“Spiritual, But Not Religious“, by Rev. Mike Holly

As Paul looks around in the city of Athens, he notices how religious the people there are. There are temples and shrines to various deities and people seem to be moving in and out and around them. Possibly even going to several areas of worship. They have their pick, in a sense, of any god that they would like. In particular, they can go to the god who has the specific are of expertise to help them in their area of need or concern.

Paul as an evangelist of the one God he knows through his Jewish upbringing and through his new-found faith in Jesus Christ seeks to instruct them and guide them to understand God from his point of view. That is a very difficult skill especially in our day and age. Not only do we encounter people that are skeptical in the Christian faith; we also encounter people who believe that they were wronged by the Christian institution or even by God Himself. Taking their experiences seriously paves the way towards building trust and a relationship of care and support.

But today we also face another category:  we encounter people who believe that Christianity really doesn’t matter. Often, you hear that they seek to be “spiritual, but not religious.” Today in worship we will be exploring how Paul as an evangelist in Athens encountered something similar and what we can learn from his response.

~Mike Holly

The Word

Acts 17:16-31

While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and also in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. Also some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers debated with him. Some said, “What does this babbler want to say?” Others said, “He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign divinities.” (This was because he was telling the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.) So they took him and brought him to the Areopagus and asked him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means.” Now all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.

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.”

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