Last fall, I was on a tour with a group from St. John’s—and some other folks across the country—and we stood in Athens, exactly where today’s reading from Acts takes place.
It is difficult to describe how overwhelming Athens feels when you first see it. Atop the Acropolis, you look out, and the city extends in every direction. Everywhere you look there are reminders of human achievement, human intellect, human religion. Even now, thousands of years later, Athens still feels impressive. Powerful.
Standing there, reading Paul’s words in the very place where he first spoke them, I tried to imagine what he must have seen. Statues and shrines. Altars to every imaginable god. Beautiful marble walkways. And tucked among them, one more altar dedicated “to an unknown god.”
A Spiritual Insurance Policy
The Athenians built shrines for every god they could name, and then, just in case, they built one more for the god they could not name. A kind of spiritual insurance policy. What if we missed one? What if there is still something out there we cannot quite see or understand? What if we are alone?
I think that is why the altar to an unknown god still feels so recognizable.
Because most people, at some point, know what it is like to search for something they cannot quite put a finger on. We want reassurance that our lives matter. We want some confidence that we are not alone in the universe. We want to believe there is something stronger than death, grief, uncertainty, and fear.
And so much of human life becomes a search for stability, meaning, and hope.
What Paul Proclaims
Paul stands in the middle of all that searching and says: “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.”
Paul does not mock them. He does not shame them for searching. He alerts them to the truth that propels his ministry: the God who made the world and everything in it—that God you will not find confined to some altar or memorial.
That God is not hidden behind one more temple we have yet to build. Through the Holy Spirit, that God dwells in us. This God—our God—is not far away.
“He is not far from each one of us,” Paul says. “For in him we live and move and have our being.”
Not far.
When God Feels Far
If you ask me, that may be the most important thing some of us need to hear this morning.
Because there are seasons of life when God can feel very far away indeed. There are moments when grief fogs our vision and God seems absent from all of it. Moments when the future becomes unclear. Moments when prayers seem to bounce off the ceiling. Moments when life changes suddenly and the world no longer feels as stable as it once did.
In those moments people begin searching everywhere for reassurance. We search for certainty. We search for control. We search for something capable of calming the fear that maybe we have been left alone.
But don’t forget what Paul says: “He is not far from each one of us.”
And better yet, in our gospel text, Jesus says to his very understandably frightened disciples: “I will not leave you orphaned.”
The God Who Comes Near
This is the same God Paul preaches about in Athens. Not a distant god. Not an abstract idea. Not a force hidden behind the stars. The God revealed in Jesus Christ is the God who comes near. The God who refuses to abandon his people.
Christianity is not ultimately the story of humanity climbing up toward God. It is the story of God descending into frightened human lives and saying: “I am here.”
That is the incarnation. That is Easter. That is the promise of the Holy Spirit.
Week after week, that promise continues here among us. Christ comes near to his people. We gather around ordinary things carrying extraordinary grace. Water. Bread. Wine. Word. The plain things through which God keeps showing up for his people.
Luther reminds us that God does not ask us to climb our way toward him through spiritual achievement or emotional certainty. God comes to us concretely and externally through promises attached to tangible things.
The altar to the unknown god is replaced by a table where the known God feeds his children.
Hitherto Hath the Lord Helped Us
This matters especially for a congregation like ours.
For 281 years, God’s people here at St. John’s have lived through wars and uncertainty and economic hardship and cultural change. There were surely moments when people wondered what would happen next. Moments when the future felt unclear. Moments when the church itself must have seemed fragile.
And yet generation after generation could testify: “He is not far from each one of us.”
If you read some history about our church from previous pastors, more than once First Samuel is quoted, when Samuel took a stone and named it Ebenezer, which means stone of help, and in the King James we hear, “hitherto hath the Lord helped us.”
He is not far from each of us. In him we live and move and have our being.
What Still Stands
Last fall, it was incredible to stand and read our passage from Acts in the very spot that Paul proclaimed this good news. Despite Athens being this incredible architectural and intellectual capital, something hit me there that tells us all we have to know.
The temples are mostly in ruins now. The empires that built them have long faded. Philosophies rose and fell. But the gospel—the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ—is still standing, still being proclaimed.
Nearly two thousand years later, members of St. John’s stood there hearing those same words. And this morning, here we are again gathered around the same promise.
The God who made heaven and earth is not far away. The risen Christ has not abandoned his people. The Spirit still abides.
And nothing—nothing in all of creation—will separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Amen.
