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The God We Know
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
April 27, 2008
Acts 17:22-31; 1 Peter 3:13-22; John 14:15-21 


Acts 17:22-31 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.”

1 Peter 3:13-22 Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good? But even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence. Keep your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God’s will, than to suffer for doing evil. For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water. And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you—not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him.

John 14:15-21 
"If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.
"I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them."

I.      BEGINNING

There is a great scene in a classic film of yesteryear—perhaps you’ve heard of it—Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.  Our erstwhile heroes, Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan, find themselves traveling through time.  Their first stop is in ancient Athens where they overhear a discussion being led by none other than Socrates himself. "That dude's famous," says Ted. "Look him up... it's under So-crates".  Whereupon Bill flips through the pages of his high school history book and reads: “Socrates – ‘The only true wisdom consists of knowing you know nothing.”  To which Ted replies: “That’s us, dude!”

The older I get, the more I find myself agreeing with Ted.  That's us.  Well, it’s certainly me, anyway.

It seems like the older I get the less I know.  The more things I learn, the less I know.  The amount of information that we accumulate over a life time—all it does is serve to convince me that I don’t really know much at all.

Nothing teaches me that lesson more than campus ministry.  Every year makes the wisdom of the previous year into folly.  We’ve shown 48 movies over the last six years as part of our Monthly Movie with the Methodists.  You’d think that would be enough of a statistical sample to have some idea of how much of a draw a given film would be.  And so it was with great confidence that I proposed showing 3:10 to Yuma in February—having been reassured by the males of the community that we would get a huge audience for that movie, and having been assured by some of the females in the community that the combination of Russell Crowe and Christian Bale would be sufficient to bring the women.  We had four people show up.  Four.  Made me feel like a rookie.  Made me feel like I didn’t know anything at all.  I have that experience a lot as a campus minister. 

I think that’s what Socrates is talking about—the idea that true wisdom consists of knowing that we know nothing.  If fact you’ll find that the biggest fools we encounter are the ones who claim to know everything.  The ones who have no doubts.

And it certainly is the case that wisdom lies in understanding just how little you know.  And so, if over my years I have grown in wisdom, it has come at the expense of feeling that I know anything at all.

II.    THE TEXT: PAUL

I am intrigued, then, by Paul’s speech in the lesson we had read to us from Acts tonight.  Paul is in Athens at the Areopagus. The Areopagus is the “Hill of Ares”, an ancient site where murderers were tried for their crimes and that in earlier times had served as the meeting place of the city council of Athens.  He says:

"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...

It is fascinating to me because the Athenians had gone to the lengths of creating an altar to an unknown god.  According to Diogenes Laërtius, the third century biographer of the philosophers, Epimenides established the shrine after a plague threatened Athens.  Epimenides had taken a flock of sheep and released them from the Areopagus throughout the city.  Wherever they stopped or lay down, the Athenians built a shrine to the local god of that place.  But a number of the sheep lay down at a location that had no god associated with it, so they built there an altar without a God’s name inscribed on it. [1]

It turns out that the Ancient Greeks worshiped this unknown god, the agnostos theos and would even sometimes swear by this god, who served as a placeholder for whatever god was out there that they had not heard of in Greece. [2]

III.  The Humility of not knowing

Would we do something like that?  Something tells me that it’s not in our national character, or our religious character, to embrace that kind of ambiguity and uncertainty.  To build an altar to an unknown god is, by definition, to have a humility about what we can and cannot know.  And we don’t always have that kind of humility.

No, if anything, we have an over abundance of certainty in religion in this world.  There are a lot of people who can tell you exactly what God is thinking or what God wants or who God would vote for or who God hates the most.  But when I look at all the people who are certain—and there are a lot of them—I note that they are all certain about different things.  One person’s certainty will often be in direct contradiction to another person’s certainty.  The two people are no less certain.  Does that fact not create uncertainty in an objective observer? 

Does not our faith raise more questions the more we grow in it?  Do not you seniors have more questions now than when you were freshmen?  Has college not helped you to discover that the more you learn the less you actually know?  Does it not teach us that very humbling lesson in true wisdom that Socrates spoke of?

St. Paul lectures the Athenians and tells them that the God they don’t know is the God he knows and proclaims.  We may not have altars to an unknown god, but is the God we do have altars for any more known to us?  Do we have any chance of greater certainty than the Athenians so long ago?

IV.  The God We Know and are known by

Of course, there are things we do know about God.  God is not a complete mystery.

Paul points out that God 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.”

Paul tells us that by virtue of the resurrection we know that God has the world in hand.  God is not abandoning the world to death and decay and injustice.  We know that God is moving through history for our sake.  That, we know.

But there is something else we do know.  Because in the person of Jesus Christ, we see God revealed to us in the world. 

The Gospel of John, from which we read tonight, begins by with the eloquent poem “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God… And the Word became flesh and dwelled among us.”  What the Gospel of John reminds us is that this Jesus whom we meet, this Jesus is in flesh the very Word, the heart, the Spirit of God.  And what we see in that Jesus is a person who lives out a life of love for all whom he meets.  Therefore we understand that the Word of God, the very mind and heart of God are of love.  What we can be sure of is that the God that we know is a God of love.

            A God who has promised to be with us.  A God who promises to dwell within us.  As take love into ourselves we take God into our being.  As we share love with others, we share God.  And so if we need to be certain of anything, we can know this: that God is, and that God is love.

There is something else about the incarnation worth noting.  Theologians have long pointed out that the incarnation is not only the way we know God through Jesus, but the way that God knows us.  And that is an often overlooked aspect of our relationship with God.  God knows us.  God knows our lives.  God knows our sufferings.  God knows our pains—all the things we face.

When Moses meets God in the wilderness for the first time, God tells him, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters.  Indeed I know their sufferings….” (Ex. 3:7) The Hebrew word that means ‘to know’ means to know by experience, not by simple cognition. 

Our salvation is not tied as much to our ability to know God—an ability that we lack perfect ability to do—but on the fact that God knows us.

God knows us.  That, I submit, is perhaps a little more important for us to realize than how we know God.  We will always lack that kind of certainty.  We will continue to seek to know God and we will still feel that we will not know God totally.  We can’t, really, our brains aren’t large enough. 

It doesn’t really come down to how well you and I understand God, or understand the world, or all the things that go wrong in the world.  All the injustices, and brokenness, and the pain, and whether random occurrences are chance or providence. All the things that we can’t know—and the things that we question the more we grow in faith.

And so we need to remember that it is because God knows us that we are God’s children. 
Because God knows us, we live lives that have meaning. 
Because God knows us, we live lives that can be given fully to others.
Because God knows us, we are in relationship with God.

V.    END

The God behind the altar we have may be no more known to us ultimately than the ‘unknown god’ of the Athenians.  But there are some things we do know.

We know that God is. We know that in Christ Jesus God was reconciling Godself to the world.  And we know that this God whom Paul proclaims, and the Church teaches, and we celebrate and experience here together, knows us.  And this God, “indeed is not far from each one of us.”

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unknown_God  (yes, Wikipedia)

[2] Ibid. (yes, Ibid.)

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Copyright © 2008. Mark A. Schaefer.

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