To an Unknown God

Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
June 1, 2008, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Exodus 32:1-6
Acts 17:16-34

“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.”

In a book that is revered by some and reviled by others conservative historian Paul Johnson laments the “relativistic world” in which we now must live. Johnson contends that by the midpoint of the 20th century, Einstein’s theory of relativity had begun to fall prey to the law of unintended consequences which, in turn, plunged us into a world out of joint. It is a world in which there are no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge and above all of values. “Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably,” he concludes “relativity became confused with relativism.”

Johnson goes on to opine that nothing could have been farther from Einstein’s intention. Einstein was a man who devoted his life to the quest not only for truth but for certitude (a slight projection on Johnson’s part, I suspect). “You believe in a God who plays dice,” Einstein wrote to his colleague Max Born, “and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture. I firmly believe but I hope that someone will discover a more realistic way or rather a more tangible basis than it has been my lot to find.”

Einstein’s hope to find a more tangible basis for belief set him on a life-long quest for a unified field theory. In the relativistic world of the 21st century, that same hope to find a more tangible basis for belief has set a multitude of others on a decidedly religious quest, a quest that--more often than not-- ends in absolutism [absolutism being religion’s brand of certitude]. In fact I think it could be said that the unintended consequence of relativism in the last century has been the proliferation of religious absolutism in the first decade of this century.

I think it also could be said that the vast majority of would-be believers in God dwell somewhere between relativism and absolutism. At issue is not so much belief in God’s existence as a godly basis for human ethics. In a world of violence, hatred and greed, there are days when we yearn for certainty concerning right and wrong to counter the complexity haunting our made-up minds. In a world where the institutions on which we once relied for order are no longer recognizable—marriage and family, church and state, neighborhood and nation—we enact laws to secure our hold on life as we believe God ordained life to be. Yet at the same time we find ourselves appalled by any who confidently strap explosives onto their backs because they have sought and found the religious certainty that we lack. We rail against the claim that God’s will is knowable when the will carried out in God’s name is so contrary to our way of life.

Our texts this morning remind us that we are not the first in human history to struggle for certainty in a nether land of not knowing for sure. The Israelites in the 32nd chapter of Exodus and the philosophers of Athens in the 17th chapter of Acts, for all of their ancient trappings, are our contemporaries in relation to the absolutism and relativism of their own time. Before they reveal the living God they reveal the human quest, never satisfied, for a tangible basis for belief. Scripture paints this quest with a broad brush and calls it idolatry: the human desire to have hold of God be that god perfect knowledge or perfect power or perfect spiritual practice.

So then, this story about the idolatry of Israelites reveals the unwillingness of our species, in the first place, to wait for the God who comes to us. Our longing to know, to touch, to handle, to feel, to see and to arrive at absolute certainty trumps faith in the living God every time. The Book of Exodus tells us the Israelites grew tired of waiting for Moses to come down from the mountain. And even though Moses eventually returned bearing tablets of stone on which moral laws had been chiseled for all time, forty days and forty nights turned out to be too long a time to bide. So the people go to Aaron and say, “Up, make us gods who shall go before us; as for this Moses, this man who brought us out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.”

When we grow weary of waiting for God or impatient in the face of God’s silence or afraid in the shadow of a world gone awry, we begin to fashion our own absolutes. And because our absolutes do not look or sound so very different from what we think God would sound or look like if God were ever to appear, we mistake them for the God who made the world and everything in it. Once the molten calf was finished the Israelites proclaimed, “These are your Gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” This was the language of faith. The words they had used to describe the activity of the living God now were the same words used to worship an idol.

It is what we do without even knowing we do it when we use the biblical witness and its language to underwrite our longing for the absolute. Religion becomes our tangible basis for belief, prompting politicians and preachers alike to proclaim God’s will on any given subject. In fact, the more definite the proclamation, the more numerous the people who come running and rejoicing that the absolute assurance they have sought is in this religion and no other. Ironically, such assurance bolts and bars minds and hearts against the God who would be known in the messy complexity, in the maddening silences, in the flesh and blood of the biblical witness.

The second word to say about our dwelling between absolutism and relativism is revealed in the philosophers of Athens. As regards relativism, they embraced it…absolutely! Luke captures the Athenian mindset masterfully when in Paul’s speech he writes, “Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.”

Here our eagerness to find a tangible basis for belief makes every new theory or ideology or self-help technique worthy of devotion. “Novelty” writes theologian Scott Bader-Saye “is alluring….But the new quickly becomes old, and so novelty creates an inexhaustible desire. Our love of novelty can even take on the appearance of a search for truth, when in fact it is only a form of distraction. This seems to have been the case in first-century Athens.”

If our first instinct in this relativistic world issues from our inability to wait for the God who is God, our second instinct is to trust just about everything else instead. The philosophers of Athens built statues to every imaginable object of worship; and when they had exhausted the options, they built one more just in case: “To an Unknown God.” Paul could have taken offense but instead he takes the statue as an opening for substantive conversation: “I perceive that in every way you are very religious.” Again says Bader-Saye, “Paul discovers an opening for proclamation not in some natural religious impulse but in their willingness to confess that there are things they do not know, things they cannot see. Paul recognizes that their attraction to novelty goes hand in hand with the lure of visibility. The novel attracts us only insofar as it is easily grasped. If ‘seeing’ a new truth requires time and training, the novelty inevitably wears off before truth is found.”

Paul would say the same of us. It is not so much that we go from one god to another as it is that we are vulnerable to persons or theories or methodologies or ideologies or churches that will meet our need for visibility with little effort on our part. We trust what we can try or, to use Paul’s words, “we hope to feel after God and find him.” The criterion for our trust is whether the new idea works for us; and while it works, we are downright evangelical devotees...until, of course, a new apostle wanders into town or happens upon the best-seller list. Then like the philosophers of Athens, we are all ears.

“By proclaiming the invisible and the unknown” to the philosophers of Athens and the relativists of the twenty-first century says Bader-Saye, “Paul refuses to let God become just another novelty, just another idol.” “What you therefore worship as unknown,” says Paul “I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by mortals nor is he served by human hands.”

Somewhere between the God of Max Born—the God who plays dice—and the God of Albert Einstein—the God who created an objective universe of law and order but eludes our knowing--there is the living God who comes to us not in stone tablets or statues but in the flesh and blood of a human life. The God who has chosen to be known in Jesus Christ resists every effort of religion to absolutize his words and actions even as God refuses philosophy’s affair with novelty by the scandalous particularity of the incarnation. Somewhere between the absolutism of our heads and the relativism of our hearts, the God who gives, to all, life and breath and everything; who made, from one, every nation of men and women to live on the face of the earth; the God who is not far from each one of us, in whom we live and move and have our being is the God who, even now, seeks us seeking him.

We were made, you and I, such that absolutes will finally never be our lot to find because we are being sought absolutely by the God who made the world and everything in it. We have been made, my friends, for revelation and not relativism, for awe and not absolutism, for service and not idle speculation, and we are restless until we rest in God.

All of which is to say in this relativistic world (by design?) that there are no absolutes save the absolutely sure promise of God to be with us and for us made tangible in Jesus Christ. In him God searches for us until God finds us and on his shoulder returns us home rejoicing; in him God waits for us until God spies us down the road leading back from a far country and runs to embrace us; in him God accompanies us in the valley of every shadow until that day when our hope becomes an eternal reality and we see face to face the love that never has and never will let us go. Thanks be to God.

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