Sermon for the 14th of May - Sixth Sunday of Easter

Lectionary Readings for the Sixth Sunday of Easter

Psalm 66: 7-end
There we rejoiced in him, who rules by his might for ever, whose eyes keep watch on the nations— let the rebellious not exalt themselves. Bless our God, O peoples, let the sound of his praise be heard, who has kept us among the living, and has not let our feet slip. For you, O God, have tested us; you have tried us as silver is tried. You brought us into the net; you laid burdens on our backs; you let people ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water;
yet you have brought us out to a spacious place. I will come into your house with burnt-offerings; I will pay you my vows, those that my lips uttered and my mouth promised when I was in trouble. I will offer to you burnt-offerings of fatlings, with the smoke of the sacrifice of rams; I will make an offering of bulls and goats. Come and hear, all you who fear God, and I will tell what he has done for me. I cried aloud to him, and he was extolled with my tongue. If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. But truly God has listened; he has given heed to the words of my prayer. Blessed be God,
because he has not rejected my prayer or removed his steadfast love from me.

Acts 17: 22-31
Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, ‘Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, “To an unknown god.” What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he 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 him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For “In him we live and move and have our being”; as even some of your own poets have said, “For we too are his offspring.” Since we are God’s offspring, 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. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.’

John 14: 15-21
‘If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you for ever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.
‘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. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.’ Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, ‘Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?’ Jesus answered him, ‘Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; and the word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me. ‘I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. You heard me say to you, “I am going away, and I am coming to you.” If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I. And now I have told you this before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe. I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming. He has no power over me; but I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father. Rise, let us be on our way.

Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter

Thank you again for the opportunity to be with you today! It is a great pleasure, for me. I don't often preface a sermon in this way, but I wanted to be sure to tell you, before I begin, how great an impression this book made on me. In preparation for preaching to you today, because one of the passages is about the great apostle Paul, I read an entire biography of Paul! Just kidding---I had wanted to read this anyway, but in the mysterious timing of things I did actually did just finish reading this. And I wanted to hold it up and show it to you so that, if you are at all interested, you will remember this particular biography. Tom Wright is one of the most brilliant New Testament scholars and theologians writing today. He has written over 70 books! But don't let
that deter you from reading this one. It was inspiring---it brought Paul to life for me-- it made me look at his life from many new angles. So!
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The Areopagus, or Hill of Ares (Mars), stands a few hundred yards to the northwest of the Acropolis, in Athens, where Paul had come, probably late in the year 50. This is where the ruling members of the council that governed Athens met---the archons--- the nine who were elected each year. This was not a debating society of philosophers---Stoics and Epicureans---as some people imagine, but a court. Paul was on trial for the ideas that he had been preaching, and as Tom Wright says, "It was a dangerous moment. It could have gone badly wrong." Paul was being judged, and the outcome of that judgement could have been not only banishment, but even death. The humorous aspect of this is that the Athenians had heard Paul talking about two people, as they thought---Jesus and Anastasis---where they mistook this second word, meaning resurrection in Greek, as the name of Jesus's consort. As in Isis and
Osiris.....
The speech that Luke gives to Paul in the passage we have read today can be read in about two minutes, but Luke had to condense things, in his Gospel. It is likely that Paul spoke to the Athenians for at least two hours; probably more. And although Luke sarcastically comments that the Athenians loved novelty, and it was a fact that many cults and forms of worship were allowed to find their place in their city, it was a tightly limited toleration, always controlled.
There had been another famous trial there, in 399 B. C., four centuries before Paul appeared. It was a very famous trial in the history of the world: the trial of Socrates. And what were the charges against Socrates? Corrupting the young and introducing foreign divinities. After hearing his unapologetic defence of his intention and his acts, the jury was infuriated, and found Socrates guilty by 281 votes to 220. Socrates'

student, Plato, records that his sentence was to drink a cup of hemlock, the dramatic subject of many paintings. So that trial was the precedent for Paul's trial. But this was Paul's supreme, climactic moment, as it has come down to us in Acts. The city where he had grown up, Tarsus, was a crossroads of all the philosophies of the world, and Paul welcomed the chance to use all his exposure to them, all his learning, all his skill. Deeply Jewish, but utterly transformed by his experience on the Damascus Road, Paul rose to the daunting challenge of provoking the Athenians to a radically new way of conceiving God. This was about one single God, both utterly transcendent and inescapably personal. Paul begins his address to the archons with the famous inscription on an Areopagus altar, To an unknown god, and brilliantly uses it to announce that all of Athen's philosophies and cults have only dimly hidden the truth of the One God he now proclaims to them. It is now, in the now-accomplished reality of the Resurrection of the Son of God, this one who loved Paul and died for him, that the full Truth can at last be known by them. The shamefulness of the Cross was in reality a victory. And that victory was already
changing the world. The other quotation Paul uses, For we are his offspring, is by Aratus, a third-century B. C. poet, a Stoic, whose poem from which this line comes was the most widely read poem in the world of that time, after Homer. This Stoic notion of a weak kind of pantheism---we are part of God, God is in all---Paul now uses to say life is not about getting in touch with your inner God-like self, but about responding in love to the God who is already actively seeking you out. And who has ultimately, decisively, demonstrated his love for the world, and for you, by giving over his own Son to a seemingly humiliating death in your own recent memory.

So that Athens, that prided itself on being the capital of wisdom, actually had been waiting for the enlightenment that Paul had this opportunity to present to them. The reaction of the court was to say: We will hear you again about this. And some became believers. So the point of this entire episode in Acts is Resurrection. It has already happened, or it hasn't. It has either already changed the world, or it hasn't. Our two passages for today couldn't contrast themselves more in tone, but they are the same in intensity. Paul is the Jewish zealot, changed utterly by his experience of the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus, on fire now with the reality of the power of Christ's Resurrection; John, the mystic, meditates on the revelation of the love of God as poured out for us in the body of his Son. So what does John have to say about Resurrection? That it will be completed by the gift of the Holy Spirit, sent to take the place of the Son who has indeed Risen. But that this Spirit of Truth is one that the world cannot receive. It cannot, because it does not hear, it does not see, what has already been given to it to hear and see.

But to those who do hear and see, this Truth manifests itself in love. A love that fills our being and directs all our acts. That takes away our fear and gives us peace. If the Resurrection that Paul proclaimed so passionately has changed us, we will respond to God's love for us with an echoing response of love to all whom we meet. We will enact the love of God by the love we demonstrate to our fellow human beings.

If you love me, you will keep my commandments. Love one another as I have loved you. John ends Jesus's discourse to his disciples by these words to them:

Rise, let us be on our way.

The world is out there, waiting to be changed by our passion--our loving passion for our God and for His Christ. The world waits for us to change everything by ourpassionate acts of love. We are already engaged in this mission, but we come here to this place, together, to hear how heroes like Paul were set on fire by the experience of being loved and charged with this mission. And so to be inspired and renewed in our own faith and our own energies, to do the same. Rise, let us be on our way!