The Good News breaks forth into All cultures
Acts 17:16-34
I want us to think today about the many different cultures that are a part of our world. Culture can be defined in a number of ways, but I want us to think about it as the behaviors, perspectives, values and beliefs characteristic of a particular social, ethnic, or age group. People within a culture usually interpret the meaning of symbols, particular words, gestures, and countless behaviors in the same ways. Cultural traits distinguish people in one culture from others and usually are passed on from generation to generation.
For example: I grew up in a small town, Appalachian mountain culture. When my Dad taught me to drive a car, he passed on to me that when someone in a lane next to me puts on a blinker, I should slow down and let that person pull in front of me. Everyone in my town did that. Then, I went to Chicago. The first time I was driving on the Eisenhower Freeway, I put on my blinker and expected the taxicab in the lane next to me to slow down and let me in. But he sped up and began blowing his horn when I tried to pull in. My Chicago passenger told me, "This is a different driving culture. When you want to change lanes, first you begin to pull into the lane and only then do you put on the blinker!" Then, when I went to Tokyo and tried to drive on the opposite side of the road, I knew that I was in a completely different cultural world.
Driving culture is just one tiny aspect of almost countless cultural difference we have to learn as we engage with people different from ourselves. We have youth cultures, Baby Boomer cultures, southern cultures, urban cultures... And note this: It is not easy or comfortable to understand and get along with people when our cultural ways and values are so different. In fact, cross-cultural misunderstanding is at the root of much of the conflict we see all around the globe – in the Middle East, in Ukraine and Russia, etc.
And that brings us to the eternal plan of God not only to bring people from every culture into a place of better understanding but also into one eternal family. It was sin that separated people from one another. It is God's plan to bring about reconciliation among people, both to Himself and to one another. In the book of Ephesians, Paul declared it was God's eternal plan to do this. The only mystery was this: How would God do it?" The Bible's answer is, "In Christ. Faith in Jesus Christ brings us together." But, how is that message of God's good news coming to all cultures to be communicated across so many cultural divisions?
Acts 17:16-34 and God's Gospel Coming to Athens
That brings us to Acts 17 and the Apostle Paul's seemingly coincidental visit to the city of Athens, Greece. Athens was the educational, cultural and entertainment center of the ancient world. It was the native city of Plato and Socrates and the adopted city of Aristotle, Epicurus and Zeno. It was a place of ongoing philosophical discussion and of enormously divergent religious opinion. There were temples and idols everywhere in the city. In other words, this was a very different culture from the Apostle Paul's.
Religion was at the heart of the cultural differences there: Up until this point, Paul had dealt exclusively with people who believed that there is only one God in the world. Paul always first looked for a synagogue in a city when he went in. The worldview of his fellow Jewish people was that there is one God, the Maker of everything that exists. We have already seen that Gentiles had started coming to faith in Jesus before we get to Acts 17. But, for the most part, the Gentile converts had been "God-fearers", i.e., people who had rejected the idea of "many gods" and were searching for the one God who is over all.
So in Acts 17:1-10, Paul went into a synagogue and pointed the people there to the prophecies in the Bible about a Messiah. Then Paul said that Jesus fulfilled the prophecies. And a large number of Jews and God-fearing Gentiles believed (v.4). The same thing happened in Berea in 17:10-12. Paul's approach began with the Bible. Day after day, the Jewish people and God-fearers studied the Scriptures with Paul until we read in v.12, "As a result, many of them believed."
Of course, these conversions to believe in Jesus didn't happen without controversy. People upset with this message abut Jesus being the Savior of the world tried to end Paul's ministry – so Paul was run out of Berea and unexpectedly ended up one day in Athens, Greece waiting for his ministry partners, Timothy and Silas. But Paul did not see this development as being a waste of time or even a time for being a tourist. No, he saw his being there as a divine appointment. What did he do?
First, Paul went to a synagogue and reasoned with the Jewish people and the God-fearers there. I'm sure he did this as he always did, i.e., by going through Scripture with them carefully. But, these people, i.e., those who believed in one God over all gods, comprised a tiny minority in Athens. So...
Second, Paul went into the Marketplace, the "Agora". This wasn't just a shopping place but the center of community life. It was energetic and alive with people heralding the news of the day, discussing their philosophies, dialoging about politics, and promoting their religions. Athens' Agora: http://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/01/bd/5a/59/caption.jpg.
Some of our UC Berkeley students have told me this is a lot like walking through Sathergate into the main gathering place on campus called Sproul Plaza: http://berzerkeley.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/03-04sathergatefront.jpg. Student groups try to recruit people there. Political issues are bantered about there. It's the center of community life.
When Paul went to the marketplace, he encountered people who had very different views about God and the world. (Just like a student who had graduated from Maranatha High School would experience when he or she goes to a state university.) Most of the people in the Agora were polytheists. In one section of the Agora, there was a huge section of idols – statues big and small. And on the hillside towering over the Agora, there was the Parthenon: http://www.democratic-republicans.us/images/athens-parthenon-night-big.jpg. The Parthenon was a temple of ongoing religious activity including magic and prostitution. Enormous statues of various gods surrounded it: http://taylorseast.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/dsc07518.jpg.
While Paul was dialoguing with the polytheists, two other groups came to talk with him, the Epicureans and Stoics. The Epicureans did not deny that there were deities in this world but they scoffed at the idea that gods care about how people conduct their lives. So, they were "Deists", people who believe in spiritual reality but that God doesn't concern himself with human affairs. In fact, they believed that we are free from the fear of gods holding us accountable for our conduct. They said we are free to pursue lives of happiness and pleasure without reference to gods. (Sounds a lot like our culture, doesn't it?)
And the Stoics, in their religious viewpoints, were basically pantheists. They saw each human being as being a part of a whole connected reality. They said we find contentment through accepting that we should not struggle against the forces in our universe because we're a part of it. Religiously, the Stoics would be closest to philosophical Buddhists. They called people to be at peace with things being the way they are.
As Paul talked with all these groups, there were times of misunderstanding. Some of them called him a babbler, i.e., a man who was stringing together a lot of random ideas. They may have misunderstood what he meant by the word "resurrection" in v.18 because that word was sometimes associated with a goddess.
But, according to v.17, Paul kept at it. He went back to the Agora "day after day" and reasoned with the people. I'm sure it was a learning experience for him. Paul was learning how other cultures viewed the world, how they thought, and what they valued. And it gave him an opportunity that was huge:
Third, Paul went to the Areopagus (Mars Hill). This word, "areopagus", was used both for a body of influential people in Athens and for the hilly area where they met in the Agora to hear disputes and receive input. After all these days of dialogue, Paul had earned the privilege of going before this body of leaders. When they met, crowds gathered to listen in too – so this was an enormous evangelistic opportunity. The speech Paul made is one of Paul's three major speeches Luke recorded in Acts. But this one is very different from the other two. Remember that the other two were given to people who already believed that there is one God who is sovereign over everything in the universe. Here, Paul's approach has to be different.
What do we learn from him? (Of the many things I think we should learn, I've picked out just a few.)
#1: We must know God personally ourselves.
We cannot grasp what happened in Athens without remembering that Paul had met the one true God personally – through faith in Jesus. It was so life-changing for him that the story is told twice in Acts, both in Acts 9 and 26. For Paul, God was not a philosophy or intellectual concept. No, God was real. That means that Paul knew that he was not a part of the deity as the Stoics believed. He knew that God was not distant from the world as the Epicureans believed. He knew that God is here, that God knows us, that God cares about us and that God has a way he has created us to live. And Paul knew that these statues of "gods" he saw all around him were not God.
When you grasp that Paul had a real and personal relationship with God, then his response to what he saw makes sense. It gave him the confidence to say boldly, "These things you believe about God need to be expanded in an infinite way. God is bigger than anything you have every even imagined." For Paul, this was not a philosophical discussion. It was clarifying the identity of the Person who had changed his life.
Have you met God? If you have, you will listen to how people talk about God in a different way. And, when you have met God, you will also deal with people differently too.
#2: We must deal with people personally and respectfully.
A part of our own culture is that we have become increasingly polarized. We don't have many places like the Agora in our society where people can sit down and talk to one another and listen to one another. Instead, so often we talk at one another. If we disagree about matters of politics or faith, we call people names and refuse to associate with them.
Paul shows us a better way. As he began, the Bible says in v.17 that he "reasoned with" people day after day. Lawyers among us will probably recognize the term for what Paul did, i.e., dielegomai. You may hear the word "dialogue" in that Greek word. This was a very special word to the people in Athens because it spoke of the way Socrates engaged in teaching. We still call it the "Socratic method." It's not one way communication but a method by which questions are posed and answers are sought together. Only people who respected one another and listened to one another could do this well. And that's what Paul did. He didn't just yell at the people or call them names. He sat down and listened. And he did it over and over again until he gained understanding and he began to impart understanding. At first, they called him a "babbler" but eventually he won a hearing. They said in v.19, "We want to know about this new teaching you're presenting. Your teaching is still strange to our ears and we would like to know what you mean."
This sort of relationship building takes more time. But it is consistent with the life of Jesus. Jesus did not simply give us a message. He came personally. And he sends us as he was sent. He experienced what we experience. He knows us and understands us. He speaks to our real needs. That's what we need to do too.
Jason Emmanuel Petty is better known by his stage name Propaganda. He is a spoken word artist and poet from Los Angeles, California. In one of his spoken word poems, he calls us to do what the Apostle Paul did in Athens: to move into the lives of people, become a part of the culture and of the community, and be Christ's ambassador of reconciliation wherever we are. Here's a part of his poem, Justice & the Gospel:
You can have a heart that breaks for a dying city, yet have nothing to offer them.
Wait! There's the problem: "Them!" There is no them. Them is us!
Culture is you. It's me. We. We're our city.
We're the culture. So we too are the problem.
And our Savior: He, he wasn't a commuter.
He moved in. He spoke the language of the broken.
He spoke our language...
The culture is us. It's you. We're participants.
How could we possibly be the solution?
We need someone to move in! And, the Savior moved in.
This is your city. He came and walked the streets of your soul.
And you, in the same vein, must move in.
You go. You pray that the gospel prospers.
'Cause if it prospers, you will too.
So, like Jesus and Paul, we are to develop relationships of respect with people around us and understand how people think, what they enjoy, and how they hurt. As we gain understanding, out of our love for people we will know what to say to them -- for we will long for others to know the life we have in Jesus.
#3: We sometimes must begin with a simple message about who God is.
Standing there before the intellectual leaders of Mars Hill, Paul could see the many gods all over the marketplace. And he could look up and see the Parthenon too with its temple and gigantic statues in gold. http://www.mccullagh.org/db9/1ds-12/areopagus-at-dusk.jpg. I imagine him saying, "Look at all this. I have learned from being here that you know there is something bigger in this world than just the normal mundane things that happen. You even sense that there is a God you do not know for you have kept here an altar dedicated to 'an unknown God.' You don't know the very One you have been made to worship. I am here to tell you about him now.
The God you were made to worship made everything. And he doesn't live in the Parthenon for he made everything that is. He made all people. Yes, he made you. So, God doesn't need you to bring him things so that he might be manipulated into giving you what you want. No, you need him! You were made for him. You are God's offspring. It's not possible for the offspring to make the one who made us! God has always been and he has been patient with people but now he has made himself known. The eternal God now calls all people to repent of their sins and of worshipping other gods and to believe in him"
More and more, I am convinced that we need to start in our witness where Paul started, i.e., with careful discussions of who God is and what God is like. People have such strange ideas of what God must be like. As a hint: Genesis 1-2 will be a great help to you in talking about God -- just as it was to Paul.
#4: We must find the courage to call people to know God through faith in the resurrected Jesus.
There is an obvious question begging to be asked in all this: "Paul, how can you know that your God is the only real God in the face of all these 'gods'?" Just as v.18 tells us Paul was constantly "proclaiming the good news about Jesus and the resurrection", Paul returned to Jesus and the resurrection at the culmination of his sermon. Paul said, "God has given us proof of my message by raising him from the dead."
Remember all the cultures converging here in Athens. Why is it that in Athens – as every city in Acts – the issue of resurrection is central? I suggest at least two reasons for this. One is that our faith is not like other religions. It's not about rituals and activities we have to do in order to please the deity. As Tim Keller says, "The Christian faith is not advice to be followed but good news to be believed." So Paul announces that, "God came and defeated death by a resurrection. We saw him die and we saw him alive. The greatest enemy in this world has been defeated."
I think the other reason the message of resurrection from the dead is relevant to all cultures is that death affects people no matter what culture we are a part of. We live in a dying world. The natural course of our world is that things deteriorate. All cultures know this. The Maple Street Building was well built but it is deteriorating. Grass withers. People grow old and die. But when Jesus came into this world, his resurrection from the dead announced a new beginning. The unrelenting enemy called death met a greater Master. Its sting has been taken away. The necessity of dying in this world has been turned around. Death has been swallowed up and eternal life is offered to all who follow the one resurrected Lord Jesus. This is our great hope in this world. Death and disease and old age – these are not terminal things. When we encounter people from any culture, we can know that they need to know that there is a certain hope in this dying world. Jesus is risen. That's why we must always talk about Jesus to any culture.
So Paul called people to join him and the community of faith in this new life with the one true God. Some sneered (v.32a). Don't be discouraged when that happens. Some knew they needed to hear more (v.32b). I find that frequently is the case when people hear about a message about the one true God for the first time. Be ready for the long haul. And, praise be to God, some believed (v.34). And, there are still people following Jesus in Greece today. Why – we even have Greek believers at LAC!
I call you today to repent of your sin and to believe in Jesus today. And, I send you today to look for chances to sit down with people, to find out how people think about important things, to be patient as you engage in dialogue, and always to tell them about Jesus. Some will believe. God will be pleased.
To His glory,
Dr. Greg Waybright
Senior Pastor
Greg Waybright • Copyright 2014, Lake Avenue Church