Acts 2:1-21

Introduction
Yesterday morning, we held a coffee morning at Broomfield. We wanted to support
our missionary charity for the year, the Mission
Aviation Fellowship. You could make paper aeroplanes, take them to the
balcony and throw them in the direction of the communion table. Whoever got
their paper plane the nearest to the front would win a prize.

Mark, our three-year-old, got into the spirit of it,
especially after someone took him to a table and made him a paper plane. Then he
said, “Daddy, I want to play aeroplanes!”

I knew what that meant: with his hands, he would hold my
hands. Then he would run around me faster and faster, and would lift off. I whizzed
him around, and he flew with great joy and abandon. I put him down, and he
laughed. As I stood there dizzy, everybody laughed at me. Jim said, “Quick, get
a camera. I want a picture of the minister looking inebriated!”

“They are filled with new wine,” sneered the cynics at
Pentecost, witnessing the disciples who had been filled not with spirits but
the Holy Spirit.

It’s easy on Pentecost Sunday to be hung up on the
particular manifestations of the Holy Spirit described in Acts 2. Depending on
your personality or your style of faith, you may either loathe or love the
violent wind from heaven, the tongues of fire and the speaking in other
languages. In other sermons and articles, I have examined these things, but
today I want to concentrate on what Pentecost means.

1. After Easter
Pentecost was called so, because it was the fiftieth day after Passover in the
Jewish calendar. For Christians, it therefore comes after Easter. You may think
I have plumbed new depths in stating the obvious, but there is something
important here. Some Christians would like to stop with the joy of Easter
morning, but our journey must also take us through Ascension to Pentecost. As
Ben Witherington III says,

Throughout Acts, the presence of the Spirit is seen as the
distinguishing mark of Christianity – it is what makes a person a Christian.[1]

It isn’t just the question of speaking in tongues, it’s more
fundamental. The Holy Spirit enables us to confess Jesus as Lord[2].
Hence, Peter quotes Joel here:

Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.
(Verse 21)

The Holy Spirit shows us who Jesus truly is. The Spirit shows
how sinful we are and us how wonderful Jesus is. But the Spirit’s work doesn’t
stop there. The Holy Spirit shows us our need of God’s grace, and reveals to us
the saving work of Jesus in his Cross and Resurrection. Believing savingly in
the Easter events requires the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives. To see the
glory of Jesus and worship the Father through him means we need the Holy
Spirit. Neither worship nor evangelism are fundamentally human activities: we
need the Spirit to be at work in order for them to happen.

That’s to put it a challenging way. More positively, if you
have met Jesus, found the forgiveness of sins in his name through the Cross,
begun following him as a disciple and worshipping him as Lord, then the Holy
Spirit must have been at work in your life.

So, assuming we care about worship and evangelism as
Christians, we need to embrace a post-Easter faith, a Pentecost faith. It is a
faith that says, ‘Come, Holy Spirit. Be more at work in us, through us, ahead
of us and beyond us.’ Pentecost faith like that is grateful for all the past
signs of the Spirit’s work, but is hungry and thirsty for more.

2. Harvest
We have a lot of fun at Hatfield Peverel at harvest-time. As well as the Sunday
service and bringing offerings for good causes such as Harvest For The Hungry, we
have our Harvest Supper and Auction. The produce that cannot be given away is
auctioned off, and the proceeds given to our cause for the year. We have great
fun bidding against each other for tins of soup, home made jam and everything
else. Last year, Liz Ward and I enjoyed a ridiculous bidding war against each
other for a pineapple.

Now why am I talking about harvest in May? Well, our Jewish
friends so enjoyed their festivals and celebrations that they had two harvest festivals each year. One was
equivalent to our regular harvest festivals. It was the ingathering of the
crops at the end of the summer. But they also celebrated the arrival in late
Spring of the first fruits. They did this at Pentecost, or to give it its more
Jewish name, the Feast of Weeks, that happened seven weeks after Passover.[3]

Spiritually speaking, we look forward to the great
ingathering harvest at the end of the age, but we have plenty to celebrate in
the meantime. We have our spiritual first fruits. The gift of the Holy Spirit
is the first fruits of God’s harvest. The Spirit is the sign that shows us what
is coming. The Spirit is the first instalment of God’s kingdom in our lives. Here
is the foretaste of all that is to come.

Paul has a similar analogy in two of his letters, where he
describes the Holy Spirit as like a deposit[4].
Just as we pay a deposit on an item, intending to pay the remaining balance, so
the Holy Spirit is God’s initial deposit on us. He has begun his work of
salvation, and – as Paul says in Philippians – he will complete it[5].
If you think of the old Magnus Magnusson catchphrase from Mastermind, “I’ve
started, so I’ll finish”, the gift of the Spirit is God’s promise that he has
started his work in our lives, and he will finish.

So do you see the signs that the Holy Spirit is at work in
your life? Has the Spirit led you to saving faith in Christ? Does the Spirit increase
your vision of Jesus and your love for him, so that you want to worship God and
share God’s love? Is the Holy Spirit slowly making you more like Jesus, even if
you know there are still too many ways in which you are not like him? Does the
Spirit give you the courage and the words to be faithful to Christ under
pressure? If so, these are the first fruits of God’s harvest in you. One day it
will all come to complete fruition. These signs are the deposit God is putting
on your life. One day God will complete it.

3. Law
Like many homes, a weekday morning is frantic in ours, even though I work from
home. Getting one child ready for school and another for pre-school is a mad
rush. It is made even more so by the fact that Rebekah is a dreamer and that
ten minutes before we are due to leave, she and Mark know that their favourite
TV programme starts. Yes, it’s their Spanish language course. (Otherwise known
as Dora The Explorer.)
We are one of the closest families to the school; we are usually one of the
last to arrive. At points of great frustration, we tell Rebekah that if she is
late for school, a police officer will come and tell Mum and Dad off. We have
to try some way of scaring her into obedience! We pull out the same ‘policeman’
line in the car, if she doesn’t want to put on her seat belt or she dares us to
drive too fast.

We are used to ‘law’ as a list of rules, with some enforcers.
There was an ancient Jewish tradition that also associated Pentecost with the
giving of the Law at Sinai. And the Jewish writer Philo, who predates Luke,
wrote:

Then from the midst of the fire that streamed from heaven
there sounded forth to their utter amazement a voice, for the flame became the
articulate speech in the language familiar to the audience.[6]

It makes Sinai – where the Law was given – sound very much
like Acts 2. Pentecost is the Law of the Spirit, rather than the letter of the
Law. Pentecost fulfils Jeremiah’s vision of God’s new covenant, where God will
not write his law on tablets of stone, but inside the hearts of his people[7].

It is what Paul (again!) talked about when he wrote to the
Galatians in his famous words about the fruit of the Spirit. He tells his
readers that if they live by the Spirit, they will not spend their time
gratifying the full range of sinful desires, from immorality to the occult to
rage, envy and drunkenness. The Spirit, however, produces fruit: love, joy,
peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
And his punch line? ‘There is no law against such things.’ Furthermore, ‘If we live
by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.’[8]

In other words, if you want to please God and fulfil his
law, the Holy Spirit enables you to do so. It isn’t just about following a set
of rules, but becoming the kind of person God wants to be. The law of the Spirit
isn’t just about outward compliance, but inner transformation. When we try to
keep the rules in our own strength, we fail miserably, and fall back into
self-centredness. However, Pentecost brings the gift of the Spirit, God’s new
law. Not only does the Spirit lead us to the actions that please God, the Spirit
also enables to do that will of God and bring pleasure to God. If we want to
please God, we need to be open to the Holy Spirit.

Conclusion
I hope the things I’ve described about Pentecost are things for which we all
long in our lives as disciples of Jesus. I hope we long for a post-Easter
Pentecost faith, where the Holy Spirit is always enabling us to respond to
Jesus in repentance, worship and witness. I hope we also have a ‘first fruits’
faith, in which we can see signs of the Spirit’s work, but long for more,
before the final harvest. And I hope we have a love for God’s law that goes
beyond outward conformity to inward renewal, depending on the power of the
Spirit, not our own feebleness, to enjoy pleasing God.

But what to do about it? It’s easy to preach a sermon about
this and leave people feeling condemned. ‘You’re not doing enough of x, you
should do more of y.’ Here’s an alternative way of approaching it.

I came downstairs the other day, and could hear a noise. “Is
the tap running?” I asked Debbie. Sure enough, in the downstairs loo, the cold
tap hadn’t been turned off. Mark can wash his hands after going to the toilet,
but he struggles to turn off some of our taps. If he’s also managed to put the
plug in, the overflow saves us from disaster.

All the blessings of Pentecost are about the overflow of the
Spirit – the rivers of living water flowing from us to others. The disciples
don’t speak in tongues to the crowd:
the crowd overhears. It is an overflow. Pentecost is not the time to beat
ourselves up about our failures. It is the time to seek an overflow of the
Spirit, for then all the other things come as a natural consequence.

This Pentecost, let us ask God to soak us with the Holy Spirit
– not for the sake of spiritual self-gratification, such an ambition is a
contradiction in terms. But let us rather ask God to saturate us with the
Spirit so that we may more truly be worshippers, witnesses, holy people and all
the other things he longs for us to be.

I didn’t preach today. I presided at Holy Communion, while Mike, a Local Preacher led the first part of the service and preached. I was glad it worked out that way this weekend. It meant that on Friday, I had been able to head down to see my parents. I stayed there until last night. Mum has been in more pain again, since her fall just before Christmas.

So now you know why I didn’t post a sermon this weekend on the blog. But it was good to sit under Mike’s ministry this morning. He preached from Isaiah 35 about ‘streams in the desert’. Feeling that ministry here often is a desert made it all the better to hear him.

Actually, it wasn’t just Mike and me leading this morning. Mike has a musician friend called Ian, who also took part. As well as leading one or two songs from the guitar, he also performed a couple for us to meditate upon.

Now I am perfectly used to this approach to worship. I am used enough to an Anglican approach where one person leads the service and another preaches. However, it was interesting to note how nervous some of the congregation were about whether three leaders would ‘work’. Just that simple change put some people outside their familiar context, and temporarily raised anxieties. (I believe the anxiety quickly passed, however.) The frames of reference established by the patterns familiar to us can be powerful things. There have been convulsions at one church I know. The new minister recognised quickly that in a large congregation, the traditional Methodist way of distributing the bread and wine at Holy Communion was unwieldy. He quickly adopted an Anglican ‘continuous flow’ method. I don’t know how he managed the change, but I gather there was pain at the AGM. Familiarity seems to equal normality for many of us. Fear of the unknown is a big factor in many churches.

Yet the Christian faith has something powerful to say to those who are afraid of the unknown. It is the doctrine of hope. I don’t say this glibly, after the fear I faced early last year when a routine urine test showed evidence of blood, and I had to be seen urgently at hospital. However, within routine church life it seems we bind ourselves up with some very mundane familiarities in which we find a degree of security. Discipleship is surely an adventure. In the understandable and important pastoral task of making church a ‘safe place’ for the hurting, we have both found the safety in the wrong things and also forgotten that faith is meant to be dangerous.

It is as if we have become the ‘health and safety’ church. By that I mean that health and safety regulations in our culture have operated in such a way as to remove as many risks as possible from all public activity. Before long, we shall need a risk assessment before getting out of bed in the morning. We have taken this attitude to church. We are the church of the buried single talent.

During Lent this year, I ran a weekly course based on the DVD version of John Ortberg‘s book, ‘If You Want To Walk On Water, You’ve Got To Get Out Of The Boat.’ I had read the book a few years ago, and enjoyed it. What struck me this time was how everything I had ever heard before about the story of Peter walking on the water to Jesus was about his sinking, because he failed to keep his eyes on Jesus. Peter was the failure. But Ortberg makes a great play on the idea that Peter was a success, compared with the other disciples who stayed in the boat. At least he got out of the boat and took a risk of faith, even if he wobbled. Some people, however, gained a big affinity for the other disciples. Traditionally, a boat has been a symbol for the church (think of the World Council of Churches’ logo). We may like to stay in the boat of the church rather than meet Jesus outside the church, on the rough waves.

I sense that one of the calls of Christian leadership today is to expose people to danger. Church needs to be a risky place once more. We need to embrace that before wider society makes it that for us, or before many of us die out. What can we do to make Christianity something that raises the pulse?

Doing that may involve exposing people not merely to risk and danger but to chaos. I am currently reading Alan Roxburgh‘s book ‘The Sky Is Falling‘ from 2005. He says that in a period of great discontinuous social change, people often want to do one of two things. One is to revert to how things were in an earlier time, when all seemed peaceful and ordered. The other is to rush through to the new shape of the future. But, he says, the transitional phase, or ‘liminality’, may last a long time. The only way to come through faithfully is to stay with the chaos until the new order emerges. I have done a lot to try to help congregations realise that we aren’t in Kansas any more, Toto. Through reading Roxburgh I am beginning to understand even more the importance of entering into biblical narratives of liminality, the biblical literature that describes or emanates from times in history when the familiar had been ripped from them, but the new had not yet come. The best example I know of that is the Jewish exile in Babylon. I have preached several times in recent years on Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles (Jeremiah 29). I am beginning to think I may need to engage with that most painful of Psalms, Psalm 137.

Where, then, is hope? Where do we find our security? The moment we pose such questions we should as Christians know the answer. It is in God. It is in God’s character as faithful, even when faithful doesn’t mean he does what we want him to do. Our faith and hope remains in God even though the fig tree may not blossom, as Habakkuk said. Yes, we can look to the long term future for what we believe God may do. But God is true, even before the Second Coming, and whether or not ‘revival’ comes, or whether it comes later rather than sooner. God is God; our church securities are not.

In which Len Hjalmarson develops Alan Hirsch‘s view of mission as Christology – Mission – Ecclesiology: NextReformation » missional rooting. He points out that God has always been on mission, and that God’s work of mission begins with forming Israel. Hence the root of mission is not Christology but the Trinity.

I can only aspire to this: Letters from Kamp Krusty: New Kamp Krusty Feature: “If Jesus Had a Blog”

Acts 17:16-34

Introduction
Voting. However cynical we are about politics, our culture is saturated with
it. We are a democracy, and we vote for our leaders. Local elections are
looming in many parts of our country. Opinion polls attempt to predict who will
win a General Election, and politicians pay close attention to them.

Voting is present in the epidemic of reality shows on the
TV. We decide the fate of a wannabe singer on The
X Factor. We judge the aspirations of someone who wants to be famous for
being famous on Big Brother.
We choose between desperate has-beens, trying to resuscitate their careers on I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here.

Now, if I asked you to take a vote on the Book of Acts, as
to which passage had led to the most discussion, I doubt you would choose today’s
reading. Perhaps you would choose chapter 2, with its account of the first Christian
Pentecost. Maybe you would go for chapter 9, dramatically recounting the
conversion of Saul on the Damascus Road. Both those stories are popular and
controversial. But among the scholars, Paul in Athens wins the vote:

‘In fact, it has attracted more scholarly attention than any
other passage in Acts.’[1]

Apart from the question of how Paul’s speech here relates to
his teaching in his epistles (which I won’t bore you with in a sermon),

‘Luke has presented us here with the fullest example of Paul’s
missionary preaching to a certain kind of Gentile audience (namely, an educated
and rather philosophical pagan one without contacts with the synagogue)’[2].

In that respect, this story commends itself to us, if we are
to have a missionary engagement with our world. It is to some extent a pagan
one, and has little contacts not with the synagogue but with the church. For several
years, I have referred to this passage in that respect. Indeed, I chose to preach
on it only a month after starting here, when I did a series of sermons about
our missionary relationship with a changing world. Today, the Lectionary brings
me back to these verses[3],
and the chance to reflect again on how we exercise our missionary calling
today. What does missionary commitment require of each one of us?

1. Passion
Paul is waiting for some friends. Rather than idle his time away, the first
thing Luke tells us is that

‘While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply
distressed to see that the city was full of idols.’ (Verse 16)

‘Deeply distressed.’ The Greek is the word from which we get
our word ‘paroxysm’. It’s a word for strong negative emotions. The city was
full – no, weighed down – with idols. That it would be upsetting for someone
Jewish like Paul is obvious on one level: the Ten Commandments prohibit graven
images of God, so idols are out. But it was worse in Athens. Jews often alleged
that there was a link between idolatry and immorality. The content of some
Athenian idols would have backed up that claim.[4]
As it’s Sunday morning, I’ll spare you the tawdry details.

We too face a culture that is ignorant of the God and Father
of our Lord Jesus Christ. There are many reasons for this, some of them our
fault as the Church, but the desire (need?) for worship persists, and so we
have idolatry today, some of which is connected to immorality.

We can list today’s idolatries easily: sex, shopping, money,
possessions, and so on. But there are bigger questions for us: does seeing
people worship in this way arouse passion in us as Christ-followers or not? And
if it arouses passion, is it a godly passion?

There are several reactions we can have to contemporary idolatry.
One would be apathy. We see false and unhealthy worship, but can’t be bothered
to make a stand. Either that, or we’re more worried about people’s reactions if
we say something, so fear keeps us quiet.

Another is that we can react passionately, thinking we are
doing so for God, but being quite ugly. Passion turns to judgmentalism.

Or we can be passionate for the wrong reasons. We look at
the numbers flocking to sporting events or the shops on a Sunday, and bewail
our own small numbers. If we’re not careful, our real reason is not a desire to
honour Jesus Christ, but the fear that our little religious club might close. ‘Can
we fill all the vacant jobs here?’ is a poor reason for evangelism.

The passion Paul had was a passion for the glory of Jesus.
If the worship due to his name were being directed elsewhere, even if out of
ignorance rather than deliberate choice, that moved him. He challenges us to
leave behind apathy, anger and selfishness as reactions to idolatry, and
instead react out of a heart full of love for Jesus. I believe Paul could only
have reacted as he did in Athens if he regularly remembered how much God in
Christ had done for him who once had been a sworn enemy of the church.

We don’t have to have had dramatic ‘Damascus Road’
conversions like him, but a sense of how wonderful God is, how much he has done
for us, how gracious and loving he is in contrast to us will do more for
mission than a thousand training programmes. It’s a passion that comes from God’s
grace, and which is nurtured in worship, prayer, fellowship, Bible meditation
and getting on with the life of a disciple. In other words, God has acted in
extravagant love towards us, and we receive and respond. Then we have a passion
for Jesus and a passion for those who do not love him.

2. Engagement
If you have a passion for Jesus and for those who don’t know him, then the
last thing you can do is sit around and moan. Nor can you bury your head in the
sand and say, ‘It’s all hopeless.’ Passion will drive you to engage the love of
Jesus with those yet to know him.

And that passion drives people out into the world to engage
with the idol worshippers and others. It doesn’t say, ‘We’ve got an interesting
event on here, why not come and join us?’ Those happily worshipping idols see
no reason to do so, and nor did the Athenians. Paul went to them to engage them
with the Gospel; he didn’t set up camp and invite them onto his territory. So –
he went to the synagogue (not that he considered his fellow Jews idolaters, but
he believed Jesus was the fulfilment of all their hopes), where he didn’t get
up and give an altar call: he ‘argued’ (debated) with the Jews and the Gentile
God-fearers (verse 17). That is, he was in conversation with them. He didn’t
solely use set-piece speeches.

He did the same in the mainstream Athenian culture, because
he also went to the market place to debate with whoever was there each day. Here,
we need to understand that the market place wasn’t simply where you went to buy
your strawberries and potatoes: it was the centre of civic and cultural life in
Athens. If you wanted to make an impact upon the life of the city, you went to
the agora, the market place and
started networking with people there. Therefore, we have our priorities out of
kilter when we are happy that someone answers a call to preach or offers for
the ministry, but we are less impressed when somebody becomes a bank manager, a
teacher, an artist, a musician or a secretary.

Yesterday, I read the
words of a Canadian businessman
who had been reflecting on Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount, where he
tells his disciples they are the salt of the earth. Here is just one of his
thoughts:

‘Salt NEVER serves its purpose staying in the shaker.
The purpose of the Christian life is found when “shaken out” to flavour the
world. Too often the highest vision of ministry given to Christians is to be on
the church platform, rather than changing the flavour of the world.’

If disciples are the salt of the earth, then, the church is
the saltshaker. Our purpose is not to create an alternative social life and
entertainment menu for Christians: it is to shake the salt out into the world,
where it will do its work of engagement. Yes, we are here to heal, comfort and
encourage, but never by keeping the grains in the saltshaker.

3. Contact and
Conflict
Paul causes a stir in Athens. Some find him intriguing, others are disparaging.
Still others are confused: he is advocating a god called Jesus, and a goddess
called Anastasia (the Greek for ‘resurrection’, which is a feminine noun). The
Areopagus, the city council that decided which gods were acceptable to be
worshipped, decides almost to put him on trial – or at least put his views
under their microscope.

How does Paul respond? Much of his speech follows the
conventions of ancient rhetoric. He speaks in their style. Unlike when he is in
a synagogue, he doesn’t quote the Scriptures – but his content is scriptural. His
only direct quotes come from Greek cultural sources such as poets – but he uses
them to support his argument and bring the challenge of the Gospel to his
hearers.

And his point is this: the Athenian approach to God is plain
wrong. God the Creator doesn’t need idols, nor is he dependent upon what human
beings do. You’re muddling around in the dark, he tells his listeners. God
excused that in the past, but not any longer: he will judge the world. His
promise that he will do so is that he has raised Jesus from the dead. This isn’t
comfortable stuff. Paul is under suspicion. In response, he criticises Athenian
beliefs, and ends by proclaiming the Resurrection, and Athenians didn’t believe
anyone would be raised from the dead[5].

Paul, then, knows the Gospel, and has taken the trouble to
know the society to which he is proclaiming that Good News. The Gospel is his
foundation, but how he shares it depends on the people with whom he is
engaging.

It’s this knowing the Gospel and knowing our world that is
important for us. Some of us know one far better than the other. There are
those Christians who spend so much time in Bible study, but they wouldn’t have
a clue how to relate to non-Christians. But there are others who wrap
themselves up in the world and are ignorant of the faith. The world easily squeezes
them into its mould[6]. They
are barely distinguishable from their non-Christian friends.

Let me pose this as a challenge, then: do I fall into one of
these extremes? Am I so caught up in Bible study and Christian books that I can’t
connect with people who need the Gospel? If so, will I take the time to listen
and understand our world? We can do this by nurturing conversations with
friends, reading newspaper leader columns and paying attention to popular
culture, such as music and television. While we do this, we look for the
underlying assumptions and subject them to Gospel scrutiny.

Or am I so absorbed by the world that I am losing my
Christian distinctiveness? If that is me, then I have a different challenge. I may
need the discipline of daily Bible reading. Good quality Christian books may
help me. (Ask me if you want recommendations about books or Bible study notes.)
I may well find it helpful to join a fellowship group where we spur one another
on in our discipleship.

Conclusion
Sometimes in a world that seems increasingly ignorant of the Gospel, if not
hostile to it, the task of Christian witness seems daunting, if not hopeless.
But when we read of Paul taking the Good News to pagan Athens, we realise that
nothing is impossible with God. No, he didn’t see masses of converts, but he
did make some headway.

The change requires a degree of recalibration for us as
Christians from what we have been used to. We can’t rely on commonly accepted
beliefs or the idea of a ‘Christian country’: we need a passion for Jesus and
for people not yet in the community of faith. Nor can we expect to do things on
our terms and our territory: we need to move out in engagement. Finally, we
need to bring the Gospel and the world together, not only in our actions but
also in our thinking, so that we can shape our missionary task appropriately.

Are we up for the challenge?

Acts 17:16-34

Introduction
Voting. However cynical we are about politics, our culture is saturated with
it. We are a democracy, and we vote for our leaders. Local elections are
looming in many parts of our country. Opinion polls attempt to predict who will
win a General Election, and politicians pay close attention to them.

Voting is present in the epidemic of reality shows on the
TV. We decide the fate of a wannabe singer on The
X Factor. We judge the aspirations of someone who wants to be famous for
being famous on Big Brother.
We choose between desperate has-beens, trying to resuscitate their careers on I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here.

Now, if I asked you to take a vote on the Book of Acts, as
to which passage had led to the most discussion, I doubt you would choose today’s
reading. Perhaps you would choose chapter 2, with its account of the first Christian
Pentecost. Maybe you would go for chapter 9, dramatically recounting the
conversion of Saul on the Damascus Road. Both those stories are popular and
controversial. But among the scholars, Paul in Athens wins the vote:

‘In fact, it has attracted more scholarly attention than any
other passage in Acts.’[1]

Apart from the question of how Paul’s speech here relates to
his teaching in his epistles (which I won’t bore you with in a sermon),

‘Luke has presented us here with the fullest example of Paul’s
missionary preaching to a certain kind of Gentile audience (namely, an educated
and rather philosophical pagan one without contacts with the synagogue)’[2].

In that respect, this story commends itself to us, if we are
to have a missionary engagement with our world. It is to some extent a pagan
one, and has little contacts not with the synagogue but with the church. For several
years, I have referred to this passage in that respect. Indeed, I chose to preach
on it only a month after starting here, when I did a series of sermons about
our missionary relationship with a changing world. Today, the Lectionary brings
me back to these verses[3],
and the chance to reflect again on how we exercise our missionary calling
today. What does missionary commitment require of each one of us?

1. Passion
Paul is waiting for some friends. Rather than idle his time away, the first
thing Luke tells us is that

‘While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply
distressed to see that the city was full of idols.’ (Verse 16)

‘Deeply distressed.’ The Greek is the word from which we get
our word ‘paroxysm’. It’s a word for strong negative emotions. The city was
full – no, weighed down – with idols. That it would be upsetting for someone
Jewish like Paul is obvious on one level: the Ten Commandments prohibit graven
images of God, so idols are out. But it was worse in Athens. Jews often alleged
that there was a link between idolatry and immorality. The content of some
Athenian idols would have backed up that claim.[4]
As it’s Sunday morning, I’ll spare you the tawdry details.

We too face a culture that is ignorant of the God and Father
of our Lord Jesus Christ. There are many reasons for this, some of them our
fault as the Church, but the desire (need?) for worship persists, and so we
have idolatry today, some of which is connected to immorality.

We can list today’s idolatries easily: sex, shopping, money,
possessions, and so on. But there are bigger questions for us: does seeing
people worship in this way arouse passion in us as Christ-followers or not? And
if it arouses passion, is it a godly passion?

There are several reactions we can have to contemporary idolatry.
One would be apathy. We see false and unhealthy worship, but can’t be bothered
to make a stand. Either that, or we’re more worried about people’s reactions if
we say something, so fear keeps us quiet.

Another is that we can react passionately, thinking we are
doing so for God, but being quite ugly. Passion turns to judgmentalism.

Or we can be passionate for the wrong reasons. We look at
the numbers flocking to sporting events or the shops on a Sunday, and bewail
our own small numbers. If we’re not careful, our real reason is not a desire to
honour Jesus Christ, but the fear that our little religious club might close. ‘Can
we fill all the vacant jobs here?’ is a poor reason for evangelism.

The passion Paul had was a passion for the glory of Jesus.
If the worship due to his name were being directed elsewhere, even if out of
ignorance rather than deliberate choice, that moved him. He challenges us to
leave behind apathy, anger and selfishness as reactions to idolatry, and
instead react out of a heart full of love for Jesus. I believe Paul could only
have reacted as he did in Athens if he regularly remembered how much God in
Christ had done for him who once had been a sworn enemy of the church.

We don’t have to have had dramatic ‘Damascus Road’
conversions like him, but a sense of how wonderful God is, how much he has done
for us, how gracious and loving he is in contrast to us will do more for
mission than a thousand training programmes. It’s a passion that comes from God’s
grace, and which is nurtured in worship, prayer, fellowship, Bible meditation
and getting on with the life of a disciple. In other words, God has acted in
extravagant love towards us, and we receive and respond. Then we have a passion
for Jesus and a passion for those who do not love him.

2. Engagement
If you have a passion for Jesus and for those who don’t know him, then the
last thing you can do is sit around and moan. Nor can you bury your head in the
sand and say, ‘It’s all hopeless.’ Passion will drive you to engage the love of
Jesus with those yet to know him.

And that passion drives people out into the world to engage
with the idol worshippers and others. It doesn’t say, ‘We’ve got an interesting
event on here, why not come and join us?’ Those happily worshipping idols see
no reason to do so, and nor did the Athenians. Paul went to them to engage them
with the Gospel; he didn’t set up camp and invite them onto his territory. So –
he went to the synagogue (not that he considered his fellow Jews idolaters, but
he believed Jesus was the fulfilment of all their hopes), where he didn’t get
up and give an altar call: he ‘argued’ (debated) with the Jews and the Gentile
God-fearers (verse 17). That is, he was in conversation with them. He didn’t
solely use set-piece speeches.

He did the same in the mainstream Athenian culture, because
he also went to the market place to debate with whoever was there each day. Here,
we need to understand that the market place wasn’t simply where you went to buy
your strawberries and potatoes: it was the centre of civic and cultural life in
Athens. If you wanted to make an impact upon the life of the city, you went to
the agora, the market place and
started networking with people there. Therefore, we have our priorities out of
kilter when we are happy that someone answers a call to preach or offers for
the ministry, but we are less impressed when somebody becomes a bank manager, a
teacher, an artist, a musician or a secretary.

Yesterday, I read the
words of a Canadian businessman
who had been reflecting on Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount, where he
tells his disciples they are the salt of the earth. Here is just one of his
thoughts:

‘Salt NEVER serves its purpose staying in the shaker.
The purpose of the Christian life is found when “shaken out” to flavour the
world. Too often the highest vision of ministry given to Christians is to be on
the church platform, rather than changing the flavour of the world.’

If disciples are the salt of the earth, then, the church is
the saltshaker. Our purpose is not to create an alternative social life and
entertainment menu for Christians: it is to shake the salt out into the world,
where it will do its work of engagement. Yes, we are here to heal, comfort and
encourage, but never by keeping the grains in the saltshaker.

3. Contact and
Conflict
Paul causes a stir in Athens. Some find him intriguing, others are disparaging.
Still others are confused: he is advocating a god called Jesus, and a goddess
called Anastasia (the Greek for ‘resurrection’, which is a feminine noun). The
Areopagus, the city council that decided which gods were acceptable to be
worshipped, decides almost to put him on trial – or at least put his views
under their microscope.

How does Paul respond? Much of his speech follows the
conventions of ancient rhetoric. He speaks in their style. Unlike when he is in
a synagogue, he doesn’t quote the Scriptures – but his content is scriptural. His
only direct quotes come from Greek cultural sources such as poets – but he uses
them to support his argument and bring the challenge of the Gospel to his
hearers.

And his point is this: the Athenian approach to God is plain
wrong. God the Creator doesn’t need idols, nor is he dependent upon what human
beings do. You’re muddling around in the dark, he tells his listeners. God
excused that in the past, but not any longer: he will judge the world. His
promise that he will do so is that he has raised Jesus from the dead. This isn’t
comfortable stuff. Paul is under suspicion. In response, he criticises Athenian
beliefs, and ends by proclaiming the Resurrection, and Athenians didn’t believe
anyone would be raised from the dead[5].

Paul, then, knows the Gospel, and has taken the trouble to
know the society to which he is proclaiming that Good News. The Gospel is his
foundation, but how he shares it depends on the people with whom he is
engaging.

It’s this knowing the Gospel and knowing our world that is
important for us. Some of us know one far better than the other. There are
those Christians who spend so much time in Bible study, but they wouldn’t have
a clue how to relate to non-Christians. But there are others who wrap
themselves up in the world and are ignorant of the faith. The world easily squeezes
them into its mould[6]. They
are barely distinguishable from their non-Christian friends.

Let me pose this as a challenge, then: do I fall into one of
these extremes? Am I so caught up in Bible study and Christian books that I can’t
connect with people who need the Gospel? If so, will I take the time to listen
and understand our world? We can do this by nurturing conversations with
friends, reading newspaper leader columns and paying attention to popular
culture, such as music and television. While we do this, we look for the
underlying assumptions and subject them to Gospel scrutiny.

Or am I so absorbed by the world that I am losing my
Christian distinctiveness? If that is me, then I have a different challenge. I may
need the discipline of daily Bible reading. Good quality Christian books may
help me. (Ask me if you want recommendations about books or Bible study notes.)
I may well find it helpful to join a fellowship group where we spur one another
on in our discipleship.

Conclusion
Sometimes in a world that seems increasingly ignorant of the Gospel, if not
hostile to it, the task of Christian witness seems daunting, if not hopeless.
But when we read of Paul taking the Good News to pagan Athens, we realise that
nothing is impossible with God. No, he didn’t see masses of converts, but he
did make some headway.

The change requires a degree of recalibration for us as
Christians from what we have been used to. We can’t rely on commonly accepted
beliefs or the idea of a ‘Christian country’: we need a passion for Jesus and
for people not yet in the community of faith. Nor can we expect to do things on
our terms and our territory: we need to move out in engagement. Finally, we
need to bring the Gospel and the world together, not only in our actions but
also in our thinking, so that we can shape our missionary task appropriately.

Are we up for the challenge?

Acts 17:16-34

Introduction
Voting. However cynical we are about politics, our culture is saturated with
it. We are a democracy, and we vote for our leaders. Local elections are
looming in many parts of our country. Opinion polls attempt to predict who will
win a General Election, and politicians pay close attention to them.

Voting is present in the epidemic of reality shows on the
TV. We decide the fate of a wannabe singer on The
X Factor. We judge the aspirations of someone who wants to be famous for
being famous on Big Brother.
We choose between desperate has-beens, trying to resuscitate their careers on I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here.

Now, if I asked you to take a vote on the Book of Acts, as
to which passage had led to the most discussion, I doubt you would choose today’s
reading. Perhaps you would choose chapter 2, with its account of the first Christian
Pentecost. Maybe you would go for chapter 9, dramatically recounting the
conversion of Saul on the Damascus Road. Both those stories are popular and
controversial. But among the scholars, Paul in Athens wins the vote:

‘In fact, it has attracted more scholarly attention than any
other passage in Acts.’[1]

Apart from the question of how Paul’s speech here relates to
his teaching in his epistles (which I won’t bore you with in a sermon),

‘Luke has presented us here with the fullest example of Paul’s
missionary preaching to a certain kind of Gentile audience (namely, an educated
and rather philosophical pagan one without contacts with the synagogue)’[2].

In that respect, this story commends itself to us, if we are
to have a missionary engagement with our world. It is to some extent a pagan
one, and has little contacts not with the synagogue but with the church. For several
years, I have referred to this passage in that respect. Indeed, I chose to preach
on it only a month after starting here, when I did a series of sermons about
our missionary relationship with a changing world. Today, the Lectionary brings
me back to these verses[3],
and the chance to reflect again on how we exercise our missionary calling
today. What does missionary commitment require of each one of us?

1. Passion
Paul is waiting for some friends. Rather than idle his time away, the first
thing Luke tells us is that

‘While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply
distressed to see that the city was full of idols.’ (Verse 16)

‘Deeply distressed.’ The Greek is the word from which we get
our word ‘paroxysm’. It’s a word for strong negative emotions. The city was
full – no, weighed down – with idols. That it would be upsetting for someone
Jewish like Paul is obvious on one level: the Ten Commandments prohibit graven
images of God, so idols are out. But it was worse in Athens. Jews often alleged
that there was a link between idolatry and immorality. The content of some
Athenian idols would have backed up that claim.[4]
As it’s Sunday morning, I’ll spare you the tawdry details.

We too face a culture that is ignorant of the God and Father
of our Lord Jesus Christ. There are many reasons for this, some of them our
fault as the Church, but the desire (need?) for worship persists, and so we
have idolatry today, some of which is connected to immorality.

We can list today’s idolatries easily: sex, shopping, money,
possessions, and so on. But there are bigger questions for us: does seeing
people worship in this way arouse passion in us as Christ-followers or not? And
if it arouses passion, is it a godly passion?

There are several reactions we can have to contemporary idolatry.
One would be apathy. We see false and unhealthy worship, but can’t be bothered
to make a stand. Either that, or we’re more worried about people’s reactions if
we say something, so fear keeps us quiet.

Another is that we can react passionately, thinking we are
doing so for God, but being quite ugly. Passion turns to judgmentalism.

Or we can be passionate for the wrong reasons. We look at
the numbers flocking to sporting events or the shops on a Sunday, and bewail
our own small numbers. If we’re not careful, our real reason is not a desire to
honour Jesus Christ, but the fear that our little religious club might close. ‘Can
we fill all the vacant jobs here?’ is a poor reason for evangelism.

The passion Paul had was a passion for the glory of Jesus.
If the worship due to his name were being directed elsewhere, even if out of
ignorance rather than deliberate choice, that moved him. He challenges us to
leave behind apathy, anger and selfishness as reactions to idolatry, and
instead react out of a heart full of love for Jesus. I believe Paul could only
have reacted as he did in Athens if he regularly remembered how much God in
Christ had done for him who once had been a sworn enemy of the church.

We don’t have to have had dramatic ‘Damascus Road’
conversions like him, but a sense of how wonderful God is, how much he has done
for us, how gracious and loving he is in contrast to us will do more for
mission than a thousand training programmes. It’s a passion that comes from God’s
grace, and which is nurtured in worship, prayer, fellowship, Bible meditation
and getting on with the life of a disciple. In other words, God has acted in
extravagant love towards us, and we receive and respond. Then we have a passion
for Jesus and a passion for those who do not love him.

2. Engagement
If you have a passion for Jesus and for those who don’t know him, then the
last thing you can do is sit around and moan. Nor can you bury your head in the
sand and say, ‘It’s all hopeless.’ Passion will drive you to engage the love of
Jesus with those yet to know him.

And that passion drives people out into the world to engage
with the idol worshippers and others. It doesn’t say, ‘We’ve got an interesting
event on here, why not come and join us?’ Those happily worshipping idols see
no reason to do so, and nor did the Athenians. Paul went to them to engage them
with the Gospel; he didn’t set up camp and invite them onto his territory. So –
he went to the synagogue (not that he considered his fellow Jews idolaters, but
he believed Jesus was the fulfilment of all their hopes), where he didn’t get
up and give an altar call: he ‘argued’ (debated) with the Jews and the Gentile
God-fearers (verse 17). That is, he was in conversation with them. He didn’t
solely use set-piece speeches.

He did the same in the mainstream Athenian culture, because
he also went to the market place to debate with whoever was there each day. Here,
we need to understand that the market place wasn’t simply where you went to buy
your strawberries and potatoes: it was the centre of civic and cultural life in
Athens. If you wanted to make an impact upon the life of the city, you went to
the agora, the market place and
started networking with people there. Therefore, we have our priorities out of
kilter when we are happy that someone answers a call to preach or offers for
the ministry, but we are less impressed when somebody becomes a bank manager, a
teacher, an artist, a musician or a secretary.

Yesterday, I read the
words of a Canadian businessman
who had been reflecting on Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount, where he
tells his disciples they are the salt of the earth. Here is just one of his
thoughts:

‘Salt NEVER serves its purpose staying in the shaker.
The purpose of the Christian life is found when “shaken out” to flavour the
world. Too often the highest vision of ministry given to Christians is to be on
the church platform, rather than changing the flavour of the world.’

If disciples are the salt of the earth, then, the church is
the saltshaker. Our purpose is not to create an alternative social life and
entertainment menu for Christians: it is to shake the salt out into the world,
where it will do its work of engagement. Yes, we are here to heal, comfort and
encourage, but never by keeping the grains in the saltshaker.

3. Contact and
Conflict
Paul causes a stir in Athens. Some find him intriguing, others are disparaging.
Still others are confused: he is advocating a god called Jesus, and a goddess
called Anastasia (the Greek for ‘resurrection’, which is a feminine noun). The
Areopagus, the city council that decided which gods were acceptable to be
worshipped, decides almost to put him on trial – or at least put his views
under their microscope.

How does Paul respond? Much of his speech follows the
conventions of ancient rhetoric. He speaks in their style. Unlike when he is in
a synagogue, he doesn’t quote the Scriptures – but his content is scriptural. His
only direct quotes come from Greek cultural sources such as poets – but he uses
them to support his argument and bring the challenge of the Gospel to his
hearers.

And his point is this: the Athenian approach to God is plain
wrong. God the Creator doesn’t need idols, nor is he dependent upon what human
beings do. You’re muddling around in the dark, he tells his listeners. God
excused that in the past, but not any longer: he will judge the world. His
promise that he will do so is that he has raised Jesus from the dead. This isn’t
comfortable stuff. Paul is under suspicion. In response, he criticises Athenian
beliefs, and ends by proclaiming the Resurrection, and Athenians didn’t believe
anyone would be raised from the dead[5].

Paul, then, knows the Gospel, and has taken the trouble to
know the society to which he is proclaiming that Good News. The Gospel is his
foundation, but how he shares it depends on the people with whom he is
engaging.

It’s this knowing the Gospel and knowing our world that is
important for us. Some of us know one far better than the other. There are
those Christians who spend so much time in Bible study, but they wouldn’t have
a clue how to relate to non-Christians. But there are others who wrap
themselves up in the world and are ignorant of the faith. The world easily squeezes
them into its mould[6]. They
are barely distinguishable from their non-Christian friends.

Let me pose this as a challenge, then: do I fall into one of
these extremes? Am I so caught up in Bible study and Christian books that I can’t
connect with people who need the Gospel? If so, will I take the time to listen
and understand our world? We can do this by nurturing conversations with
friends, reading newspaper leader columns and paying attention to popular
culture, such as music and television. While we do this, we look for the
underlying assumptions and subject them to Gospel scrutiny.

Or am I so absorbed by the world that I am losing my
Christian distinctiveness? If that is me, then I have a different challenge. I may
need the discipline of daily Bible reading. Good quality Christian books may
help me. (Ask me if you want recommendations about books or Bible study notes.)
I may well find it helpful to join a fellowship group where we spur one another
on in our discipleship.

Conclusion
Sometimes in a world that seems increasingly ignorant of the Gospel, if not
hostile to it, the task of Christian witness seems daunting, if not hopeless.
But when we read of Paul taking the Good News to pagan Athens, we realise that
nothing is impossible with God. No, he didn’t see masses of converts, but he
did make some headway.

The change requires a degree of recalibration for us as
Christians from what we have been used to. We can’t rely on commonly accepted
beliefs or the idea of a ‘Christian country’: we need a passion for Jesus and
for people not yet in the community of faith. Nor can we expect to do things on
our terms and our territory: we need to move out in engagement. Finally, we
need to bring the Gospel and the world together, not only in our actions but
also in our thinking, so that we can shape our missionary task appropriately.

Are we up for the challenge?