Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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Early Christians remembered, and reminded each other of, heroic events that took place in the first years of the Church's life. This was one such story: what the great Saint Paul told the people of Athens about their cover-your-backside, hedge your bets altar, the one inscribed to an "unknown" god. Athens in those days, you remember, was the cultural and academic center of the world. Centuries after the Romans had conquered the Greeks, wresting empire from the descendants of Alexander the Great, wealthy Romans still sent their children to Athens for school. If they couldn't afford that, they hired Greek tutors to come to their homes. Roman artists and Roman writers copied what the Greeks had done. Rome's most important buildings looked suspiciously Greek (as do ours). So for Paul (an itinerant tent maker, follower of an obscure Jewish carpenter) to walk into Athens, where Socrates and Plato and Aristotle had held forth centuries before - for Paul to walk into Athens and proclaim a new way of looking at the world, was brassy. Extremely brassy. As if you or I would walk into the ivied courtyards of Harvard and proclaim an entirely new way of thinking and learning and living. But that's what Paul did. And, in the long run, it was Paul, not the professors, who prevailed. The major emphasis in Paul's words that day was that God need no longer be unknown, not since Christ had come. It is a straight-forward Christian assertion (a very bold assertion): that ordinary men and women can actually know God in Jesus Christ. Whatever Jesus was that's what God is. If Jesus healed, God heals. If Jesus loved, God loves. "I and the father am one," Jesus had said. Of course, we can make anything difficult if we try hard enough. With our complicated theologies, we can make a knowledge of God almost impossible. We can get ourselves tangled up in obscure thinking (as the Greeks did), we can seek truth in religions long ago and far away. We can search for God in exotic and remote places, can travel to the mountain top, or to a deserted island, or to India or Tibet or Nepal-- and talk to the holy men - only to discover that there is no better revelation of God than the one we already have in Jesus. So that the true search for God is inward, not outward - nearer, not farther.

A teacher asked her class what color apples were. Most said red. A couple said green. One little boy said white. The teacher said, "No. Apples are red or green, but not white." The little boy said, "Look inside." Paul was saying to those sophisticated Athenians, put aside your books, your theories, your speculations, your circumlocutions, and look inside. Look for God in the everyday. Quit implying that God is unknown, or unknowable. Paul's God is underfoot. Paul's God , in Jesus, has become touchable, audible, visible. (Paul knew that, in the long run, theories and circumlocutions, "talking around," are ways of avoiding a God who is as plain as the nose on your face.) Look for him in the man, Jesus. There are people still alive who knew Jesus, for heavens sake!

"What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you." Then Paul reminds them how God made the world and everything in it - not just Jews, but Athenians, too - and, because he made everything and everyone, there is nothing we can give God that is not already his. He doesn't need anything. Shrines and idols, things "made by human hands," cannot appease God. It is not we who give to him, but he who gives to us: "In him we live, and move and have our being." Once one gets creation straight, one understands that God is not (cannot be) a deity like those worshipped all over the ancient world, deities made of gold, or silver or stone. God is not like a painting or sculpture fashioned from our imaginations, Paul said. A god who could be contained in such things is way too small. We don't need shrines and altars (certainly not altars to unknown gods). We need a real, living God. And that's what we got in the Word that became flesh.

One might think that such a close God, one about whom we can know all we need to know in the man Jesus -- by simply reading the New Testament - one would think that such a God would be welcomed with open arms. But, in truth, we prefer God at a distance. The Athenians' problem was not that God was unknown to them but that (Paul's God, at least) was too easily known. Too clear. Too demanding. To suggest to someone, even today, that God can be seen and touched in Jesus Christ, is to force that person to a decision, is to prevent evasion on that person's part..

One cartoon shows a young man earnestly praying, "God, what shall I do with my life?" In the next frame God answers: "Feed the hungry, right injustices, work for peace." "Just testing," the young man says. God says, "Same here." When God is too close for comfort, we find ways of buffering ourselves from him. We mute his word.

If Jesus makes God touchable, audible, visible, communion makes Jesus touchable, audible, visible. Roman Catholics do it every time they worship. We do it once a month. Other Christians do it more or less frequently. But we all do it. Because Jesus told us to, and because this sacrament (in the words of the old book) is "an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace." In other words, "something we can see and touch for something we cannot." Communion reminds us of Jesus. "Do this in remembrance of me." As a widow finds an old pair of her husband's shoes, as he left them, ready for him to step into and walk away, and as that physical presence (those shoes) brings back, in terrible grief, all her love and all her unspeakable loss, so we touch the bread and drink the wine, and the physical presence of these things brings back the life, death and resurrection of our Lord. And, in doing so, we celebrate Jesus and God himself. God is not unknown to us. To say so is not to accept Jesus.