Sermon for the 6th Sunday of Easter, 5/21/17

Our God Is So Big!                                                                                       Pastor Jennifer Ginn       Acts 17: 22-33     
                                                                                               
    How in Heaven’s name did Paul get into this high-flung pulpit at the Areopagus, a position from which weighty judgments were rendered and important debates conducted? Paul has been kicked out of two towns in the days just before this because of his UNpopular message. How odd that those he would least expect to have interest in his message, the Greeks, would invite him to speak. But they do. In the verses before today’s reading begins, they ask, “may we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting?”
    I can identify with that question. I often yearn to discover ‘something more, something bigger, something deeper.’ Don’t you? We all know there’s likely to be more beneath the surface than we expect. You start cleaning out that closet you’ve let pile up for years and discover behind the piles of sheets and towels and pillowcases a box of your grandmother’s silver you’d forgotten about. Or you begin to trace the cause of the oil stain on your garage floor and find so much more than a loose drain plug—yikes! There’s a thrill to digging deeper and pushing further, even when you dread what you might find.
    The Athenians loved that ‘rush’ of new discoveries, too. They were intelligent and curious people. Paul caught on to their yearning for more when he walked through Athens, the city of many gods. An ancient proverb declares there were more gods in Athens than men. But Paul found one altar with the inscription, “To an Unknown God.” Even with a staggering array of ready-made gods, still the Greeks longed for one more, whom they could not even name.
    And that’s where Paul meets them, at the place of their yearning. He uses that very yearning to introduce his God (our God). We are connected, Paul says, we humans: all placed here by the God of the universe and made by that God with a need to find the creator, to know the one who made us.
    And here’s the amazing part…..Paul says to them: you may not realize it, but this God already holds you in an orbit of love. You are already part of God’s family: created by God and born from the same ancestor as the rest of humankind. You are made to reach for and discover the rest of the family that we are ALL in, together.
    This idea of an ordered world and a God who desires our companionship—I wonder how they processed that. Their gods were known to be capricious, unpredictable in their relationships with humans, and certainly not in the ‘god business’ for the sake of mortals.
    But a God who made us and gave us all we need, who placed us deliberately in time and space? A God who loved human flesh and became flesh in order to draw us into the family of God? The Athenians would have known nothing of that idea.         
    They did, like all of us, long to be part of something bigger and more true. Paul’s message to them? The God you don’t know yet is big enough to hold all of you, all of humankind and the natural world in one loving circle, God’s wide arms.
   
    A favorite preschool song at C&C:
‘Our God is so big, so strong and so mighty there’s nothing our God cannot do.
The mountains are his, the rivers are his, the stars are his handiwork, too.
Our God is so big, so strong and so mighty there’s nothing our God cannot do.’

    The second verse is more fun than the first:
‘Our God is so big, so strong and so mighty there’s nothing our God cannot do.
The trees are his, the seas are his, and so are the elephants, too.
Our God is so big, so strong and so mighty there’s nothing our God cannot do.’

    Kids love the elephant part. Sweet and funny, but it makes an important claim: God doesn’t hold only the trees and seas, but the elephants and donkeys—
all we Republicans and Democrats and in betweens,
all we of various colors and nations and religions.
And yes, even those people who look right past you, even those you suspect may hurt you, even those you hate.
    Yes, God holds us all in an ever-expanding circle of love that is hard to envision, a holy mystery. But in our kindest and best moments, maybe we can actually perceive that circle of love, and trust it to be right and true.
    Paul would have liked the song. And he’s counting on that same kind of trust as he pours out his heart in Athens. He’s counting on their perceiving that the news he brings of the God whose plan includes them IS right and true. 
    Some of them caught that message. Despite their discomfort at some of Paul’s claims, they said, “We will hear more. We will hear you again about this.” A few of them even joined him and became believers—and you just never can tell what a few ‘on fire’ believers can do.
    Paul’s message was tailor-made for the Athenians. But it’s a message for us, too. Will YOU hear more? (You have heard more already, what Paul wrote to the believers in the churches he founded: he says that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither male or female, neither slave nor free. All are one family in the body of Christ.)
    In your kindest and best moments, can you trust that? That the God who made our first parents is also God of those we see as different or maybe even dangerous?
* that the Muslim across the street who goes to work every morning just like you is as honest in his reach for God as you are in your quest to understand this same God?
* that the quiet woman with the ruby dot on her forehead (who knows God so differently) knows a piece of the one God and occupies, with us, the holy, loving circle of God’s arms?
* that the guy parked next to you at the mall, who gets out of his car at the same moment you do, but has the wrong political sticker in his back windshield, is your brother in Christ?
    If God is that big, that loving, that present in every tree and elephant, every boy and girl, every grizzled elder and every baby growing in a womb, every enemy you can identify—if that is true, could it be that the world is indeed a different kind of place than we might have thought?
    What if the world really were held in God’s arms of love and grace? If that were true, wouldn’t we who worship that very God be living as if we believed it? Perhaps we can begin here…and now.