Sermon on Acts 17: 16-31 and 1 Peter 3: 13-15
Today my sermons is about evangelism: an appropriate subject
given that St Matthew’s is about to hold an Alpha course. Now I confess I have never been a big fan of
evangelism. I have always taken comfort
in that verse in Ephesians which goes ‘The gifts he [Jesus] gave were that some
would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers[1]. So not all are called to be evangelists then. Well that lets me off the hook. But of course it doesn’t, or at least not entirely, because
as our reading from 1 Peter Chapter 3 today reminds us we should ‘always be
ready to make our defence of the hope that is in us.’ That’s all of us and not just some of us.
Our reading from Acts, today, gives us an object lesson in
how to give a defence of the hope that is in us and in particular suggests,
that in doing so, we need to ‘start where people are at’. It gives us three tips. When embarking on a discussion about the good
news of the Gospel:
Firstly listen to what your listeners have to say first
Secondly find out what they want and need
Thirdly talk to them in words they understand.
These are rules to be followed in most conversations. However you may not want to follow them in
some situations such as when shouting at your child to step away from the fire
but even then you’ll want to use words they understand.
But before moving on to these tips, let’s go back to our
passage from Acts for a moment. It’s an
account of a speech Paul gives in the Areopagus in Athens in around AD 50. The Areopagus was, by this point, a sort of
meeting point where you could catch an interesting public lecture. A bit like the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford.
Luke tells us in Acts Chapter 17 that ‘all the Athenians and
the foreigners living there would spend their time in nothing but telling or
hearing something new.’ Now this might
sound rather sarcastic on Luke’s part. But
on the other hand what Paul had to say to the Athenians was new. So I think it is
better to interpret this verse as Luke telling us that the Athenians were, at
least in theory, open to the something new that Paul had to tell them. I think it is always worth starting with the
assumption that people are open to what you have to say, and vice versa, until
proved otherwise.
So Tip number 1: Listen to what your listeners have to say
first.
Paul, before he embarked upon his lecture to the Athenians
had clearly taken the time to look around Athens and to delve into Athenian
beliefs. And he starts his lecture by
saying, ‘Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way’. Now again that might sound as if Paul was being
sarcastic. But I don’t think Paul had
much of a senses of humour. And sarcasm
– the lowest form of wit – I am fairly sure wasn’t his bag. It seems to me more likely that he was being
serious.
We are inclined to think of Greek religion in terms of
Gods like Zeus and Apollo and Goddesses like Hera and Aphrodite who
gratuitously interfered in the affairs of humans whilst living it up on Mount
Olympus But of course for a long time
there had been Greeks who had thought much more seriously about religion and
even had a conception of God quite similar to that of Paul. Here is Plato on God in the Timmaeus:
‘For God desired that, so far as
possible, all things should be good and nothing evil; wherefore, when He took
over all that was visible, seeing that it was not in a state of rest but in a
state of discordant and disorderly motion, He brought it into order out of
disorder, deeming that the former state is in all ways better than the latter.
For Him who is most good it neither was nor is permissible to perform any
action save what is most fair.
Plato’s God is not a million miles from our God who Paul
tells the Athenians is the one ‘who made the world and everything in it’ (Acts
Chapter 17 verse 24) and ‘gives to all mortals life and breath and all things’
(verse 25). And when Paul says God ‘who is Lord of heaven and earth, does
not live in shrines made by human hands’ (verse 24) he is echoing the Greek
poet Epimenides who Paul quotes later in his speech.
Epimenides
had written a well-known poem (in the 6th century BC) poking fun at
some Cretans who had built a tomb for the god Zeus:
They fashioned a tomb for thee, O
holy and high one
The Cretans, always liars, evil
beasts, idle bellies!
But thou art not dead: thou livest
and abidest forever,
For in thee we live and move and have
our being.
The last line could be straight from one of Paul's epistles
So, in discussions about the gospel, it always worth hearing
what people already believe rather than making assumptions. In today’s world we perhaps need to find out
more about our neighbours’ faiths before trying to convince them of our own. And even those who would not subscribe to any
particular religion have beliefs and reasons for those beliefs which need
taking seriously not dismissing as stupid.
Tip number 2 is to find out what your listeners want and need.
Paul had found, whilst site-seeing in Athens, an altar with
the inscription, ‘To an unknown God.’ Some
commentators on this passage argue that the Athenians were hedging their bets
here and ensuring that there wouldn’t be some god angry at being
neglected. This is, in my view, to diss
the religious beliefs of the Athenians.
Another way to view the matter is that some Greeks had already come to
think that God was unknowable and not just super-human as some of the myths
about Zeus and the other gods suggested.
Don’t we Christians think that God was largely unknowable until
revealed in the person of Jesus. And
even now there is some unknowability to God. Paul takes the inscription seriously, rather
than sneering at it, and addresses the longing for the unknowable to be known when
he tells the Athenians that God has made us ‘so that [we] would search for God and
perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of
us’(Chapter 17 verse 27).
However in defending the hope that is in us we cannot assume
our hope is what others hope for. In my youth evangelists had a tendency to explain the Gospel
merely in terms of sin and repentance as if we all must feel ourselves to be
unworthy and in need of being saved from that feeling. These evangelists assumed that if we didn’t
feel unworthy we needed to do so and that if we felt unworthy that was right
and proper because we were. This, in my
view, can get very close to saying that all shame is justified and good, even
if that shame comes from others’ abuse.
For me God’s saving work in Jesus is as much about restoring
meaning to my life as it about me feeling better about myself. But I think God saves people though Jesus in
many different and glorious ways.
Tip number 3 is to use words that make sense to your
listeners.
Paul’s speech to the Athenians in the Areopagus in Acts Chapter
17 is very different to his speech to the Jewish members of the synagogue in
Antioch in Acts Chapter 13. Both
speeches start where his listeners are at.
In Antioch. Paul addresses his listeners as ‘My brothers, you
descendants of Abraham’s family’ In Athens he associates himself with his
listeners by telling them that, ‘From one ancestor God made all nations to
inhabit the whole earth. In Antioch Paul quotes the Psalms: in Athens he quotes
Greek poets.
Now you could see these differences in the speeches as
demonstrating Paul’s rhetorical skills, as different devices to achieve the same
end of conversion but I think they demonstrate Paul’s sensitivity to using
words that his listeners will understand.
The gospel message has always
needed translation from its original Aramaic, but more than just translating
from one language to another, it needs translating from one culture to another.
Now the words that we Christians use, often as shorthand, to
discuss the gospel within our community - words like sin, repentance, salvation,
etc. - don’t mean the same to people outwith our community as they mean to us. I think there is a case for avoiding words
like sin when giving a defence of the hope that is in us. At the very least we need to recognise that
words like repentance will need, a lot of unpacking, to explain that it doesn’t
just mean feeling sorry for the bad things you have done recently
But of course there is a limit to just using words that make
sense to your listeners when defending the gospel. Paul in his speech in Athens ends with the
resurrection of Jesus (as he does in his speech in Antioch). Now unlike the belief that God created the
world and everything in it, which Paul and many of the Athenians shared, Jesus’
resurrection and the significance of that to Paul was something that most of
the Athenians were not going to accept.
Paul, elsewhere, in his first letter to the Corinthians says ‘For Jews
demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a
stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles. Wisdom in the shape of rational argument,
such as the Greeks treasured, will only get you so far when it comes to being
convinced of the life-changing good news that is the Gospel.
Now it is interesting I think to note that while, as I
said, Paul’s speech to the Athenians, gives us an object lesson in how to give
a defence of the hope that is in us, Luke tells us that, in response, only a
few joined Paul and became believers: one, a man called Dionysius the
Areopagite and the other, a women called Demaris. Contrast this with the 3000 who became
believers after Peter’s speech in Jerusalem at the first Pentecost.
And yet Luke sets aside over half a chapter of his Acts of
the Apostles to record what was Paul said in this lecture in the famous university town of Athens and to
tell us that for two people at least the lecture changed their lives.
