Mars Hill

St. Paul on the Areopagus ("Mars Hill") 

It's still Easter! This coming Sunday will be the Sixth Sunday of Easter. The readings for the day can be found here. This reflection focuses on the reading from Acts 17. 

The “snapshot” we see of St. Paul standing in front of the Areopagus in Athens has always been an image that captures my heart and my imagination. Let me try to explain why.

When you hear “Athens” -  think Cambridge or Berkeley or Ann Arbor. Rome is the center of power in the first century world (think Washington, DC.) But Athens still remains the center of intellectual life, a “college town” if you will. So when Paul goes up on “Mars Hill” (that’s what Areopagus means) think of him in the middle of Harvard Square with all the M.I.T. and Harvard types around him.  

The story actually begins six verses before where the lectionary picks it up at Acts 17:16.  Paul has come to Athens ahead of the Silas and Timothy. He’s there alone, waiting for the others to join him. He is a man with some time to kill in a great and wonderful city with art and street musicians and theater and a Starbucks on every corner.

But Paul hates it. It’s just a fact of life I guess. Some people love college towns and get a feeling of exhilaration. Others find all that talk of Foucault and Derrida a bit much. Paul is “deeply distressed" according to the narrator. He’s deeply distressed because everywhere he looks he sees idols. Don't forget, even though he is now a follower of Jesus, Paul has been raised a Jew, and trained as a Pharisee. He remembers the Torah, and he is not a fan of graven images that claim to be "god."

So he does what Paul does best: he starts arguments. But, of course, in a town like Athens, this is precisely the way to make friends! Academics love to argue! Paul goes into the synagogue and then in to the market place where he argues with the Jews and with the Epicureans and with the Stoics. Some respond to him the way tenured faculty sometimes do. Dismissively. “Who is this babbler?” they ask.

But others are intrigued. Or maybe just amused. Paul may be out of his natural element but his passion and his ability to make the case for what he believes is credible. And Paul is no idiot, to be sure. He's just a faithful Jew who believes that Jesus is Messiah; not a Greek philosopher. 

So that’s how we have come to be on Mars Hill as Paul begins the discourse in this Sunday's reading: “I see how extremely religious you are in every way...” Now as readers of the Bible (and not just lectionary texts) we can hear the irony (and no small amount of sarcasm) in that statement. because we know that when Paul was out walking the streets of Athens he has become distressed. No, deeply distressed. Because he has seen what to him looks like "a city full of idols."

But he doesn’t stand on Mars Hill and say that. He doesn’t stand up and say, “You idolaters. . .” What he says is: “I see you are clearly looking for something. I see that you are seekers…” I get it that you are clearly looking for God. You seem to be religious but not very spiritual! (If, by spiritual, one means allowing the (holy) Spirit of the Living God. to fall afresh on us.) So while there is no doubt irony here, I also hear a genuine desire on Paul's part to meet these people where they are and to take their seeking seriously. Paul notes that in his sightseeing he has found an inscription “to an unknown god” and that becomes his opening. 

Notice Paul doesn’t begin with Jesus. He gets there at the end when he speaks of the One raised from the dead. But he doesn’t begin there. He begins with the notion that there is a God who has created the heavens and the earth. He begins by asserting that all human beings are really one family. And if all people are created in God’s own image, then it follows that all people have some longing and desire to connect with that God, however repressed or distorted that may be.

Paul begins with their yearning. Because he seems to recognize that city full of idols is also a city filled with people who are longing for something more, something real, something authentic and true. So Paul doesn’t tell them they are all going to hell. Nor does he say, “Jesus is the answer.” They haven’t yet asked him a question! 

Rather, he engages them. He points them toward something that conveys more wisdom than Stoicism or Epicureanism have to offer. He identifies the God of creation with the “unknown god," a God who is not made of gold or silver or stone who is bigger than all the art in this city and bigger than the imagination of the greatest scholars in this city, a God who has sent his son into the world to judge and redeem it and has raised him from the dead.

Now at that point, Paul loses some of them. They find resurrection too big a pill to swallow. But we also are told that some of them joined the community of Jesus’ followers; including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris. And some others.

I began my ordained life on a college campus, with some of my closest friends in the Philosophy and English Departments. A number of them could not quite make the leap of faith. But they were deeply curious and true seekers. The philosophers were asking questions of meaning. The lovers of literature knew that there was some great literature in the Bible and they were especially drawn to Job and Ecclesiastes, which ironically get too little “air time” in most congregations.

Those forms of Christianity that dismiss matters of the mind worry me. We are, after all, called to love God not only with our whole hearts and souls, but also with our whole minds. Intellect cannot take us all the way to faith though. There is a “leap” that we must take beyond intellect if we wish to believe. What Thomas the twin teaches us (and what St. Anselm will later remind us of) is that “to believe is to begin to see.” That is, faith opens our eyes to even greater understanding. The goal for Christians is not to prove faith. If you proved it, then it wouldn’t be faith! It would just be another idol! The work of the Church in every age is to help make Christianity credible. It is to not be afraid of the intellect, because faith is a matter for both head and heart.

Practically speaking, I think about what this means for our theology of evangelism. One of my heroes in the history of Missiology is the sixteenth-century Italian Jesuit, Matteo Ricci, who was a missionary to China. Ricci learned the language and the culture of the people among whom he lived. He dressed as a Confucian scholar and came to serve the royal court as a mathematician. (Those crazy Jesuits!) Only then did he begin to speak, much as St. Paul did centuries before on Mars Hill, about the God he knew in Jesus. Ricci assumed, in other words (as St. Paul does in today’s gospel) that the God who created the heavens and the earth and all people from every tribe and language and nation was already at work in those people and in their culture. He was not bringing Truth to people with no truth. Rather, he was building on what they already knew and starting with their yearning.That leads to a very different kind of evangelism  than many of us are accustomed to.

What does all this have to do with us? Too many Episcopalians are scared of being evangelists. Although that is beginning to change with the Presiding Bishop we have right now. Before Michael Curry, the best Episcopal evangelists I saw in the parish I served were the kids. Kids would invite their friends to come to Sunday School with them or a Palm Saturday event to see the live donkey, or to sing in a choir or to come bowling with the Youth Group. They weren’t afraid to extend an invitation to “come and see” without any agenda and without anxiety. And without being afraid that people might mistake them for a fundamentalist in so doing. They invited, and welcomed, and connected their friends to something real.It happened enough times that I begin to understand that they did naturally what many of the adults found so difficult. I think that like the evangelist St. Paul and missionaries like Matteo Ricci and bishops like Michael Curry they got it.

What would our evangelism look like if more of us did? First of all, I think we cannot dismiss the culture out of hand. We can and we must critique it, because there is much in our world that is idolatrous and that is not life-giving. But critique takes understanding and discernment and engagement; not a sense of moral superiority. Where do we see in our own popular culture, in music and in film and in the arts, some sense of yearning? Where do we see “altars to an unknown god?” How do we as Christians learn to speak the language of our mission field, which is no longer as far away as China.

Yet it also seems to me that our culture is shaped by the values of Wall Street and Madison Avenue and Hollywood and the Pentagon. And the continued effects of racism that go to the very roots of this nation’s history.We do need to name what is idolatrous as idolatrous. But can we see, as Paul did on Mars Hill, that the love of money or of power or of nation, while indeed idolatrous, is also a sign of longing for meaning? Can we find the "unknown gods" in our town time and connect with those?

How do we engage this culture and learn to speak the language of modern-day Epicureans and Stoics while also recognizing that we have “good news” to share that goes beyond those other ways of knowing and thinking and being in the world? How do we listen for the yearnings of our friends and neighbors who want something more, and then invite them to "come and see," trusting that God is already at work in their asking of the questions? And trusting, also, that we are part of a faith community that welcomes the big questions?

One of the big challenges that progressive Christians face in this time and place is that we’ve let the fundamentalists define the terms for way too long. Evangelism isn’t about threatening people with hell and handing them a tract. Nor is it about a marketing strategy that teaches us how to grow a congregation by offering people what they want. Rather, evangelism is simply an extension of who we are as baptized persons. It’s part of the deal, a part of our Baptismal promises, that as we grow in faith and learn to articulate our faith we are called to share that good news. Right now, when people are living in isolation and anxiety, they are looking for connections. They are looking for meaning. Those occasions can, if we dare, become our own Mars Hill experiences, as we bear witness to the love of God we have known in Jesus Christ a love that requires all of us: body, mind, and spirit.