A sermon on Acts 17: 22-31 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.
During the Open Baptists conference last year, I caught an Uber across Canberra in the early evening. My driver was a Muslim, and he was very pleased that my trip was taking him towards home, because it was Ramadan, and his extended family was gathered at this place, hungry and waiting for him to get home so they could break their fast together.
It was Ramadan for him, and Lent for me, and we fell into a conversation about how fasting is understood and practiced in our respective faith traditions. I learned quite a lot. Maybe he did too. I was particularly impressed by his emphasis on fasting as a spiritual practice rather than a tribal identity marker. He spoke with great enthusiasm about the ways that fasting was helping him become a more mindful, loving and generous person, and we shared a frustration with those in our traditions who fast as though trying to prove something instead of allowing it to form them into better people.
By the time he dropped me off, we felt like brothers in faith, learning from one another and encouraging one another in our practices. I hope he got home to his family quickly without having to take another ride.
I remembered him warmly as I read the reading we heard tonight from the Acts of the Apostles. The Apostle Paul is talking with some of the leading thinkers of Athens about their religious traditions, and he’s drawing connections and finding common ground. He’s more than happy to talk about Jesus, and he does so quite boldly. But he’s doing it in a conversation about shared religious instincts and experience, not in a fight over whose faith is best.
Paul reminds the Athenians that their own philosopher and poet, Epimenides, said, “in God we live and move and have our being.” It is a remarkable line, and it is not surprising that Paul knew it, because apparently it was quoted in a number of Jewish texts as an example of how one could speak of the true God in the language of Greek philosophy.
Part of what makes it remarkable is its contrast to so much of the religious posturing of that era, or perhaps any era. In a number of other cities on his travels, Paul gets into trouble when he speaks about Jesus because the locals immediately take it as an offence against their local deity. We have this tendency to reduce God to a tribal deity who must be supported by rabid fans, as though each local god was in rivalry with each other and there’s a league table on which we all cheer for our god to end the season on top.
Neither Epimenides nor Paul are talking of a tribal deity. Instead they are trying to describe an experience of God that is universal, even if people don’t recognise it. “In God we live and move and have our being.” All of us.
Even the fact that they are talking of being “in” God is remarkable. Not below God, or facing God, or even approaching God — but in God. Like being in air, or in water. Perhaps like being in a culture, in an atmosphere, or even in a loving embrace. God is not out there, distant and aloof. God is all around us, as close as the air that we breathe, and whatever the person next to you believes, you’re both breathing the same air — living and moving and having your being in the same divine reality. I could feel that in that Uber last year.
I’ve preached on Paul in Athens previously as an example of an evangelism that is respectful and generous, trying to get away from the arrogance and aggression of far too much Christian evangelism. I’m not feeling any need to renounce any of that, but I am seeing something different in it this time, something deeper and perhaps even more important. And I’m grateful to my Uber driver for helping me to see it.
The thing is, although he and I both came from faiths with strong traditions of trying to evangelise others, neither of us were trying to do that during that ride. And I think it was because we both recognised that we didn’t need to. I recognised him as one who was living and moving and having his being in God, and whose faith didn’t need to be overturned and replaced, but encouraged and honoured because it was obviously life-giving and formative in really good ways. I think he recognised that in me too. We were brothers comparing notes, comparing experiences, and encouraging one another to go deeper, to live our faiths to the full.
So this time, as I read again Paul’s words to the Athenians, I’m hearing him name the reality that made that connection in the Uber possible. “In God we all live and move and have our being.” All of us.
Someone else’s words have impacted the way I hear this story this time round too. I’ve been banging on a bit about getting to know Bishop Malkhaz at the Peace Cathedral in Georgia last year, so I probably don’t need to repeat the whole story. But when Malkhaz began the Peace Project — bringing together a church, a mosque, and a synagogue under the one roof — there were some in the local Muslim and Jewish communities who accused him of having an agenda to use the project to try to proselytise their people, to convert them to Christianity.
Malkhaz was quite adamant that he had no such agenda. Rather, he said, he wanted to create opportunities in which he might learn from Jews and Muslims everything they could teach him from their traditions that would help him and his congregation to become better Christians, and in return he was ready to share whatever he could offer from his tradition that might help them become better Jews and Muslims.
Malkhaz is naming something that I had experienced with my Uber driver. The difference is that I just fell into by accident, or by luck of the Uber ride allocation system. Whereas Malkhaz was going looking for it, and intentionally setting up structures that would enable it to become a normal part of the life and faith of those congregations who were connecting through the Peace Project.
The suspicion of ulterior motives is hardly a surprise. The history of Christian missions contains no shortage of hideous tales of arrogant colonialist attitudes where we evidently thought we had an absolute monopoly on God and on truth, and everyone else should be grateful for our benevolence in imposing it on them. At its worst, in some eras, so-called Christians sought to impose their religion on others at the point of a sword, and slaughtered any who refused to submit. In other times or places, my Uber driver and I might have been expected to kill each other. The interim findings of the Royal Commission into Anti-Semitism, handed down this week, are a sobering reminder of the ugly legacy of that past.
No doubt other religions have had their darks sides too, but we can only repent of ours, and ours has often been allied with the world’s most powerful military forces, making it particularly dangerous and destructive. No wonder we have been regarded with suspicion.
But we can do better. Paul is calling us to do better. The Apostle Peter is calling us to do better, as we heard in our second reading (1 Peter 3: 13-22) where he called us to present our faith “with gentleness and reverence.” Malkhaz too is calling us to do better. My Uber driver was inviting me to do better. And most importantly, Jesus is calling us to do better.
So what does that call look like, and how do we go about responding to it? Let me approach that question from slightly out in left field.
One of the things that has often struck me as a bit misguided about some of the typical Christian responses to other faiths, other world religions, is that we have often seen them as rivals, or even as enemies, when we’ve actually got a lot more in common with them than we do with much of cynical Western culture that is increasingly dismissive of and hostile to all faiths equally.
Very few people give up Christianity to become Muslims or Hindus or Jews. Most of the people who give up on Christianity look to money, pleasure, power, family, or nationalism for their purpose and salvation. When my Uber driver and I compared our experiences of fasting, we both spoke of it as resistance to those idolatries. Instead of being rivals, we were allies with a common enemy.
But right there, as I say that, I run into another idolatrous temptation, a variant religious tribalism. I might have discovered that my driver and I were allies, but if I do that by defining someone else as the enemy, as the new “other”, I’m at risk of doing nothing better than rearranging the deckchairs while the Titanic of idolatrous tribalism carries me on towards disaster. That would not be hearing the call of Jesus.
It would also not be true to my experience in that Uber. You see, almost none of our conversation was about what was wrong with other people. There was perhaps a hint of it when we spoke of people in our own faith traditions who fasted, but missed the point. But even that was more about acknowledging how easy it is for us ourselves to slip into missing the point, and so it was more a challenge to ourselves than a critique of anyone else. If our solidarity had a shared enemy, it was religious failure itself, not people.
So yes, we recognised each other as allies, but not really in opposition to anyone else. More as allies on a shared quest. More like two mountaineers trying to conquer the same mountain, and looking to one another for support and encouragement.
Actually, it strikes me that that is a more helpful comparison than I was first thinking. I know a little bit about mountaineers, because my grandfather was one. Mountaineers are a breed apart. They have a shared obsession, a shared calculated recklessness, and a whole set of common disciplines and practices. And because of that, even if they meet far away from the mountains, they will fairly quickly recognise each other and be obsessing together about mountains, equipment, and training regimes.
Jesus pointed to something like this in our gospel reading tonight (John 14: 15-21) when he spoke of “the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees nor knows this Spirit.” The Spirit is recognisable and receivable to those whose formation has prepared them to perceive it. They recognise and respond to the Spirit, and they recognise others who are similarly responding to the Spirit.
Now my Uber conversation was a lot like that, and like those mountaineers. I’ve been pondering the question of why. I’ve met plenty of Muslims and not had that spark of mutual recognition. I’ve met lots of Christians with whom I didn’t experience such mutual recognition. So what was it? I know some of it was coincidental — Lent, Ramadan, end of a long day, hungry, looking forward to the meal ahead. But I’m quite sure that wasn’t all.
Instead, more like the two mountaineers, we were two people who had been formed by similar practices, and that made us recognisable to one another. Fasting was the particular practice we most talked about that evening, but I’m sure we’d have found many more if we’d had the opportunity to talk again. But even with the fasting, it wasn’t just that we both did it. It was that we did it for similar reasons in pursuit of similar goals, and we had been shaped by that practice in similar ways.
Both of us knew that fasting is pretty pointless if it is just self-denial. But if you deny yourself and simultaneously pay attention to your internal responses to that deprivation, and bring all that to prayer, it can be quite formative. And I think that is what we were recognising in one another — a common spiritual formation. It enabled us to find one another when we could easily have just travelled together without connecting.
So I said that there is a call here — a call that Paul sounds, that Peter sounds, that Malkhaz sounds, that Jesus sounds. A call that my Uber driver and I recognised each other to be similarly responding to. I said it was a call to do better than the dark days of interfaith hostility and violence. But that’s setting a pretty low bar, and really the call is to something way beyond that. So what is it then?
It’s not about fasting. Please don’t get misled by the example I’ve been talking about. It just happened to be the one that readily came up during that Uber ride. And fasting is not for everyone. For some people, eating regularly is a more appropriate challenge. And for some other people, encountering their own hunger does not help them become better people, it turns them into terrifying monsters. I’m not naming names.
So what is it then? This is going to sound like a strange kind of answer, but bear with me. I think the call is to become findable, to be findable in the way that the Uber driver and I were findable to each other.
I don’t mean for a minute to claim that he and I have arrived, and everyone else now has to catch up. The fact that that Uber conversation had such an impact on me tells you straight away that its not an everyday experience for me. It was a taste of something that I wish happened more often. And I think that the call to me is to become the kind of person who might have that experience a lot more often. To be that findable, far more often.
One of the things that impressed me so much about that driver was his conviction that fasting doesn’t have that much value on its own, and I’m fairly sure he’d have said the same thing about any and every spiritual discipline. Any of them can be practiced in ways that are pointless and powerless. But embraced as an invitation to inner transformation, they can come to life.
That’s true even of the big ones — the disciplines of prayer, of contemplative silence, of communal worship, of generous hospitality, of simplicity of life, of relational fidelity, of active forgiveness, of attentive compassion and care, of reconciling neighbourly love. It is possible to do even these things begrudgingly and resentfully and in ways that are resistant to being challenged or changed by the practice.
But when we embrace them and surrender ourselves to them, these practices don’t just express our faith — they impress the faith deeply into us. They shape us. Practiced and deepened over time, they transform us. They make us less and less cynical, resentful, and callous, and more and more like Jesus. And thus they make us recognisable and findable to others who are being similarly transformed.
That’s what I’m seeking to be. I want to be recognisable, to be findable. Not just once, a year ago, but often, regularly, usually.
What about you? Does that call resonate for you? If your next Uber driver, or the hairdresser, or the person next to you on the tram was a person of deep, life-giving faith, would they recognise you? Would they find you?
Somewhere in Canberra tonight, there’s a man who is probably eating with his family right now. Perhaps he’ll be pausing soon to pray the evening Isha’a prayers. I don’t know his name. We may never find each other again. Paul never got back to Athens either. But that evening in Lent and Ramadan last year, we found each other — two people who live and move and have our being in God. Two people being slowly reshaped by the practices of our faith traditions into something new, something we will spend our whole lives becoming. But that’s what a lifetime is for. That evening was a taste — a taste of what I want to become.