To paraphrase a famous American football coach, context isn’t the only thing; it’s everything.  It may be slightly overstated to state “context is everything,” but context matters. 

Let us consider the following question and how we might answer it - Let us consider the following question – “Tell me about your God.”  What would we say? We’ll get to answers, of course, but my first response is to ask another question.  “Who is asking?”  What’s the context?  Who is asking the question?  Is it another follower of Jesus who I’ve known for a long time asking me to tell them about what God is meaning to me right now in my life/what God is doing in my life?  What is the faith position of the person who is asking the question?  What is known about the God the Father, Son, and Spirit?  What’s known about the Bible?  What’s known about God’s salvation plan for humanity and indeed for all of creation? From where are we starting? I’ve thought about this question in the context of Ecclesiastes 1:2, which I had tattooed on my arms almost 7 years ago.  Through those years (maybe about once a year), someone will ask me what it says and what it means.  Context is important, and I know that the words require some context.  There was a man who was doing some brickwork for us a couple of years ago.  He saw them, didn’t say anything to me about them, and later asked Nicole if I were a (ex?) drug addict!  The words on their own might be taken as fairly nihilistic – all is meaningless!  Often I don’t know the person who’s asking – I’ve just met them, or we haven’t even met at all.  That’s fine, of course, I’m always open to a conversation.  My answer in these cases has become “Without God, all the things we chase after or devote ourselves to in this life are meaningless.”  We can go on from there.  We have been made by God to live in loving communion with and service to God.  The way to such a life has been made through Jesus, and off we go.  If you want to know.  If you’re open to hearing.  Some people drop the questioning early on.  Others keep on asking questions, and so we do well to consider how we answer the question, “Tell me about your God.”

Context is important.  The mission is still the same.  To show and tell of good news. The mission never changes.  Paul finds himself in a new context this morning.  Let’s ask for God’s help today as we look at this story.

Paul’s Greek tour continues.  From Philippi, Paul and company go to Thessalonica.  After Thessalonica, Paul and his companions are sent to Berea, where we read that the Jewish people they met there “welcomed the message very eagerly and examined the scriptures every day to see whether these things were so.” They were very engaged!  Some agitators come down from Thessalonica to stir up and incite the crowds.  Silas and Timothy stay behind, while Paul is sent to the coast and from there to Athens.

Politically and economically, Athens was not what it had once been.  The political and economic centre of the area was Corinth.  Athens was still considered a centre of learning and philosophy.  Its people were famous for intellectual curiosity and wanting to know about anything new.  This is the context in which Paul finds himself.  There were a variety of worldviews represented in the marketplace (literally the centre of town - the agora, as it was called).  Paul was distressed to see that the city was full of idols.  We’ve talked about misdirected worship before.  Worship of what has been created rather than the Creator.  It caused Paul to be deeply distressed.

Paul was never one to waste an opportunity to talk about God.  He argued in the synagogue with the Jews there and with those who were devout - interested non-converts.  And also in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there.  The marketplace.  Paul was out there where things were happening.  There is a great lesson for us here, or a reminder at least.  Waiting for people to come to church to hear the good news is not going to get it done.  How do we, as a church, go from here into the marketplace in order for the good news to be known in our words and our deeds?   One of the ways in which we’ve been called by God to do this for over 30 years now is with our Out of the Cold ministry.  Through Out of the Cold, we’ve been enabled to do and speak good news both in church and outside of church – in different contexts.  The result has been a lot of goodness and a lot of blessings.  We’ve had chances through the years to speak to schools, to groups of volunteers and city staff about how we believe things like every single person has been made in the image of God; that there is an innate worth in being so made and that every single person we come across is deserving of love and compassion.

“How do we tell of God?” is a foundational question for us.  We live in an age of so much fear, isolation, anger, vitriol, uncertainty, and rapid change.  The pace of technological change.  Paradigm shifts – foundation changes in how the world works or how the world is seen to work.  The growing income gap.  The question we considered last week – “Who or what will save us?”  Who or what will get me out of the mess I’m in?  How do we speak of God in the midst of all this?

It’s a vital question.  I saw this quote from a writer named Gilbert Randle while I was at our CBOQ Assembly at the beginning of the month – “in the deep cultural paradigm shift, what has not changed are people’s questions of meaning, of faithfulness, of community and of justice.” We have unchanging good news to share about our unchanging God.  What might it look like for us as individuals to take this good news out into the marketplace?  The places where we work and go to school.  The places where we live.  The places in which we are called to proclaim that Jesus is Lord and not Caesar or political power or wealth or fame or financial security or social media popularity or likes or our stuff or obtaining more stuff or our next vacation or…… Rather, we are called to proclaim and live that God alone is worthy of our honour and praise and foundationally speaking our love and adoration and service.  This is the message which we pray God helps us to teach one another.  To teach our youth and our children with our words and our actions.  So Paul is out there.  He’s coming across people.  He’s been in the synagogue, and he’s been in the marketplace, where he is in conversation with Epicureans and Stoics – two of the major philosophical movements of the day.

Now here’s the thing about philosophical movements of the day.  One does not need to be a philosopher or to have taken a first-year philosophy course to be affected by the philosophical movements of the day.  They tend to be pervasive; they get around, even if we don’t consider them or are even aware of them.  We can think of our world and think of the effects of philosophies and belief systems like humanism, individualism, empiricism, rationalism, consumerism, environmentalism, capitalism, socialism and any other ism that we care to describe.  Their relative merits can be debated, and belief in them can be fanatically or very loosely held.  The question of philosophy at heart is “What is wisdom?”  On what do we base our life or what is it that makes life worth living?

Heavy questions, I know.

Being out there means that Paul is aware of the prevailing world views of the day. He’s in conversation with them.  “So tell me what is this thing all about?”  We might think of Epicureans as lovers of food (epicurious.com) and Stoics as… well… stoic.  There was a bit more to it than that.  For Epicureans, if God or gods existed, they were far away from humanity.  This life was all we got.  Their belief system has been summed up like this – “Nothing to fear in God/Nothing to fear in death/Good (pleasure) can be attained/Evil (pain) can be endured.”  The Epicureans.  The Stoics believed that God was found in everything.  God as divine reason that connected all things.  They were big on self-sufficiency, self-control, obedience, duty and reason.  Marcus Aurelius is one of the best-known Stoics.  His Meditations are still pretty popular, particularly if you’re a fan of Russell Crowe in “Gladiator”.    

Paul has been speaking about the good news of Jesus and the resurrection.  Jesus and life!  Some said, “What does this babbler want to say?”  Others said, “He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign divinities?”  They take him to the Areopagus, a hill below the Parthenon and a council that met there.  They ask Paul, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting?  It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means.”

You don’t have to ask Paul twice! Paul stands up and begins to speak.

He tells them that they are very religious.  Some common ground.  Where is our common ground (remembering, of course, that the ground is going to be shaken in a good way)?  There’s a reason we share a sense of the transcendent, that which is outside of ourselves and ordinary experience.  There’s a reason that it feels right and good to be part of a communal experience that is larger than ourselves.  There’s a reason we have a longing for or sense our need for help from beyond ourselves (as Augustine put it, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.”)  Here is a point of contact.  You have these objects of worship, and among them I found one that’s labelled “To an unknown god.”  Note that he doesn’t attack them. He’s not angry at them, despite his earlier distress.  Too often, the church starts from a point of anger at misdirected worship.  Remember the reaction of Paul and Barnabas in Lystra when the crowd wanted to worship them!  Their reaction was grief.  It was lament.  It was the tearing of clothes.  Here, Paul tells, “You’re very religious, and as I walked about, I found an altar to the unknown god.”

Then Paul says let me tell you about this unknown god.  Let me make God known to you.

 Paul takes it back to the beginning.  In the beginning, God created… The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth.  He doesn’t live in shrines built by what he created.  God doesn’t need anything from us.  Someone might say, “God must be very needy if God needs all this worship and praise and love.” God doesn’t need anything from us – God has created us to love God and love others.  He himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.  From one ancestor he made us, and he’s not far from each one of us.  “In him we live and move and have our being,” and as one of your own poets has said, “For we too are his offspring.”  Each one of us and everyone you ever come across is made in God’s image and loved by God.  The command now is to repent and turn to God and acknowledge these things, and this is our invitation, and this is good and right and proper because one day a man whom God has appointed will judge the world.  If the thought of God’s judgement scares us we need to consider what side of rightness we are on, because it is in righteousness and justice that all things will one day be made right by this man, who is not named here, and his name is Jesus and we hold all these things in faith and hope, confident assurance of God’s goodness and in the love of Jesus who is risen… 

1. Get behind him.  Follow him.

And hundreds believe! Not quite.  Results are mixed.  Some scoffed.  Others said, “We will hear from you again about this.”    He had done what God called him to do.  Christian proclamation is not to be judged based on numbers, its success in winning people over or the rate of approval of the message.   It’s to be based on faithfulness to the old, old story that here has been told in a new way – given a new frame.   The day is not without result.  At that point, Paul left them.  But some of them joined him and became believers.  They turned.  They accepted the invitation.  Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.

Are you with them?  Paul accepted the invitation when he met the risen Christ on the road to Damascus.  It led to him preaching at the Areopagus.  Who would have thought?  I accepted the invitation first as a child, and it led to me being up here in front of you now.  Who would have thought? What might Christ do in and through us?  What kind of people might Christ make us?  The invitation is there to claim the risen Christ as the one worthy of all your love, all your worship, all your adoration.  If it’s for the first time, then there it is.  If it’s not the first time, the invitation is before us this morning to reclaim Christ as our centre, our cornerstone, our solid ground.  Through the love of God and the power of the Holy Spirit, may these things be true for each and every one of us.

Amen