restless until we find the real thing
Wonderings:
I wonder if there’s an area of your life where you feel restless.
I wonder if you’ve ever realized that something that you had invested yourself in cherished was not…the real thing.
Reflection based on these wonderings + the readings assigned for the Sixth Sunday of Easter in Year A of our Lectionary.
Acts 17:22-31; Psalm 66:7-18; John 14:15-21
Let us speak, and listen, held in the presence of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God. Amen.
The Gospel lesson appointed for this Sunday comes from what biblical scholars call the “farewell discourse” from the Gospel according to John. In John’s telling of the story, on the night of the last supper, Jesus had a lot to say. A lot he wanted his disciples to know. A lot he wanted them to remember. Because even though the disciples don’t really grasp it on that night, Jesus is saying farewell to them. Though they don’t know it, these disciples are in the process of becoming apostles. Bearers of the good news, empowered to do what Jesus has done, and, as we heard last week, “to do even greater things than these.”
So these are among Jesus’ last words to these friends. “I will not leave you orphaned. I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.” You are not alone.
One of the fascinating ironies of Christian history is that the most prolific and influential apostle of them all was not there on that night. Was not present for the Last Supper. Did not have a single encounter with Jesus during his life. I’m speaking about the apostle Paul, who we heard about in our first reading, preaching to the Greeks in Athens. And I’d like to focus today on Paul’s speech to the Athenians, and what he has to say about idols.
It’s a beautiful spring day, it’s Happy Mother’s Day—let’s talk about idolatry!
A bit of context here. Because the setting really matters in this passage. Paul is, again, in Athens: the capital of Greek culture. He is speaking in the Areopagus, the Areios Pagos, the hill of the Greek god Ares, maybe better known by his Roman name, Mars: the god of war. But as you probably know, there are a lot of Greek gods, and as Paul has been touring around the city, he has encountered many, many altars to the many gods of that pantheon—Zeus, Artemis, Aphrodite, Hermes, Poseidon, etc, etc, etc. And Paul notes that these Greeks are so pious, so nervously attentive to keeping the gods happy, that they even have an altar where offerings can be made to an unknown god. Like, “um, if you’re out there and we just don’t know your name, um, please don’t be mad and bring us ill fortune, we got you these presents!”
It’s very possible, and maybe even correct, to read Paul’s speech to these Athenians as a sick burn on their false gods, as a takedown of their idolatry—their failure to recognize Paul's God as the one true god: the God of Israel. The God revealed in Jesus.
“The God who made the world and everything in it, God who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is God served by human hands, as though God needed anything, since God…gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.”
That’s pretty straightforward, yeah? The God who made the world and everything in it can not possibly be contained in a graven image, and can’t be propitiated by little gifts. The true and living God can’t be engaged transactionally, because God does not have needs, does not have fears or anxieties to exploit, does not have an ego that needs to be stroked. We connect with this true and living God not through gifts we give, but through the gifts that God gives to us: creation, life in all its forms and seasons, our own breath.
But what caught my attention this week, meditating on these scriptures, is the next thing Paul says to the Athenians.
“From one ancestor God made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and God allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for God and find her—though indeed God is not far from each one of us.”
Paul seems to be suggesting that our lives are made of searching, groping for what is of infinite, unconditional value; we are made for waiting and watching in hopes of catching a glimpse of God. Paul also seems to be suggesting that there’s something inescapably ironic about that quest, because God has always been closer to us than our own heartbeat.
In his writings, Paul often speaks with supreme confidence. He’s like a charismatic politician on the debate stage: he knows how to get the crowd on his side, and how to hit his opponents where it hurts. But he also knows something about the joy of being wrong.
I brought this up a few weeks ago, this phrase from the gay Catholic theologian James Allison, whose work has been a gift to my own faith: Allison writes that Christian life involves the continual rejoicing that we have failed again to see what was right in front of our faces: that the love and grace of God is richer and more surprising than we’d thought. Healthy Christian life involves a lot of chuckling at ourselves, a lot of gentle, forgiving facepalms. For the deathless love of God does not depend on us knowing the right answers. That the enfolding, forgiving grace of God will not be tamed, and “indeed…is not far from each one of us” in this moment, and in every moment—and is coming to us.
Paul spent years actively persecuting followers of Jesus. Last week, we heard the story in which Stephen—this amazing leader in the Jesus movement, who had resurrection power coming out of his pores—is stoned to death. And a man named Saul is there. A Pharisee, zealous for the Law, this Saul cheers on those who are killing Stephen.
And then, one day on the road to Damascus this Saul has an overwhelming experience of the presence of the Risen Jesus. And it blows up his world. He suddenly and completely flips from persecuting the Jesus movement to proclaiming that Jesus Christ is Lord throughout the ancient Mediterranean. And, like many of his ancestors before him who were called into new fidelity and new life, Saul is given a new name: Paul.
So it may be that in this scene Paul is trying to dunk on the Athenians and their backward ways. But it’s also very possible that Paul is speaking to them in the humble knowledge that he has been exactly like them—somebody who was confident that he had this “god stuff” all figured out, and then realized that his image of God was not the real thing. Because the real thing crashed through the image that Paul had crafted, the real thing cracked open the god that he had been anxiously trying to please, and the moment in which he realized that he’d gotten God all wrong was also the moment he felt the grace and forgiveness of God wrap him up and lift him up.
In his life—which is to say, his life-story—Paul shows us the tension that’s inherent in this life of faith, this way of love. This life of faith is a balancing act between giving ourselves to God, giving worship to God—while also being willing to pull apart our ideas about God because we are restless; because our hearts are drawn onward in pursuit of the real, live thing. And we cannot be content with a static image of our own making. Our hearts long to themselves to what is worthy of love: to the living God, to Love itself, and nothing less.
So we are continually constructing and deconstructing images of God, certain only that our images and our words will never be comprehensive, will never compass the totality of what we’re trying to point to when we talk of “God.” We’ll never get it just right. And yet those who have gone before us tell us that the God who is the real thing does not require us to get it right. We don’t have to hold all that inside ourselves; it’s the deathless love we call God that holds us.
For in that love “we live and move and have our being.” We belong here; we belong to that love; and in this moment, and in every moment, we can let go, and let ourselves be held by it.
Amen.
