By the Rev. Dr. Paul S. Nancarrow
This sermon is based on Acts 17:22-31
An audio version of this sermon is available here.
Paul, standing in the Areopagus, facing a crowd that had gathered eagerly to hear the new teaching he brought, said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way.” At least, that’s the way our translation of the Bible this morning puts it. In fact, every single modern translation of the Bible I checked shows Paul talking to the Athenians about their religion. But I respectfully submit that today, May 29, 2011, we need a new translation of that verse. Today, given the way most people most of the time in North America use the words, it would be more accurate to show Paul saying “Athenians, I see that in every way you are very spiritual.”
On Thursday I spent the day at our diocesan Spring Clergy Day, and our speaker for the day was Diana Butler Bass, a researcher and writer on contemporary church trends, and she shared with us a lot of fascinating findings from sociology of religion studies and surveys in recent years. One of these findings had to do with what people today actually mean when they use the words “religious” and “spiritual,” as in “I’m spiritual, not religious.” Now this isn’t what theologians or seminary professors or church leaders say those words mean, but what people-in-the-street (and, probably, people-in-the-pews) intend to mean by them. And what people today mean by “religious” is something that is institutional, organizational, external, impersonal, and mainly concerned with creeds and catechisms and rules and regulations and who is in and who is out. By “spiritual,” on the other hand, most people today mean something that is experiential, connected, personal, inward, open to new ideas and explorations and questions and discoveries, and where you don’t have to sign anybody’s dotted line for anything.
And, given those meanings for those words, it would be more accurate for us to understand what Paul says to the Athenians as “I see that in every way you are very spiritual.” Because what Paul observed in Athens was worship practice that was all about being experiential and connected and personal. As Paul walked through the city he saw the Athenians’ objects of worship: temples and statues and altars and shrines. And the way worship worked in Hellenistic polytheism was that you went to the temple or statue or altar or shrine of whatever god or divinity or power you needed in your life at that particular moment. You didn’t “belong” to the temple of Zeus and “reject” the temple of Hera. You didn’t say “I believe in Apollo, but I don’t believe in Artemis.” You could belong to a mystery cult in your private life, and still go to the public state religious festivals with no qualms or inconsistencies. If you were in business, and you just closed a deal that would bring you a huge profit, you might build a shrine of thanksgiving to Hermes, the patron of commerce. If you were in love with someone who didn’t even know you were alive and you wanted them to fall in love with you, you might build an altar of offering to Aphrodite. If you had something good happen in your life, and you weren’t sure which divinity had sent it to you, you might even build an altar “to the unknown god” — which is exactly what Paul says he saw as he was walking along. In every way, Athenian worship was about connecting your own personal, private, daily, inward experience with the experience of larger powers that could shape and help your life. Or as we today might say, in every way the Athenians were very spiritual.
And what I really love about this story is the way Paul takes the next step: When Paul begins to tell the Athenians the Good News of God in Jesus, he does not begin by rejecting their spirituality. He does not say “You Athenians have been wandering in the trackless wastes of spiritism, but I bring you the true religion; and if you sign on to my creed and my catechism and my rules and my regulations, then you will believe the truth.” No, when Paul tells the Athenians the Good News of God in Jesus, he does it in spiritual terms. “You need to understand,” Paul says, “that God is not like gold or silver or stone, that God is always more than our pictures of God, that the full reality of God can never be captured in any images or statues or shrines or ideas or definitions of God. And God is not far away and distant from us,” Paul says, “God is not sitting on top of Mount Olympus watching us from far away and waiting for us to make mistakes so God can hurl thunderbolts at us. But God is close to us,” Paul says, “God creates everything that is and holds everything in being — including us — and God moves our hearts to search for God, so that everywhere you look you see something of God.” And then Paul quotes a saying some trace to the Greek philosopher Epimenedes: “In him we live and move and have our being.” (Paul quoting Greek philosophy to teach about Jesus! I love it!) God is always already all around us: take a breath, and God is there; touch your beloved, and God is there; think a thought, and God is there. “And,” Paul goes on, “God has appointed a man, Jesus, to show us all in his own flesh what it means for us to be children of God, what it means for us to live our lives always experiencing God’s presence, what it means for us to feel the living God who is behind and beyond all the images. And,” Paul concludes, “as witness to how full our lives can be when we live in God, God raised Jesus from the dead, God gave Jesus a whole new kind of life, and through Jesus gives us a new way of being alive, too.” At each stage of his teaching, Paul presents the Good News of God in Jesus in terms that are experiential, connected, personal, and about inward transformation of life. At each stage, Paul presents the Good News of God in Jesus as a spirituality.
And here’s the kicker: I don’t think Paul did that just as a debating tactic, I don’t think Paul did that just as a marketing strategy to sell the Athenians. I think Paul presented the Good News of God in Jesus as a spirituality because that’s what it is. At its heart, at its root, at its core, Christianity is about experiencing new life in Christ, about connecting with others who share that experience, about personal and inward commitment to a Way of love and compassion and service following Jesus. At its heart Christianity is spiritual. To be sure, Christianity also has a religious dimension. Through the centuries, Christian communities in diverse times and places have evolved institutions and organizations and creeds and catechisms and rules and regulations. To our shame, there have been times and places in Christianity where those institutions and organizations and creeds and catechisms and rules and regulations have been treated as more important than the experiences and connections and persons they were meant to foster. But I think the proper relation between religion and spirituality in the Christian Way is that the external forms of religion are meant to create a sustaining environment, a safe place, a fertile soil, in which the inward experiences of spirituality can grow and unfold. Religion is like the scaffold we climb up to paint the mural of spirituality; religion is like the skeleton that supports the muscles and tissues of the spiritual life. The Nicene Creed, for instance, is not just a set of external propositional statements you have to agree with, but it is a set of instructions for meditating, a set of images for pondering, that can guide the heart to having a certain Christian feeling for God. What we do when we gather here at Trinity for our religious services, for instance, is to connect with one another in an action that is meant to open our spirits to a real and living experience of communion with God and each other in Christ. What Paul tells the Athenians, Paul tells us: the Way of Jesus is a spirituality, which has some religious pieces to help it grow and flourish.
And that focus on Christian spirituality is just as important for us in 2011 as it was for Paul in 51. Many historians and commentators today suggest that our society is a lot like the multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious scene in Hellenistic cities like Athens, and that people today are looking for things not so different from what the Athenians were looking for in the Areopagus. Another statistic Diana Butler Bass shared with us on Thursday showed that 12 years ago, if you asked people whether they were spiritual or religious, 30% would say spiritual, 54% would say religious, and 6% would say both; but that same question asked 2 years ago showed 30% spiritual, 9% religious, and 48% both religious and spiritual. That’s a huge change — and I think it tells us that more and more today people are not satisfied with just the external forms and trappings of religion, but they don’t want to entirely give those up, either; and that more and more people today are wanting some way to hold together the external and the internal, the organizational and the personal, the religious and the spiritual, and to unite them in a living and livable experience of God. And I think that is good news for us, good news for us as Episcopalians, good news for us as Trinitarians — because I think we are uniquely positioned to offer people something that is spiritual and religious. Our Anglican heritage, our Episcopal way of being Christian, is profoundly aware of the link between the external and the internal, always mindful of outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, constantly looking for the appearing of beauty to open up into the feeling of God, deeply committed to serving others as a way of experiencing the compassion of Christ. As Episcopalians here at Trinity Church, we are, at our best, all about practicing our religion for the purpose of growing in our spirituality. That is what we have to offer in our Areopagus today.
Paul said to the Athenians "I see that in every way you are very spiritual — let me tell you about the spirituality of Jesus." May we, in our time of spiritual searching, share the spirituality of Jesus with our world, too. Amen.
This sermon is based on Acts 17:22-31
An audio version of this sermon is available here.
Paul, standing in the Areopagus, facing a crowd that had gathered eagerly to hear the new teaching he brought, said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way.” At least, that’s the way our translation of the Bible this morning puts it. In fact, every single modern translation of the Bible I checked shows Paul talking to the Athenians about their religion. But I respectfully submit that today, May 29, 2011, we need a new translation of that verse. Today, given the way most people most of the time in North America use the words, it would be more accurate to show Paul saying “Athenians, I see that in every way you are very spiritual.”
On Thursday I spent the day at our diocesan Spring Clergy Day, and our speaker for the day was Diana Butler Bass, a researcher and writer on contemporary church trends, and she shared with us a lot of fascinating findings from sociology of religion studies and surveys in recent years. One of these findings had to do with what people today actually mean when they use the words “religious” and “spiritual,” as in “I’m spiritual, not religious.” Now this isn’t what theologians or seminary professors or church leaders say those words mean, but what people-in-the-street (and, probably, people-in-the-pews) intend to mean by them. And what people today mean by “religious” is something that is institutional, organizational, external, impersonal, and mainly concerned with creeds and catechisms and rules and regulations and who is in and who is out. By “spiritual,” on the other hand, most people today mean something that is experiential, connected, personal, inward, open to new ideas and explorations and questions and discoveries, and where you don’t have to sign anybody’s dotted line for anything.
And, given those meanings for those words, it would be more accurate for us to understand what Paul says to the Athenians as “I see that in every way you are very spiritual.” Because what Paul observed in Athens was worship practice that was all about being experiential and connected and personal. As Paul walked through the city he saw the Athenians’ objects of worship: temples and statues and altars and shrines. And the way worship worked in Hellenistic polytheism was that you went to the temple or statue or altar or shrine of whatever god or divinity or power you needed in your life at that particular moment. You didn’t “belong” to the temple of Zeus and “reject” the temple of Hera. You didn’t say “I believe in Apollo, but I don’t believe in Artemis.” You could belong to a mystery cult in your private life, and still go to the public state religious festivals with no qualms or inconsistencies. If you were in business, and you just closed a deal that would bring you a huge profit, you might build a shrine of thanksgiving to Hermes, the patron of commerce. If you were in love with someone who didn’t even know you were alive and you wanted them to fall in love with you, you might build an altar of offering to Aphrodite. If you had something good happen in your life, and you weren’t sure which divinity had sent it to you, you might even build an altar “to the unknown god” — which is exactly what Paul says he saw as he was walking along. In every way, Athenian worship was about connecting your own personal, private, daily, inward experience with the experience of larger powers that could shape and help your life. Or as we today might say, in every way the Athenians were very spiritual.
And what I really love about this story is the way Paul takes the next step: When Paul begins to tell the Athenians the Good News of God in Jesus, he does not begin by rejecting their spirituality. He does not say “You Athenians have been wandering in the trackless wastes of spiritism, but I bring you the true religion; and if you sign on to my creed and my catechism and my rules and my regulations, then you will believe the truth.” No, when Paul tells the Athenians the Good News of God in Jesus, he does it in spiritual terms. “You need to understand,” Paul says, “that God is not like gold or silver or stone, that God is always more than our pictures of God, that the full reality of God can never be captured in any images or statues or shrines or ideas or definitions of God. And God is not far away and distant from us,” Paul says, “God is not sitting on top of Mount Olympus watching us from far away and waiting for us to make mistakes so God can hurl thunderbolts at us. But God is close to us,” Paul says, “God creates everything that is and holds everything in being — including us — and God moves our hearts to search for God, so that everywhere you look you see something of God.” And then Paul quotes a saying some trace to the Greek philosopher Epimenedes: “In him we live and move and have our being.” (Paul quoting Greek philosophy to teach about Jesus! I love it!) God is always already all around us: take a breath, and God is there; touch your beloved, and God is there; think a thought, and God is there. “And,” Paul goes on, “God has appointed a man, Jesus, to show us all in his own flesh what it means for us to be children of God, what it means for us to live our lives always experiencing God’s presence, what it means for us to feel the living God who is behind and beyond all the images. And,” Paul concludes, “as witness to how full our lives can be when we live in God, God raised Jesus from the dead, God gave Jesus a whole new kind of life, and through Jesus gives us a new way of being alive, too.” At each stage of his teaching, Paul presents the Good News of God in Jesus in terms that are experiential, connected, personal, and about inward transformation of life. At each stage, Paul presents the Good News of God in Jesus as a spirituality.
And here’s the kicker: I don’t think Paul did that just as a debating tactic, I don’t think Paul did that just as a marketing strategy to sell the Athenians. I think Paul presented the Good News of God in Jesus as a spirituality because that’s what it is. At its heart, at its root, at its core, Christianity is about experiencing new life in Christ, about connecting with others who share that experience, about personal and inward commitment to a Way of love and compassion and service following Jesus. At its heart Christianity is spiritual. To be sure, Christianity also has a religious dimension. Through the centuries, Christian communities in diverse times and places have evolved institutions and organizations and creeds and catechisms and rules and regulations. To our shame, there have been times and places in Christianity where those institutions and organizations and creeds and catechisms and rules and regulations have been treated as more important than the experiences and connections and persons they were meant to foster. But I think the proper relation between religion and spirituality in the Christian Way is that the external forms of religion are meant to create a sustaining environment, a safe place, a fertile soil, in which the inward experiences of spirituality can grow and unfold. Religion is like the scaffold we climb up to paint the mural of spirituality; religion is like the skeleton that supports the muscles and tissues of the spiritual life. The Nicene Creed, for instance, is not just a set of external propositional statements you have to agree with, but it is a set of instructions for meditating, a set of images for pondering, that can guide the heart to having a certain Christian feeling for God. What we do when we gather here at Trinity for our religious services, for instance, is to connect with one another in an action that is meant to open our spirits to a real and living experience of communion with God and each other in Christ. What Paul tells the Athenians, Paul tells us: the Way of Jesus is a spirituality, which has some religious pieces to help it grow and flourish.
And that focus on Christian spirituality is just as important for us in 2011 as it was for Paul in 51. Many historians and commentators today suggest that our society is a lot like the multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious scene in Hellenistic cities like Athens, and that people today are looking for things not so different from what the Athenians were looking for in the Areopagus. Another statistic Diana Butler Bass shared with us on Thursday showed that 12 years ago, if you asked people whether they were spiritual or religious, 30% would say spiritual, 54% would say religious, and 6% would say both; but that same question asked 2 years ago showed 30% spiritual, 9% religious, and 48% both religious and spiritual. That’s a huge change — and I think it tells us that more and more today people are not satisfied with just the external forms and trappings of religion, but they don’t want to entirely give those up, either; and that more and more people today are wanting some way to hold together the external and the internal, the organizational and the personal, the religious and the spiritual, and to unite them in a living and livable experience of God. And I think that is good news for us, good news for us as Episcopalians, good news for us as Trinitarians — because I think we are uniquely positioned to offer people something that is spiritual and religious. Our Anglican heritage, our Episcopal way of being Christian, is profoundly aware of the link between the external and the internal, always mindful of outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, constantly looking for the appearing of beauty to open up into the feeling of God, deeply committed to serving others as a way of experiencing the compassion of Christ. As Episcopalians here at Trinity Church, we are, at our best, all about practicing our religion for the purpose of growing in our spirituality. That is what we have to offer in our Areopagus today.
Paul said to the Athenians "I see that in every way you are very spiritual — let me tell you about the spirituality of Jesus." May we, in our time of spiritual searching, share the spirituality of Jesus with our world, too. Amen.
