worship this Sunday…

As a kid who absolutely adored television, one of my favorite things was when a tv show had a “crossover” episode. A crossover episode was one where a character from one tv show surprised the viewers of another tv program by suddenly showing up in that story. Whether it was a character from a related show or even someone totally unexpected, there was always a certain joy for me in how it made me feel that all these shows were somehow “connected” behind the scenes in some way. That there was a cohesion somehow even if I wasn’t privy to it. 

This week our Scripture passage feels a bit like a crossover episode to me. Not with characters necessarily, but instead with cultures. What I mean by that is although I know that Greco-Roman culture definitely overlapped with Jewish/Judean culture from the New Testament, we don’t actually see those two meet very often in Scripture. It just feels like when we read the New Testament that the majority of the time we are experiencing what we might understand to be a Jewish Biblical culture rather than a Greco-Roman one.

Which is why our passage this week feels like such an exciting crossover episode. Because in this story from the Book of Acts, the Apostle Paul (previously a Jewish Pharisee) goes to Athens to speak to the Greek people about their religious, cultural and even philosophical ideas. He wanders the streets of Athens and reflects with them about how they understand God, and even commends them for their faith and religiosity. It’s a really cool passage because Paul (who is often depicted to be a rather harsh defender of the faith) shows us that he is diplomatic, open-minded, and even genuinely interested in some sort of interreligious dialogue.

But I also think that one thing we will see in this story is that while Paul is diplomatic and open-minded in his conversation, he is not ultimately just interested in learning for learning’s sake. Instead, he believes that what has happened in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, a young Jewish man in a remote part of the Roman Empire, really does have something to say to the entire world. While it is true that he values Greek ideas and culture, more than that he wants them to understand the impact of what happened with Jesus-who has been raised from the dead.

My hope for us this Sunday so we might leave worship feeling the same way that Paul did that morning in Athens. That this thing that happened long ago in a remote part of the world really, really matters. It matters for people's lives, beliefs, their work, and it matters for the cultures and societies in which we move and live. 

See you on Sunday as we keep exploring this idea!

-Pastor Brent

Acts 17:22- 17:31

Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. 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. 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, 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. 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, 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. 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.’ 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. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, 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.”