The Unknown God (Notebook #74)

May 1, 2005

Text: Acts 17: 22-31

When Paul arrived in the city of Athens on his missionary journey to Greece, he found in the City Square a statue to an unknown God. The Greek people had no shortage of Gods. Their Gods were quite profuse and continue to be familiar to us today through their mythology.

The Greeks had a little of a “let’s make sure all our bases are covered” mentality, that I sometimes run into on my hospital rounds. On many occasions my patients tell me how they have been visited that day by a Catholic member of the Pastoral Care Department, the S. Baptist preacher in for a visit with a roommate, or ran into a Jewish rabbi while being taken to the x ray department. Now I have shown up, all the bases are covered. Such reasoning, may have resulted in the statue to the unknown God.

Paul was never one to pass up an opportunity to share his favorite story with whoever might listen. Athens was a city full of listeners when it came to philosophy or theology. For such subjects, an audience was always near at hand. So Paul at Athens had without even trying, an audience and a ready made prop – the statute to the unknown God. So Paul started to unwind an intriguing story for his Greek listeners. Telling them that he knew who this unknown God was probably caught a few ears in a flash.

Then Paul told them a story. He told them a story about the God of Israel who was also a god of love, so much love that he sent a son into the world. This god was unlike anything that the Greeks had ever heard of. In their pantheon, humans were hardly anything that any god would ever had any real need for. Humans were the audience at best and occasionally drawn into the God’s lives per the whims and fancies of some God up to mischief or fighting a bout of boredom. Such was the Greek story. But Paul’s story was different and appealing, if not seductive in a way especially when compared to the coldness of the Greek mythology.

When Paul encountered the unknown God in Athens and the unknowing Greeks who lived there, he made visible that which was invisible by telling the story. Paul was practicing a method used by Jesus and learned by both of them from their Jewish teachers. Jesus’ and Paul’s spiritual ancestors had passed the faith on from generation to generation by storytelling. Jesus had taken the art of story telling to another whole level. The parables became for him the story telling method by which he made visible the invisible.

Even though all the people with whom Jesus worked and to whom he ministered were devout, faithful and religious people, their God and the same God who was Jesus’ God was unknown to them. The Greeks had a statue to an unknown God. The Religious folk of Jesus’ day also had their unknown God. Their own God had become unknown to them behind all the layers of ritual, traditions, codes, rules, regulations and cultic worship rites that had grown up between them and their God. The pillar of fire that had led them out of Egypt had become a cold and distant star and the cloud that led them by day had become a wisp of fading mist.

It is in the hearing of stories that we are given opportunity to interface with the divine. Jesus provided that interface through his parables. His parables made the unknown God of mystery and awe a living presence of love and grace. His parables and stories made visible the invisible. That is what Paul was doing in Athens.

There is always the danger that when we wrap ourselves in religiosity that God becomes unknown to us, and what has been revealed becomes hidden again. The Greeks were a very religious folk, the last thing that anyone could ever accuse them of is a lack of religion. Yet they knew there was something missing and erected a statute to the unknown.

When we come to this table, we can become like the Greeks a people worshipping an unknown God. We can do this my turning our religion into a system of rigid rules and regulations. We can do this by stifling the freedom of the spirit and the leadership of the spirit by looking for truth in petrified doctrine, ossified by declaring it holy or sacred.

God is here to be known to us. We cannot know God without knowing ourselves. The Greeks to whom Paul preached knew this truth themselves, as one of their philosophers expressed it, “The unexamined life is the wasted life.”

For every invisible gift of the sacred available at this table there is a parallel visible mortal need.

To be fed at this table, one must know that he or she is hungry and thirsty. If you have never approached this communion without experiencing some emptiness in your gut, some sense that something is missing, some sense that you are not whole in a way that can only find healing through the grace and love of God, then, no matter how many times you have been to this table, you have gone away hungry just as many.

The sacred gift of healing is on this table. God has placed it there and in receiving it God becomes known to you, the invisible has become visible, the intangible has been touched. But if one doesn’t know or refuses to admit one’s own story of brokenness, then the story of wholeness remains a rumor and not the truth that shapes and heals ones life. Perhaps the most common form of brokenness and one of the most entrenched forms is that of thinking “there is nothing wrong with me, I am not broken, I don’t need fixing.” That is a fantasy and as long as one lives with that fantasy, the reality of wholeness also remains a fantasy, a fairytale.

That’s sad. If you are human, you are broken. Most of us have to learn that the hard way. I did. I am not going into all the details, but I hit a point of brokenness in my life and the need to acknowledge it in order to find healing. When I was about thirty years old, I ended up in the hospital for about three days. I was sick. Sick enough to be in the hospital. There was only one problem, the doctors couldn’t find out what was wrong with me. They never did and the best they could do was say, you are sick. Go home, get better and good luck. The church gave me a three month medical leave. For several weeks, I stayed home, recuperating without benefit of medicine or blessing of doctor, and I couldn’t get one verse out of my head, “Physician, heal thyself.” Jesus was taunted by that line. I was haunted by it. I knew there were things, even unpleasant and dangerous things that I would have to look at, or as the Greeks said examine. So that I did because I really didn’t like being sick. The more I looked at my own story, even the ugly parts, the more God became known to me.

The Greeks had a belief system. Paul had a faith system. The Greeks had a whole pantheon of Gods that they believed in. Paul had one God whom he had come to trust. The Greeks had God about whom they had heard. Paul’s God was one with whom he was in constant conversation.

Paul’s God continues to tell us his story. God is still speaking. God speaks through the invitation and welcome to this table. Our presence here is not a reward that has been earned but a gift that has been pro offered. Our presence here is not a stamp of approval on our goodness but a measure and a full measure of our need and sinfulness. This table is a sign that God in Christ has acted towards us with love. Come bring your story, share it with your God and may the unknown God be visible to you.

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