The unknown god made known (easter 6 a)

Given by the Rev. Canon Lance Beizer, Apr. 27, 2008

I can see Paul standing there on the Areopagus, the main plaza of the intellectual center of the ancient western world. He sees a monument to what is said to be “an unknown God” and points it out as a representation of the God he wants to present to the citizens of Athens. We’ve all been brought up with the myths of the Greeks and Romans sounding oh so quaint. It is perfectly obvious to us that Zeus didn’t come down from Mt. Olympus literally in the form of a swan to impregnate poor Leda. We trust that those images of Bacchus chasing lovely young maidens must surely have been just as likely to produce a chuckle in the Romans as in us. 

But it isn’t quite as cut and dried as all that when we look really deeply into the myths. What seem to us like unbelievable stories of hardly believable gods may be thought of another way. There is a long tradition in Christianity of speaking about angels and archangels and, as we hear every time we say the Eucharist, “all the company of heaven.” We even name them on occasion. We hear stories about them in the Bible, particularly Gabriel, who spoke to Mary of her pending pregnancy.” Catholic Christians also often turn to saints for assistance. When, for example, I had what was thought might be a life-threatening illness, one of my mom’s best friends, who was a good Catholic, asked St. Jude to intervene, and here I am today, over half a century later. Was it St. Jude? I’m not about to say “no.”  

I’m not trying to convince you that angels and saints are proper prayer companions. You’re free to turn to them or not, as you see fit. But I think it’s at least possible to consider the gods of the Greeks and Romans in the same way – something a bit more human, maybe even domestic, than that “unknown God” whose inscription Paul speaks of. Actually, one of the chief differences of Christianity from both Judaism and Islam is the much stricter view the other faiths have towards any visible representations of God. You won’t find either of them depicting a Charlton-Heston-like God (as an aside, I read the other day that Heston was himself an Episcopalian). But both have a rich cache of stories about angels. So I do believe that there is a real human need to incorporate something into their religion easier to relate to than a purely transcendent God. It’s also no coincidence that Baby Jesus resonates with so many people. And think how popular the words of “In the Garden” are, as they proclaim that “He walks with me and he talks with me and he tells me I am his own.” 

And yet, on the other hand, there is in our tradition a strong sense that we cannot really know the man from Galilee except as we are able to pull things out from the stories told about him, and clearly even those whom he literally walked with often revealed that they didn’t know him very well – though, ready as they were to follow him without even knowing where he would lead, more and more they came to know him for who he really was, and, as they did so, also do we. Perhaps the best-known passage from the first twentieth-century attempts to reconstruct the life of Jesus the man is this one from the pen of Albert Schweitzer, describing the process by which Jesus made himself known: 

He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side. He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: “Follow thou me!” and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.  

Unknown he may have been as he undertook his ministry, but he gradually made himself known in his healing deeds and perhaps even more in his personal behavior, associating with tax collectors and lepers and all sorts of those on the margins of society, and insisting that children are important enough to be taken seriously, something that clearly took his disciples by surprise. In those demonstrations of who he was he revealed not only himself, but the one who sent him, even God the father.  So it is in those whom we can see, or today perhaps only read about, like the saints, but most especially Jesus himself, that we can see through to what we can only imagine – the unknown god described by that Greek inscription which the book of Acts tells us about. 

We can know Jesus, and therefore God the father, through reading and hearing the stories about Jesus, but we don’t have to rely on only our own intellects to process that information. In John’s Gospel we heard today that Jesus is going to have the father send what it calls another Advocate to be with the disciples, and, by extension, with us.  In the original Greek, the word for Advocate is Paraclete, which literally means “one called to the side of.” It is often, but not always, used to describe an Advocate in the sense of a lawyer who speaks for us. In fact, Jesus himself is referred to this way. But there are other translations possible also. In fact, given the fact that it is also called here “The Spirit of Truth,” and said to be “in” us, a simple translation like, “helper” is probably better. But, what may give us real hope is that this helper is best understood as the Holy Spirit – God’s presence with us now that Jesus is gone. If the god of the inscription in Athens that the book of Acts refers to is unknown, and the Jesus who gathered his disciples came “as one unknown,” the Holy Spirit,” so amorphous, is even more unknown. 

We must come to know that Spirit in ways that have become associated over the centuries with looking within ourselves, with getting to find it in the still point within our very souls. The marvelous novelist and spiritual writer Sue Monk Kidd in her book “When the Heart Waits,” speaks of the need to look within the soul as she discusses the work of the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart. She puts it this way: 

We’ve mostly looked at it [that is, the soul] as something to save – an immortal essence in need of redeeming. How many souls have you won? then becomes the central question of Christian life. But the soul is more than something to win or save. It’s the seat and repository of the inner Divine, the God-image, the truest part of us. (p. 48) 

When we are in touch with that aspect of God that is within us we can feel more deeply the call to love our neighbor as ourselves, for if God resides in the deepest part of ourselves he is likewise within our neighbors as well. And if we can see God in the man Jesus, in whom he resided, can we not also, then, see him in others, in whom he now resides as the Spirit. One of the most powerful passages for me in my spiritual reading, one that has had a lasting effect on my attitude towards others, is from a little book by a not very well-known British woman who has been described as “artist, odd ball, mystic, friend, and in the end, suffering servant.” Her name is Caryll Houselander, her book “A Rocking-Horse Catholic.” She writes of her mystical experience of seeing God in others in the form of Christ himself. The scene is the London underground: 

I was in an underground train, a crowded train in which all sorts of people jostled together, sitting and strap-hanging – workers of every description getting home at the end of the day. Quite suddenly I saw with my mind, but as vividly as a wonderful picture, Christ in them all. But I saw more than that; not only was Christ in every one of them, living in them, dying in them, rejoicing in them, sorrowing in them – but because He was in them, and because they were here, the whole world was here too, here in this underground train; not only the world as it was at that moment, not only all the people in all the countries of the world, but all those people who had lived in the past, and all those yet to come.

I came out into the street and walked for a long time in the crowds. It was the same here, on every side, in every passer-by, everywhere – Christ. (pp. 137-8) 

What a world this could be if everyone were able to look at others in the same way! Whether we look within ourselves, or at those we greet this morning as we pass the peace, or at those we see on the streets of our city, or even at those whose faces we only see in our papers and magazines, the folks who live half a world away, may we also come to see Christ in them…. 

In his name we pray, AMEN

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