“The Gifts and the Giver”
Preached By: Rev. Karla Wubbenhorst on Thanksgiving Sunday October 08, 2006
Scripture Reading: Acts 17: 1-18: 17
17.1 After leaving Philippi, Paul and Silas passed through
Amphipolis and Apollonia, and came to Thessalonica, where Paul, as
was his custom, taught in the synagogue, proclaiming Jesus as Messiah.
Some of the Jews as well as many of the God-fearing Greeks, and not a
few of the leading women became believers. But those Jews who had
not believed created an uproar in the marketplace and sought the
apostles in Jason’s house. Not finding them, they dragged Jason and
some of the other believers before the city authorities, shouting: “These
people who have been turning the world upside down have come here
also, and Jason has entertained them as guests. They proclaim another
king called ‘Jesus’ which is opposed to the decrees of the emperor.” The
magistrates and people were disturbed at hearing this, but Jason and the
others were released on bail. The believers sent Paul and Silas off to
Beroea that night. Arriving there they again went to the Jewish
synagogue, and found the people more receptive than in Thessalonica.
Many believed, including not a few Greek women and men of high
standing. But the Jews of Thessalonica sought the Apostles in Beroea
and began to incite the crowds there, so the believers immediately sent
Paul to the coast and on to Athens. Silas and Timothy remained, on the
understanding that they would join Paul as soon as possible.
16
While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was deeply
distressed to see that the city was full of idols. 17So he argued in the
synagogue with the Jews…and also in the marketplace every day with
those who happened to be there. 18Also some Epicurean and Stoic
philosophers debated with him. [At length they] brought him to the
Areopagus and asked him, “May we know what this new teaching is
that you are presenting? [For] the Athenians…would spend their time in
nothing but telling or hearing something new. 22Then Paul stood in
front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely
religious you are in every way. 23For 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. 24The 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, 25nor is he served by human
hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all
mortals life and breath and all things. 26From one ancestor he made all
nations to inhabit the whole earth….Every nation gropes for God…—
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“The Gifts and the Giver”
Preached By: Rev. Karla Wubbenhorst on Thanksgiving Sunday October 08, 2006
though indeed he is not far from each one of us. 28For ‘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.’ 29Since 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. 30While God has
overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people
everywhere to repent, 31because 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.”
32
When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but
others said, “We will hear you again about this.” 33At that point Paul left
them. 34But some…became believers, including Dionysius the
Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.
18.1After this Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. 2There he found a
Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, who had recently come from
Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had ordered all Jews to
leave Rome. Paul went to see them, 3and, because he was of the same
trade, he stayed with them, and they worked together—by trade they
were tentmakers…. 5When Silas and Timothy arrived from Macedonia,
Paul was occupied with proclaiming the word, testifying to the Jews that
the Messiah was Jesus. 6When they opposed and reviled him, in protest
he shook the dust from his clothes and said to them, “Your blood be on
your own heads! I am innocent. From now on I will go to the Gentiles.”
7
Then he left the synagogue and went to the house of a man named
Titius Justus, a worshiper of God; his house was next door to the
synagogue. 8Crispus, the official of the synagogue, became a believer in
the Lord, together with all his household; and many of the Corinthians
who heard Paul became believers and were baptized. 9One night the
Lord said to Paul in a vision, “Do not be afraid, but speak and do not be
silent; 10for I am with you, and no one will lay a hand on you to harm
you, for there are many in this city who are my people.” 11He stayed
there a year and six months, teaching the word of God among them.
12
But when Gallio was proconsul of Achaia, the Jews made a united
attack on Paul and brought him before the tribunal. 13They said, “This
man is persuading people to worship God in ways that are contrary to
the law.” [Gallio was reluctant to become a judge in a dispute over the
Jews’ religious law, so he dismissed the case. The Jews then seized
Sosthenes, official of the synagogue, and beat him in front of the
tribunal. To all these things, however, Gallio turned a blind eye.]
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“The Gifts and the Giver”
Preached By: Rev. Karla Wubbenhorst on Thanksgiving Sunday October 08, 2006
Sermon Text:
For a Thanksgiving Sunday
sermon there are texts which are a
great deal more obvious to choose
than Acts 17: Paul’s mission to
Athens. For instance there’s the
story of the 10 lepers whom Jesus
heals, and the one who returns to
say ‘thank you.’ In the writings of
Paul we have many examples of
Christian Thanksgiving, and the
exhortation to the Thessalonians:
“give thanks in all circumstances.”
Now there’s a text for a
thanksgiving sermon. Or there’s
the harvest theme – a very rich one
in Scripture. In Psalm 126 harvest
is a metaphor for joyful reward
after the patient bearing of sorrow.
“6Those who go out weeping,
bearing the seed for sowing, shall
come home with shouts of joy,
carrying their sheaves.” In Isaiah
55 and the parable of the sower from Mark 4, harvest is the
metaphor for the sure response to God’s Word. Those are the texts
we chose last year at this time. In Luke 10 – “the harvest is
plentiful but the workers are few” – harvest refers to the work of
Christian mission. So many wonderful Thanksgiving Sunday texts
passed by, but as I looked at the next portion of text coming up in
our series on Acts, I saw the potential for a Thanksgiving Sunday
sermon there too. The passage records Paul’s encounter with a
culture which has no concept of what it means to be a thankful
people. It shows a couple of forms of religiosity which can easily
describe our religious-ness when Thanksgiving is left out.
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“The Gifts and the Giver”
Preached By: Rev. Karla Wubbenhorst on Thanksgiving Sunday October 08, 2006
Paul is very sad as he wanders through this great city of
Athens waiting for his companions, Silas and Timothy, to join him.
As an educated man with a mind honed for debate, Paul has
probably longed to see Athens all his life. No doubt he has read
the writings of Philo, the renouned, recently deceased rabbi from
Alexandria, whose whole intellectual project was to unite the
revealed truths of Judaism with the human wisdom of the Greek
philosophers – with Plato’s wisdom in particular.
But during Paul’s visit to Athens he finds that the loftier
philosophies of the 5th century BC, the philosophies of Plato and
Aristotle, have been replaced by more practical thinking, deriving
from 3rd century figures like Epicurus and Xeno the Stoic. What
passes under the name of philosophy, is as degraded as some of
what lines the bookshelves these days under the title of “self-help.”
Athens is the birthplace of democracy, renowned for its wise
judges and silver-tongued statesmen. But Athens had been
conquered by the Roman
dictator Sulla in the last
century, and now the real
statescraft in Athens, like
everywhere else in the
empire, was in the hands of
Roman civil servants. The
only legacy which
participatory government left
upon the men of Athens was
the notion that everyone has
an opinion and every opinion
must be heard. Paul finds a
culture of idlers discussing every novel opinion in the watering
holes of the marketplace. This talk-shop accomplished nothing,
except that it made every old babbler with a bee in his bonnet, feel
he’d had his 5 minutes of airtime.
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“The Gifts and the Giver”
Preached By: Rev. Karla Wubbenhorst on Thanksgiving Sunday October 08, 2006
Paul also would have known
Athens as the home of some of the
world’s greatest artisans – sculptors
and architects whose style had been
copied throughout the great cities of
the West and of the East. Paul
would have had his eyes wide open
for the elegant balanced white
marble columns, the lithe, graceful
depictions of the human figure in
smoothest alabaster, which had
made the name of the Athenian artisans. What he saw was a flea
market jumble. A sculpture of a different god in every corner, and
from every angle in the city, the towering acropolis, crowned with
its white marble abomination, a temple to the pagan goddess
Athena.
Paul had come to Athens expecting to find
something to admire. The reality was a grave
disappointment. Instead of admiring the
Athenians he began to pity them in their
religious confusion. They had shrines and
temples to every god going, the 12 Olympian
gods of traditional Greek mythology, Zeus,
Apollo, Athena and the rest, as well as a few of
the older regional gods, such as Python whose
games were celebrated at Delphi, and whose
temple stood on the southern side of the
Acropolis. There were shrines to other gods,
which foreign immigrants had brought with them – for Athens was
a cosmopolitan city and prided itself on being a tolerant place.
And there was a whole raft of demi-gods. There was a saying in
the ancient world that it was easier to find a god in Athens than a
man. Athens reveled in its diversity, its religious pluralism, it even
erected a statue to the unknown god, lest any deity be omitted from
the worship, but for Paul the whole scene was indescribably sad.
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“The Gifts and the Giver”
Preached By: Rev. Karla Wubbenhorst on Thanksgiving Sunday October 08, 2006
The sons and daughters of the most enlightened culture the world
had ever seen, given over to the bondage and the darkness of idol
worship and superstition.
In fact Athens had two religious problems. On the one hand
it was hyper-religious – shrines everywhere, statues of the gods for
sale on every news-stand, three for a penny. But on the other hand,
there was a deep cynicism about all religion. The epicureans and
the stoics were the prevailing philosophies and both were
essentially atheistic. The ways of life they promoted they saw
were hampered by belief in a personal God, concerned with the
lives of human beings. So being a city teeming with gods, had
made the Athenians feel superior to all religion. They maintained
all religion, but didn’t have a scrap of true religious feeling for any
of their gods.
This is the feeling, I must say I have, whenever I see
any kind of religious ceremony presided over by the
government of Canada. The example which springs
immediately to mind is the state funeral held in December of
2002 for the late governor general Ray Hnatyshyn. Christ
Church Anglican in Ottawa was chosen as the venue. The
service began with the liturgy of the Ukrainian Orthodox
church, the church to which Mr. Hnatyshyn and his family
belonged. There followed the eulogies, given in English by Peter
Mansbridge and in French by Senator Yves
Morin, which took the place of any sermon
and formed the centerpiece of the service.
Mansbridge used the opportunity to assure the
gathering that, far from being a good
Christian, Hnatyshyn was a good Canadian,
embodying not the Christian values of faith,
hope and love, but the Canadian values of
respect, good humour and regard for the
common man and woman. The multi-faith prayers toward the
conclusion of the service were led by a Jewish Rabbi, a Muslim
Imam, a Roman Catholic priest and a Mohawk elder. The dean of
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“The Gifts and the Giver”
Preached By: Rev. Karla Wubbenhorst on Thanksgiving Sunday October 08, 2006
Christ Church Cathedral represented the protestant Christians in
giving the benediction. As in ancient Athens, the official position
in Canada is “a place for every god.” And in this way are all gods
kept in their place. Religious values become secondary to the
national values of respect, good humour, and regard for all citizens
in common.
There are many problems with such a way of being religious
and irreligious at the same time, but one very big problem is this:
In such a climate there can be no true thanksgiving. As in Athens,
the motive of religious observance becomes so much less than true,
heart-felt thanksgiving to the Lord of heaven and earth for all that
is and is provided. The motive of religious observance becomes
mere maintenance, a daily sweeping out of the shrine, replacement
of its flowers, insistence that each religious interest take its part in
the calendar of celebrations, in order to keep its oar in. Paul is
disturbed to see the way that religion is practiced in Athens,
because in this great city of free thought and of free men, there is
no aura of freedom around the religious spaces. No aura of joy.
No aura of spontaneous gratitude and thankfulness. The statues of
the gods require maintenance, they require service. That is what
idolatry is: the slavery of a people toward their gods. That is what
cults demand: a bevy of worshippers to aggrandize the deity. Only
after the Athenians have accomplished their religious duty, do they
have the sense of being let out of school, set free to do the things
they really enjoy.
Paul brings these Athenians news of a 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, 25nor is he served
by human hands, as though he needed anything,” Paul says.
Imagine how that news would have fallen on the ears of these
dutiful Athenians. God doesn’t need anything from us, God
doesn’t need us to maintain the shrines? Then what’s the point of
being religious? For those who believed Paul, it opened up a
whole new vision of what religious worship could mean. The
Christians were worshipping God not because they were afraid of
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“The Gifts and the Giver”
Preached By: Rev. Karla Wubbenhorst on Thanksgiving Sunday October 08, 2006
God’s anger if they didn’t serve him aright -- superstitious lest
some divine benefit be withheld, for service omitted. The
Christians were worshipping God as a response to the great things
God had done. They were thankful. Their hearts bloomed in love
for God when they saw how God had always shown goodness
toward them, and in these latter days had accomplished their
salvation by the sending of Jesus Christ. Those who believed Paul
were overjoyed at being given a role in bringing this good news to
all people, even when that work entailed hardship and persecution.
Idolatry created an army of drones, intent on serving the needs of
the gods. Christianity maintained that God had no needs, and did
not care for being served by human hands. When Christians
served God they did so not with a slavish spirit, because they had
to; but with a grateful spirit, because they got to.
The second part of the problem with religion in Athens was
basic unbelief. The people might go
about their religious duties out of
superstition, out of tradition, but at heart
they were either Stoics or Epicureans, and
these were practical philosophies which
had factored out God. For the Epicureans,
the gods may exist, but they were
unconcerned with human affairs. For the
Stoics, a kind of impersonal deity existed
everywhere, but being impersonal, did not
care or intervene as human beings made
their terms with fate. Being, for all
practical purposes, without God, these
philosophies concentrated on the gifts of
God. The Epicureans worshipped life’s pleasures. The Stoics
worshipped the gifts of human character which made folk strong –
the gift of fortitude, and temperance, the gift of patience. The
problem is that neither of these philosophies, any more than the
paganism of ancient Greece, could inspire a thankful heart. Life’s
pleasures were absorbed, the stoical character was cultivated, but
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“The Gifts and the Giver”
Preached By: Rev. Karla Wubbenhorst on Thanksgiving Sunday October 08, 2006
there was no Giver conceived of beyond the gift. No one to thank
for a meal of rich food, no one to thank for the strength to get
through the trials fate had sent.
Sometimes I think even as believers in Christ that we are
stuck in the kind of Greek religious mentalities, which make it
impossible to be truly thankful. Sometimes we tend to think of
going to church and fulfilling the other duties of the Christian life
as service paid to our God, rather than as a fitting but spontaneous
grateful response for everything the Lord the
done. Sometimes the focus of our religion is
all on the gifts – the services – that we can
give to God. On the other hand, the focus of
our lives can often be on gaining God’s
benefits – God’s gifts – of prosperity,
freedom, a happy family, a comfortable lifestyle. Our pursuit of these things is no better
than the Stoics and the Epicureans if we
cannot see beyond the gifts to the joy of
knowing and of blessing the giver. Paul’s
preaching in Athens reminds us to praise God
from whom all blessings flow – to praise him
through Jesus, with a thankful heart.
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