Good morning everyone, and Happy Mothers’ Day.
I think it’s kind of interesting that today’s most notable reading is the first one. Paul, who apparently didn’t write the misogynistic letters attributed to him, is preaching in one of the intellectual capitals of his world, a city dedicated to the goddess Athena. He is speaking to the council or court, that meets on the Areopagus — or Hills of Ares, the God of War — just a few hundred yards down the hill from the Acropolis.
According to the verses preceding the one we read today, Paul was concerned by the number of idols he saw in the city. Now, Athens, like most of the rest of Paul’s world, had been conquered by Rome, after being conquered by Sparta. Rome had become the political center of the world, but Athens was still considered a cultural and intellectual hub. Athena was the Goddess of wisdom, warcraft and handicraft. She was not a mother. The Romans called her Minerva.
When Paul said, “The God who made the world and everything in it . . . does not live in shrines made by human hands.” he was standing just below the magnificent Parthenon, which in those days was still fully intact and brightly painted. When he said, “we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals,” he was a short walk from a 40-foot statue of Athena clad in ivory and gold, fashioned by Phidias, the most renowned sculptor of the Golden Age of Greece. For comparison, the nude statue that currently stands in front of the Ferry Building in San Francisco, is 45 feet tall.
Paul was an educated man who had been shown the sites of Athens. I think he was aware of his surroundings and his audience. He also was looking for common ground with the Athenians. In the past, he usually spoke to Jews, or Gentiles who were friendly with Jews, but this time, he was in a meeting space that had nothing to do with a synagogue. He was in a place that was – and is—still renowned for its public architecture, which has influenced the rest of us for thousands of years. He was looking for some other Greek idea that we all could share.
He grasped at the idea of the unknown god as the god who is everything. He also recognized that even some of the Greek poets and philosophers had talked about a single god who not only made everything and everyone, but also is a personal God for each of us. “’In him we live and move and have our being’ as even some of your own poets have said,” he tells them.
At the end of the chapter, we find that a lot of the audience didn’t buy Paul’s talk about Jesus’ resurrection, but some did, including a member of the council and a woman named Demaris. The idea that it was time to repent because the one God had raised a Jewish prophet from the dead in some backwater Roman province . . . .Well, that was a tough sell, especially for people who weren’t primed for a Messiah.
However, it was only about three hundred years later that the Roman world became the Christian world, largely due to the work of Paul and the Apostles, and idols were outlawed. We don’t know the final fate of the great statue of Athena but we have descriptions and copies. Of course, one person’s idol is another person’s is well, another person’s object of veneration.
And despite Paul’s belief that God doesn’t need temples and images, apparently, WE human beings do, because we keep building them. Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro is 124 feet tall. I think our need for shrines and images is one of the ways we humans try to connect with the vastness of our all-seeing, all-being God. We sing, we pray, and perhaps we carry a plastic pocket angel or a silver crucifix. It is one way, I think, for us to “search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him” as Paul says, “though he is not far from each one of us.” That one and only God may seem so distant, but we have only to look to find him next to us.
As a child, I remember a song with the lyric, “the Father up above is looking down with love, so be careful little eyes what you see.” I don’t think I felt I needed another father keeping an eye on me. But as an adult, I came to lean on the presence of a holy one who stood with me through the ups and downs, most often silently, but there.
Amen.