Eastertide
May 25, 2014

Scripture Reading: 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…. From one ancestor [God] 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.” — Acts 17:22, 26-28 

Paul stands amid an array of Greek gods all named and described for their individual areas of divinity except for one marked to an unknown god. The task at hand is to introduce thee Greeks to the one God in whom Paul has caste all his being without offending them regarding the other gods they worship. This unknown god seems to me to be a failsafe in case these Greeks had missed some. While that may sound like an insurance policy, it may be more an illustration of how honest the Greek were about their inability to wrap their minds around the concept of god. Clearly, for them the idea of one god was hard to grasp.

Our world is very different today and oh so much the same. We do not line up gods made of stone and give them names but we do struggle to find entities in which we can place our trust.  For good measure we, too, sometimes make a god, shaped in ways that most meets our needs or wants, as an insurance policy.  Paul is telling the Greeks and us too that it is the other way around. There is one God in whose image we were crafted. God is the one who establishes the playing field and the game plan. Our sense of wellbeing is directly tied to the relationship and response we have to God. While we spend much time groping to find the right god, the one God is ever near ready and willing to relate to us.

Our challenge is letting go of these lesser gods and turning toward the one God.

Prayer: Abba, Parent of all, take my hand no matter how tentatively I reach out for you so that I may rest in your grasp and lean into your way of being until I am whole in you. Amen.

All scriptures are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of American. Used by permission. All rights reserved.