"A Lukewarm Response"
A Sunday Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Thomas C. Leinbach
April 27, 2008 - Harwich, Massachusetts

Preaching Text: "When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed…" (Acts 17:32)

Last week we heard the account of the stoning of Stephen and were reminded of how instrumental Saul was in carrying out the attack. This week, we encounter Saul again, now going by a different name, Paul, who has become himself a disciple of Jesus, traveling from country to country preaching Christ crucified, often at considerable risk.

Paul goes about the countryside speaking to anyone who will listen, first to his fellow Jews and then, after receiving a vision in a dream, to the Gentiles. Along the way, he faces much opposition but also experiences some successes. He is able, in fact, to establish several church communities along the way.

Today's reading, however, finds him in Athens, that great cosmopolitan city known for its highly refined and sophisticated intellectualism. The place Paul chooses to preach the truth of Jesus Christ is the "Areopagus," a small rocky hill northwest of the Acropolis, otherwise known as "Mars Hill."

With a noted and prestigious history, the Areopagus could claim to be the site of the very beginnings of Greek democracy, and in Paul's day served as the place where matters of the criminal courts, law, philosophy and politics were adjudicated.

In picking this venerable site, Paul is making plain that the Gospel is not to be "done in a corner," as he later puts it in Acts 26:26, but that its truths instead are a matter of historical record and thus open to public debate, discourse, and inquiry for all honest seekers. The Areopagus, as such, is, for Paul, the most natural and fitting of venues.

Since "God made the world and everything in it," he says, there is properly no person or sphere of influence outside of God's care and concern. All of so-called "secular" life, and not just "sacred" realms, are spheres of God's loving presence, or at least potentially so. Thus law, literature, medicine, education, the arts,

business, government, science, quite literally anything and everything, is grist for the theological mill.

To most Athenians, Paul was a "babbler" promoting a crop of "foreign gods." But because they loved to learn and keep up with the latest trends, they invited Paul to a meeting at Athens's most powerful and important venue to explain what they otherwise derided as his "strange ideas."

After Paul speaks (and remember, Paul was a very leaned and articulate fellow), many of his hearers simply "scoff" at his words, while others tell him they'd like to think more about it (which is perhaps another way of politely putting him off), while but a very few are convinced. The response, in other words, is lukewarm, at best. The Athenians, for the most part, will have none of it.

In many respects, our culture is similar to the Athenian one. For we, too, seem to value intellectualism and new ideas with equal alacrity. In addition, we live in an intellectual environment that has taught us to separate out the things of the spirit from the things of this world.

We are told that the secular world, the worlds of law, literature, medicine, education, the arts, business, government and science are to be divorced from the religious. Religion instead is to be relegated to the realm of the private, the subjective.

Yet Paul, in studied contrast, boldly insists that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is either objectively true, or it is nothing.

Today it's not always so easy to speak about Christian faith. In Paul's day, it could cost you your life. In fact, the very reason Paul is in Athens is because he is on the run from an angry mob pursuing him all the way from Thessalonica, some 200 miles to the north (as the crow flies). It's significant that rather than hide from them, as would seem natural, Paul is out in the open proclaiming his firmly held beliefs to yet another audience of skeptics.

Facing such danger simply for one's beliefs may be a bit difficult for us to fathom, though there are still any number of places in our world where openly practicing Christianity can cost you your life. Far less ominously, though still troubling, is the fact that religion in this country has been pushed increasingly to the sidelines, if not out of the public square altogether. And this is particularly so is in our colleges and universities.

Back in 1985, Ari Goldman, a religion writer for The New York Times, spent a year at Harvard Divinity School for personal as well as professional reasons. This eventually led to the publication of a book, The Search for God at Harvard, in 1991. In the end, his year is marked by strong personal and spiritual growth, even though he is forced to conclude that God, perhaps surprisingly, was really not much in evidence at the school!

Some years later, in 1996, Kelly Monroe picked up on this theme in her book, Finding God at Harvard: Spiritual Journeys of Thinking Christians. She notes, with some irony, that Harvard originally was founded in 1636 so that "students might be free to know truth and life in relation to Jesus Christ." A 1643 brochure, in fact, quoted in the Harvard Guide, points out that Harvard existed "[t]o advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches."

But by the last decade of the 20th century, when Monroe arrives at Harvard to research and write a thesis entitled "The Gospel in the Information Age," the gospel of Jesus Christ, at least as far as she could tell, seemed nowhere to be found. At Harvard Divinity School, of all places, Monroe was disillusioned to discover that pretty much any belief was welcome, from paganism to eco-feminism - except, that is, belief in Jesus Christ!

Yet in the midst of her disillusionment, she finds a network of graduate students who are passionate about making God-connections through their associations with the schools of law, business, medicine, government, design and arts and sciences.

In 2006, now under the name Kelly Monroe Kullberg, she published a follow-up to this, entitled, Finding God Beyond Harvard: The Quest for Veritas, a compilation of stories about the believers she encounters at Harvard as well as an account of how she established the Veritas Forum, a group dedicated to making sense of God in an age of intellectual disdain.

The group seeks to encourage Christians to venture outside the safe confines of the church, to take seriously the Areopagean challenge of moving the Gospel beyond the isolation and insulation of our faith communities. "We can be inward-looking," warns Dan Clendenin, "self-absorbed, self-important, and cloistered, instead of engaging people at our modern day Mars Hills."

The truth is, we all have a story to tell - and it is a worthy one. Yet too often we are reluctant to share with even family and friends our faith lives, the things that otherwise give us spiritual comfort and strength.

Though not many of us are called upon to engage the major intellectual currents of our day, we nevertheless know a certain reticence to share what we do know.

In 1 Peter, however, we are told to speak up for what we believe, to fear no harm in our eagerness to spread the Word. We are called upon to be ready always to make a defense to anyone who demands from us an accounting of the hope that is in us, though, the writer cautions, we are to do this with "gentleness and reverence," never caustically or self-righteously.

In John's gospel we are reminded that through Jesus we have been given an "Advocate," the "Spirit of truth," the same spirit the world cannot receive, because it does not know the love of Christ. It is this Spirit who offers us God's Word, along with the courage and conviction to proclaim it boldly and with love.

Our world needs us to tell our story. Perhaps more so than ever.

Amen.