Thinking After Easter

First UMC Fort Dodge

April 27, 2008

Mark Haverland

Acts 17:22-31 17:22 Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, "Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. 17:23 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. 17:24 The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, 17:25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. 17:26 From one ancestor he 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, 17:27 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. 17:28 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.' 17:29 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. 17:30 While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, 17:31 because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead."

Paul preaches here to the people of Athens. It’s hard for us today to appreciate what his audience experienced as Paul spoke to them about an obscure prophet named Jesus. We think Paul is making perfectly good sense, preaching a very familiar and welcome message of comfort and hope. But I doubt that the Athenians had anywhere near this warm fuzzy feeling about Paul’s message that day. They were the intellectuals of the times. They were educated, deep thinkers, curious to learn about new ideas, able to judge bunk from serious religion, or so they thought. Most thought Paul preached bunk. Early Christianity was deemed pathetic by the religious establishment and the swells of that time. Pliny the Younger who ran a sort of 1^st century Guantanomo Bay for Christians wrote to the Roman Emperor Trajan that he could get nothing out of Christian captives but “depraved, excessive superstition.” So much for the value of torture to get at the truth! This was a common impression among the elite of 1^st century Roman culture. Paul preached what now would be called a “new religious movement,” no less ridiculous to people then as Hari Krishna is to us today. In fact, the emergence of NRMs, as scholars today label these upstart faith communities, has been going on for a long time. And, in spite of continual predictions to the contrary, new religions are likely to continue to sprout forever.

This surprises some. Many people especially in the 20^th century have predicted that religion would whither away, that humans would eventually “outgrow” belief in the supernatural. As science eventually eliminated the unknown, religion would yield to rational, empirical scientific thought. I heard the author Philip Roth say the other day in an interview on Fresh Air that he was not a believer since he did not want to be irrational. It saddens me that many people think that those of us who are religious are being irrational. This is a misreading of what we are really about. But many people agree with Philip Roth. Indeed, as in politics the fastest growing party is the no-party, so in religion, so the fastest growth in religious America is found among those with no religious preference. The American sociologist Peter Berger predicted in 1968 that by “the 21^st century, religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture.”

Well, as Yogi Berra is reputed to have said, “Never make predictions, especially about the future.” There are currently 9,900 distinct and separate religions in the world and the number increases by two or three new religions every day.[i] Most of them fail. Friends or family encourage and invite people to their new religion and they join up full of hope that now they have found the answers to life’s persistent questions. This is how most people find any church, by the way: friends and family invite them to come take a look. They stay a while and then leave if the new religion proves unsatisfying or stay if it seems to work for them. This happens in established, main line churches like ours, as well. We get some new members but we also lose members because they get mad at us, get tired of us, no longer need us or find something a bit more jazzy somewhere else. Styles change in religion just as they do everywhere else, it seems. Because people change religion often – 40% of members of a church typically have changed denominations at least once - we need to take in new members just to stay even. People change brands in religion just as they change brands in cars, clothes and restaurants. This is irritating to those of us with a stake in an existing church or denomination, but it’s a fact of life. In a religious free market institutions like ours may go to pot even if religion itself continues to be very popular. Consider us Methodists. We were a NRM in 1776, dismissed by many as too pious, too methodical (hence our name) and too interested in poor people. We were rabble rousers and the established churches didn’t like us very much, thought we wouldn’t catch on. We were flying high, however, by 1876, planting churches, colleges and missions everywhere. In 1976 we were in serious decline, deserted by many who felt we were too stodgy, boring and irrelevant. We exist today only because modern medicine has extended the life span to allow current members to continue as members into an increasingly long old age. It remains to be seen if we can revive ourselves and succeed in the 21^st century along with the Assemblies of God, the Nazarenes, and other new evangelical Protestants who are having such great success. Even if you are on the right road, you get run over if you don’t keep moving.

So Paul preaches what was an upstart, new religious movement, sort of like John Wesley preached to the established churches in England in the 18^th century. The Athenians by and large rejected Paul just as the Church of England rejected John Wesley. But Wesley caught on. And so did Paul, eventually. Christianity survived and thrived and by the 4^th century was the official religion of the Empire.

Why do you suppose Christianity caught on? Why do some NRMs make it and others, most others, as it turns out, fail? What did Paul offer those Athenians which eventually won them over?

The latest thinking suggests that people join religions that work, that give them something of value, that meet some need not met by more established traditions. They succeed when they recognize that people join to form relationships which make them feel welcome and supported. Early Christian communities, for instance, shared resources and distributed food and money to each other according to their needs. Churches succeed when they make people feel welcome and a part of the community and which offer help to each other in times of need.

Churches also need to give their people something to do. Jobs around the church are okay, but mostly people want to do something worthwhile: feed the poor, help the disadvantaged, serve the community. And churches need to present a God who is worth worshipping, a God of virtue and a God who demands that we be virtuous, too.

Much is made of how fine a speech Paul gives. It has all the markings of a classical speech. His opening connects to the experience of the audience, he cites a few local poets, he launches into familiar territory for them, the wonders of creation in this case, and introduces the hard part toward the end. The part he knew would be the most difficult for them to swallow he saves for last, hoping that the momentum of good will he builds in the first parts of the speech will propel them past their skepticism. We did not read the next verses in Acts where we learn that his ploy didn’t really work very well. Only a few signed on to the new movement. Most drifted away, at best. Many scoffed and ridiculed the new religion because they just couldn’t believe that God could raise someone from the dead.

Paul’s preaching in Athens puts me in mind of our current efforts to reach out to modern day seekers. There are huge efforts around the globe in all denominations including our own to create worship for people who know nothing about church, nothing about Jesus, nothing about worship. I hear from other ministers and from members of this congregation that we should be able to recruit from the increasing number of unchurched people in our community. These modern day people, like those in the ancient Areopagus square listening to Paul, seek deeper meaning but don’t quite know where to turn. They’re looking for something, seeking something. We in the church hope that if we change the way we communicate, if we sweeten the message, couch everything in contemporary language and music, change from traditional religious talk and worship, people will find that the Gospel message has power for them after all. If we take it to the people, as we say here at First United Methodist Church Fort Dodge, folks will see the light and join our church. This is what Paul tried in Athens. I have a somewhat jaundiced view of efforts to preach to the unchurched. They are unchurched because they want to be, not because they haven’t heart our message. Even Paul was not particularly successful at reaching out to those unfamiliar with his religious point of view. He had little more success than we do. It worked as long as Paul spoke in terms the Athenians understood. He talked about the wonders of creation, an unknown God of great mystery residing very close but still hidden. Paul even quotes a few local poets who seem to anticipate the unknown God Paul hopes to bring to them. But in the end, Paul can’t sugar coat the Gospel message enough to make the medicine go down. Eventually he must come to the part about being crucified in order to rise triumphant from the grave. The Athenians choke on this part of the Gospel and go seeking their unknown God somewhere else. The scandal of the cross, as it is called, has caused people to turn aside from Christianity from the very beginning.

Along with just about every church I know, First United Methodist Church Fort Dodge struggles with the challenge of attracting new people. We reach out to the community around us in all the ways we can think of. But we experience only a few curious enough to join our congregation. Some of this at present has to do with the interim nature of my ministry. Some of it has to do with the declining demographics of our city. But a lot of this lack of growth has to do with our inability to be any more successful than Paul was at convincing a skeptical population that we have something they need.

This makes me sad – for those who don’t respond to our preaching and for us. No church can provide the ministry people really need all the time. No church is what it ought to be, including this one. We don’t have all the answers and we don’t always live up to our noble ideas. No minister is what he or she ought to me, including this one. But I believe that you have to belong to the church that is, if you want to belong to the church that ought to be.

But we are a nation of seekers, always sure that what is missing from our lives lies just around the next bend in the road, never staying put long enough to plumb the real depths of a place, continually restless for the something just out of reach, constantly unsatisfied with what we experience, convinced that the pot of gold lies just over the rainbow. But like Dorothy, we eventually learn that the truth was right in front of us all along. As Paul says to the Athenians, what you seek is now here. Your seeking is over. I offer you the God even your own poets acknowledge is the one you need. Stay a while and let Jesus enter your hearts, commit to follow someone who offers you abundant life. They seem interested at first, but when the going gets tough, when Paul asks them to open their minds to the risen Christ, who will come to examine their lives, a Savior who has known our sorrows and griefs, and has risen triumphant even from the grave – they cannot stay and face this light which will illuminate their inner-most souls. It’s too much for them to bear. The cross is too heavy. Paul coaxes them to consider opening their souls to the risen one, but in the end this is too much for these restless seekers. They cannot stand to be found by the God who will ask them to pick up their cross and follow the crucified one into the grave. No, this is too much and they turn sorrowfully away.

I believe this is a problem for the modern day church. We fail to grow not because people do not understand what we have to offer. We fail to grow because people know very well that the church will ask them to give more than they get, to die to themselves in order to rise triumphant from the graves they now inhabit. This message of losing oneself in order to find one’s true self does not attract people and never has. Most of us prefer something that entertains and makes us feel good without asking for much effort. The most powerful word in any advertisement is “FREE.” I’ll take one. What is it? But Christianity is anything but free!

We here at First United Methodist Church Fort Dodge, however, are not afraid of a risen savior. We welcome him into our hearts. We expose gladly our innermost fears and weakness, because we know that when Jesus enters our lives, we can stop seeking. Our restless wanderings are over. We no longer have to search beyond the rainbow. When we let the Lord of peace into our hearts, we find that we are home already and have been home all along. When we let Jesus touch our souls we find that we can stay right where we are and find the peace that passes all understanding right here at First United Methodist Church Fort Dodge. Imagine that! May it always be so!

Lord, hear our prayers. Help us open our hearts and minds to the one who reaches out to us with the offer of abundant life. Give us wisdom to see the truth which lies close at hand. Quiet our spirits so that we can find rest and peace in the saving grace of Jesus. Empower us to be living prayers for your will in our world. Amen

Holy God, our unwillingness to continue where we have been in the past now stirs us to make a generous offering for the needs of others, and with a glad heart. May the world-changing news of the gospel of Jesus Christ bring the truth of resurrection potential to a hurting world.