Weekly Sermon

Going the Distance

Acts 17:22-32

The Reverend Anne Benefield

Geneva Presbyterian Church, November 3, 2002

Introduction to the scripture: By the 17th Chapter of Acts, Paul has covered a lot of territory. He has been to Philippi, Thessalonica, and Berea. He stirred things up all along the way and had some harrowing experiences. He is now in Athens waiting for his missionary companions, but Paul doesn't stay quiet while he waits. He visits devout Jews, learned philosophers, masses in the market place, and now he stands for examination on the Areopagus, a hilltop where the leaders of Athens meet. Acts 17:22-32 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 time 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." When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, "We will hear you again about this." At that point Paul left them. But some of them joined him and became believers, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them. Prayer: Lord God, awaken us to your presence that we may know through our own experience that you are faithful in caring for all your creation; through the grace of Jesus Christ. Amen The title of this sermon is "Going the Distance" which brings to mind going a long way, but in today's scripture lesson, Paul suggests that the longest journey can be the shortest distance-the journey around and within us. One reason God is doesn't seem real to us is that we look only at remote and distant places for God and not around and within ourselves. Have you ever noticed that the places where we think we can find enlightenment and peace are always located about as far away from where we are as possible? When we think of going on a retreat to grow in the Spirit we think of going to the West Virginia mountains or to a North Carolina beach. When was the last time you heard someone talk about finding fertile ground for nurturing the soul in Washington, D.C.? Perhaps that is one reason so many of us decide that going on a journey in search of God's presence, is simply too much effort. Thinking that an experience of holiness requires some exotic, remote location, we despair of any hope of experiencing God in our own lives before we even get started. Paul's speech before the Athenians dared them to look at the evidence of the divine in their midst-not on those futile shrines they had set up to some "unknown god," but in the words and actions of Jesus, whom God had confirmed as his son by raising him from the dead. Knowing the "unknown god," Paul declared, doesn't take an extended journey or clever philosophical argument. It only takes ear and eye and nose and fingers and tongue for truth. The truth, Paul revealed, had been present among them for a long time. God's design for humanity was outlined in God's creation and defined in the holy Scriptures. Paul rejects the Athenians' vague search for some unknown, out-of-sight god that remains forever evasive. The God Paul knows so well had not only been eternally close, the divine had been underfoot. In the person of Jesus Christ, God had become touchable, audible and visible for every man, woman and child. We have much in common with the ancient Athenians. We are intelligent and educated. We are surrounded by philosophical debates here in the suburbs of the nation's capital. We can spend our lives exploring possible ways to make life meaningful only to find that we have wasted our time. As Paul told the Athenians, God is not far from any of us. God is right here with us. We have but to open our eyes, our hearts, and our minds to God. To find God we need to have three things: a sense of direction, a sense of discovery, and a sense of destiny. We can go off in the wrong direction when we start looking for God's presence and purpose somewhere "out there." Instead of traveling off to some isolated mountaintop or deserted island, remember that Jesus spent the bulk of his spiritual journey, his earthly mission, in the ordinary towns and villages of his native Palestine. He taught and preached and performed miracles in the most humdrum of locations-in neighborhoods, at the docks, in homes filled with noisy kids and everyday chores. Wherever he found himself, Jesus knew he could find God's presence, if he but looked around and within. Years ago, when I was working at the Marble Collegiate Church in New York…so long ago that I hadn't even met John, my husband…I was dating a young man-that's how along ago it was, I was a young woman dating a young man-named Andrew. One weekend when Andrew was going to be out of town, I was going to preach a sermon on finding your purpose. Andrew asked to hear it and I read it to him. I knew he wasn't marrying material from his response to the sermon. The first point of the sermon was the idea of blooming where you are planted. Andrew took exception to that idea. His argument was, "What if your purpose is to live in Paris?" I never read another sermon to him! The fact is that our quest for God begins here and now, on the streets where we walk, in the offices where we work, in the homes where we live. God is right here coaxing us to grow in faith by loving the people we can serve with our own hands-people who need emergency help from F.I.S.H. or the Lord's Table or Martha's Table. And, children who need to be loved into the Christian life. And neighbors we've never even acknowledged. The Lord is among us, but if we don't have a sense of direction we can be looking in all the wrong places. A sense of discovery is important, too. I think that one of the reasons that Jesus held up children as a model for faith is their deep sense of wonder. God's presence is wondrous. Lord Chesterton, the famous author and theologian believed that "God may be the only child left in the universe, and all the rest of us have lost our capacity for joy and wonder, because of sin." Chesterton illustrated the idea by raising the question of how God made daisies. Did God just say "Daisies, be!" or did He do it in a childlike way? What happens when you play peek-a-boo with a child or throw a child in the air or do anything the child likes? Well, it's like Lays Potato Chips, you can't do it just once. The child says, "Do it again! Do it again!" And you do. So, how did God create daisies? Did God just say, "Daisies, be!"? or after God created the first little daisy, did something childlike in the heart of God yell, "Do it again!" So God created daisy number two. And once more, something inside God said, "Do it again!" And daisy number three was created. And then four, five, and six. And each time God clapped and shouted, "Do it again! Do it again! Do it again!" and fifty billion trillion daisies later the great God of the universe is still jumping up and down, clapping and yelling, "Do it again! Do it again! Do it again!" [As told by Tony Campolo, Let Me Tell You a Story: Life Lessons from Unexpected Places and Unlikely People, (Word Publishing, 2000) 11-12]. On our quest to find the God of the universe, we must keep our sense of discovery. God planted a joy in discovery in each of us, but we can be blinder than a person without sight. "A blind man was begging in a city park. Someone approached and asked him whether people were giving generously. The blind man shook a nearly empty tin. "His visitor said to him, 'Let me write something on you card.' The blind man agreed. That evening the visitor returned. 'Well, how were things today?' "The blind man showed him a tin full of money and asked, 'What on earth did you write on that card?' "'Oh,' said the other, 'I merely wrote, "Today is a spring day, and I am blind."'" [Gabriel Daly, "Widening Horizons," The Tablet 244:7811 (31 March 1990), 419-420] God shows himself throughout creation in nature and in human beings. Today is the day the Lord has made. Are we rejoicing and being glad in it? The final thing we need on our journey into faith is a sense of destiny. In his book called Reaching Out, Henri Nouwen posed a question: "What if the events of our history are molding us as a sculptor molds his clay, and if it is only in a careful obedience to these molding hands that we can discover our real vocation and become mature people? What if all the unexpected interruptions are in fact invitations to give up old-fashioned and outmoded styles of living and are opening up new unexplored areas of experience? And finally: What if our history does not prove to be a blind impersonal sequence of events over which we have no control, but rather reveals to us a guiding hand pointing to a personal encounter in which all our hopes and aspirations will reach their fulfillment? Then our life would indeed be different, because then fate becomes opportunity, wounds a warning, and paralysis an invitation to search for deeper sources of vitality." (as quoted by Dan Wakefield, How Do We Know When It's God? (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1999), 198-199.] The amazing thing is that God has placed in us a destiny that is unique and important. We get so busy looking everywhere else for meaning that we forget to look inside ourselves. A grandfather was digging potatoes along with his grandson. After several hours of hard work, the little fellow looked up into his grandfather's face and asked, "Why did you bury all these potatoes in here?" Deep within us God has buried a wonderful destiny. Will we search ourselves for it? I hope so. We will need food for the journey, so let us come to his table. Amen.