answer you'll get from outside isn't that our churches value unity, fellowship, love, and acceptance.

They'll tell you about silence. They will tell you about that quiet oppression born of good-natured people seeking unity by avoiding conflict. They'll tell you about the thunderingly silent hypocrisy of good-natured people allowing the vulnerable to be repressed and harmed out of a fear of what it might look like to others if they stood up.

They will tell you stories of silent hurt, and muted pain left ignored.

They will tell you stories of death, wrapped in the love of Christ.

Yeah. This is where it starts to get a bit uncomfortable, doesn't it?

Sir Terry Pratchett, the famous British comedy novelist, once wrote a book entitled "Small Gods," wherein the gods of the various religions in his fictional world just…popped in and out from time to time. They'd set up a religion, get things going, and then just hang out somewhere else with all the other gods, living off the power and praise of their growing faith communities. The story itself follows a god called Om, who pops back into the world one day only to learn that despite being the greatest of all the gods in this world, despite being the centerpiece of the largest institutional religion in the world (not at all modeled after Christianity, certainly), he has precisely one, solitary person who believes in him.

In time of course, this now extremely lower-case-g god discovers how it's possible to have only one believer despite having the largest religion in the world. Over time, the church built in his name grew, and formed itself into an institution, and that institution developed it's own culture, it's own doctrine, indeed it's own identity shaped not by the god who founded it, but by the biases, prejudices, and power-seeking of the humans who ran it. And before too long, and  so subtly that no one really noticed it, the church became its own God, substituted it's own beliefs for the guidance of their deity, who had become to them a very-much unknown God.

Sound familiar?

I remember the first time I read this passage in Acts, and I was amazed by this bit of rhetorical trickery that Paul pulls off in his sermon before the Aeropagus. I thought it was neat how smoothly he connected God the Creator to the existing metaphysical philosophy of the Greeks in Athens. And this kind of logic stands at the head of a great evangelical tradition of philosophical colonialism, substituting the Christian perspective for the native philosophies of those to whom we aim to "spread the gospel."

But the more time I've spent with this, the more I've begun to wonder if Paul was really evangelizing here at all, at least in the way we might understand it today, or if he was trying to speak to something greater, something that may well happen to all of us in the fullness of time.

You see Paul here is delivering his sermon to the Aeropagus, a council that gathered on a hilltop of the same name, just above Athens itself. While at times in history the Aeropagus has served as everything from a grand philosophical forum to a convenient flat-space for rich people to build houses, at this period in history it was serving as something of a philosophical judicatory; it was where people with wild, and perhaps threatening philosophies were brought - forcibly - to answer for the trouble they were stirring up in town. As we see in verse 19, Paul didn't come here by choice; he was taken up and brought before the Aeropagus, and made to answer for his theology; the theology of the resurrected Christ.

It as at this point, perhaps as much for survival as anything, that Paul makes that initial connection between the "unknown God" of Athens, and the resurrected Christ for whom he is speaking. But what's interesting to me is how the idea of the "unknown God" connects to the next passage, where Paul says;

"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, 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."

The Athenians had all of those things, of course; they had shrines made by human hands, servants and attendants all dedicated to the service of their various gods. They had religious institutions every bit as varied and developed as the grab-bag of Christian denominations we have today. And while each of the major and minor Greek gods might have had dozens of priests and temple attendants, collecting tithes from worshippers to rival any megachurch today, the temple of the unknown God was something of an afterthought. It existed, and had the occasional shrine throughout the city, but it's whole purpose was to be a "just in case we accidentally forgot anybody" in the realm of ancient Greek spirituality.

So you'd get none of the pomp and circumstance you'd get for Zeus, Hera, or Aphrodite, not even the smaller institutions of a Helios or a Hestia. Just…the unknown God, waiting in the wings as an afterthought. Remembered, but almost forgotten in the shadow of institutions much larger, and much more socially present.

Like OM in the desert, wondering how he can have a religion but no followers, are we really any different? Is our religion, here, today, really all that different?

Even in the best of times, we have to admit that we spend far more of our effort, focus, and resources on propping up and maintaining our understanding of what church is meant to be than we do actually doing work of Christ, actually following Christ in spirit and in truth, out in the world. Certainly throughout my own lifetime, the true God of the RCA hasn't always been Christ Jesus, it's been building maintenance. Or tithing. Or some mission trip or another. Or building maintenance. Or drafting a new constitution. Or making sure we have the right curriculum for Sunday school.

Or building maintenance.

Unfortunately, the world today has our worship of Christ tied to institutions that swim in that great and terrible sea that is capitalism. Every interaction is quantified, every choice we make reduced to a zero-sum-game of profit and loss, and our churches - often doing the best they can under the circumstances - have the challenge of swimming in this toxic ocean, but somehow not taking on that terrible, poisonous water.

We are meant to be different; to shine Christ's light of care for the poor, support for the suffering, justice for the oppressed, and mercy for those in need into a world where love comes always at a premium. So, in order to do that, we make a compromise. Then another. Then another after that, and before too long the institution has grown, the church has become our focus, and for all we have made, all we have built, we're left with one painful, terrible question;

Are we really following Christ, or have we simply turned our churches into the Tomb of the Unknown God?

Has our pursuit of unity led us to make an idol of silence? Has our pursuit of cultural relevance led us to make an idol out of conformity? Has our determination to show God to others misled us into thinking that we, and we alone, speak for God? And how many have we cast out, intentionally or not, because the golden idol of church unity demanded it?

In even the most progressive, loving sanctuaries throughout modern Christendom, the peak of virtue is often silence, and a lack of conflict; values held so high that the God worshipped in these sanctuaries today bears so little resemblance to the true God of the Bible, the God who is made incarnate in the person of Christ Jesus, that it borders on (if not outright charges boldly into) idolatry. Today, our God is in truth almost unknown; a shadow beside the striding colossus of Republican Jesus ™, while the voiceless and oppressed are quashed beneath the boot of a silent church desperate to grab at that unity which abandons justice in order to enforce an oppressive and complicit silence.

In the end, when we look around and ask ourselves what, out of all of this, God really, truly needs, the honest answer is as painful as it is true;

None of it.

Everything that we have, all that we have become, the church united and universal, God doesn't actually need any of it.

"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, 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."

So that is my question for us today, the question I have for us every day, the one thing I would like us to dwell on this week, is this:

What, really, is it that the Lord requires of us?

He has told you, O mortal, what is good,…to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.

Let's start there.