What I Preached at the Northern Illinois Synod Professional Leaders Conference

“An Altar to an Unknown God”

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, the one 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 needing anything, since that very God gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.

“From one ancestor God made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and 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 and find God—though indeed God is not far from each one of us. For ‘In God we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are the offspring of God.’

“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 God commands all people everywhere to repent, because God has fixed a day on which to judge the world in righteousness by a man whom God has appointed, and of this God has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead."

At first I felt sorry for the Athenians and their “altar to an unknown god.” After all, our altars proclaim how well we know our God, how much we know about our God. Think of your altar. What does it tell you about God? The altar at LSTC is freestanding because our God is in our midst and not off in some faraway place that we can only reach through a spiritual intercessor. As Paul said, “God is not far from each one of us. For ‘In God we live and move and have our being.’”

Our altar is shaped like a table because our God desires intimate relationship with us, as intimate as eating together. Our table is made of wood to remind us of nature and creation because, as Paul said, God made the world and everything in it; God is Lord of heaven and earth. There is a white cloth on our table to remind us of newness because our God makes all things new.

And when bread and wine are brought to our altar, we remember that, as Paul says, “We are God’s offspring.” God appointed our brother Jesus to suffer with us, to suffer for us. God gave assurance to all by raising Jesus from the dead, and Jesus will come again to judge the world in righteousness. All we need are the Words of Institution, and Paul’s sermon makes quite a Eucharistic Prayer!

Yes, at first I felt sorry for the Athenians and their “altar to an unknown god.” But as I joined Paul in front of the Areopagus, and heard the Apostle addressing not only the Athenians, but also us, I began to envy the people of Athens for their altar. For the Athenians are wise enough to admit that there are things about God they do not know. I wonder: How ready am I to admit that there is so much about God that I still do not know. How ready are we, as leaders and as church, to admit that there is so much about God that we still do not know. Isn’t it Paul that reminds us, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

As we contemplate change and transition, we might do well to set up and spend time praying at an altar to our unknown God. For we do not know how God will reveal Godself in our midst, whether in this place or in the places where we serve or in the places to where the church is being sent. We do not know to what tables our God will invite us. We do not know what the Creator of heaven and earth has in mind to create. And we certainly do not know what new thing God is doing; we don’t know what newness God is bringing.

What we know, all that we know for sure, is that God in Christ keeps bringing new life until no foe may harm us, not even the final foe of tomb and death. Jesus keeps bringing new life until all people, indeed all creation, is raised. God keeps bringing new life until God makes complete what has been accomplished in the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ--the end of all our woe.

That ours is in many ways an unknown God means that, as surely as the Athenians ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals, we should not expect that we know what God is doing and how God is doing it. We should not expect that our established doctrinal understandings and inherited interpretations of scripture will predict the new thing that God has in store. In fact, our understanding may very well be in tension with our experience of the new life that God in Christ brings. This tension is rooted in Christ who, risen from the dead, is not confined either to the Bible or to the past, and is certainly not the slave of our understanding. My colleague Tom Troeger, who teaches preaching at Yale, writes, “We have a technical term for people who do not change--dead. If Christ has not changed since the resurrection, then Christ is no longer alive.”

This kind of talk makes resurrection terrifying before it is empowering because this kind of resurrection gives more freedom to Christ than most believers want their Savior to have. We’re ready to be raised to life as we know it, life as we want it, life as we expect it, and life as we understand it. But Jesus is talking about new life. To proclaim resurrection is to preach the living Christ as more than the once-a-year theme of Easter. Christ’s resurrection opens astonishing possibilities when we give up the delusion that we control reality. Resurrection is the vital ministry that results when a church releases its obsession with doing things as they always have. Resurrection is the future that opens to a society when it comes to terms with its prejudice and injustice. Resurrection is the vision of Christ that is granted us when we release the images we cling to in order to preserve what we hold dear.

Spending time praying at an altar to our unknown God leads us to fold up and put away our precise blueprints for faith, Church, and community, whether in this place or in the places were we serve or in the places to which the Church is going. For, as we spend time praying at an altar to an unknown God, the permanence, autonomy, and authority that we want our faith or Scripture or worship or community or our call to possess give way to the presence, power, and voice of the risen Christ. As we spend time praying at an altar to an unknown God, Christ speaks to us. Christ conveys meaning not only through content but also through the way Jesus speaks and is heard. For the language of new life is spoken not silent. It’s memory is communal not individual, its interpretation is shared not localized. The risen Christ speaks to us and we know that when it comes to the new life God intends, there is so much we just do not know.

And so we listen more than we study. We experience more than we comprehend. We appreciate more than we analyze. But mostly, we remain open to what we don’t know more than we conclude what we know. And the risen Christ comes to us in ways that we never expect but we come to know to be true. For resurrection is not about having all the answers. And neither is leading the church through change and transition. Leading in the power of the resurrection is about being encountered by the living Christ in the places to which we go. And so we pause at an altar in Athens as we spend time together in this place, knowing that Christ will encounter us, but not knowing how.