Unknown God

Scripture: The Sixth Sunday of Easter, A.D. 2014 A

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

We hear a lot about pagan religions both ancient and new. The term “pagan” simply means rustic or rural—clumsy, even. It refers to the religion of the common, uneducated people at a time when Christianity had become primarily a faith found in cities. The Church spread along routes of trade and travel, as we read with St. Paul’s journeys in the Acts of the Apostles.

On the one hand, it seems silly to talk about paganism as a religion or as one single thing, since it encompasses the beliefs of Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, Nubians, Assyrians, Celts, Vikings—basically anyone not Jewish or Christian. It’s a catch-all term. But on the other hand, there are similarities amongst this common faith.

In general, paganism goes something like this. We recognize that there are unseen, spiritual forces influencing or governing the world around us. Instinctually, human beings apply meaning and even intelligence to natural forces. There is more to this world than just what we can see and touch. If we get sick or if the rains come or if the crops flourish or if a loved one dies, the first thing we ask is: What does this mean? What unseen power lies behind this? And how can we learn from it, deal with it, appease it?

Very early on, most cultures seem to embrace animism, the notion that everything has a spirit or a soul. If you don’t want a rockslide to wipe you off the mountain, you plead with the rocks not to fall. You try to offer them something in return for not falling. We do this today with computers or cars or elevators that refuse to work. Eventually animism evolves into polytheism: it’s not that everything has a spirit, we say, but that there are spirits that can dwell in these things. Thus, we get the notion of the oread, which is a mountain spirit, or the dryad, a tree spirit. Soon, when we’re planting crops, we ask the spirit of the corn, the spirit of the earth, the spirit of the rain, to help us, to work with us, to aid us. And in return we offer—what? Pleasing sacrifices, perhaps. Songs of praise. The promise of our loyalty.

This is paganism in its most basic sense. There are spirits everywhere, and they can be bargained with. The distinction here between ghosts, elves, and gods is largely immaterial. Great kings like Odin become remembered as deities. Powerful yearnings, like lust, become personified in, for example, Aphrodite. We call upon spirits who deal in abstractions: the god of war or goddess of the hearth. We call upon spirits of specific nations or towns or even households. Lares and pentares, the Romans called them: the household family gods.

There are spirits for everything, some big, some little, some good, some bad, some feisty, some dour—all of which grow in stories and retellings, becoming legends, becoming epics. The Egyptian gods, the Norse gods, the Greek gods, the Brahmin gods, it’s all the same. Popular deities get swapped and slapped together with local favorites. Some want wine, some want smoke, some want shrines, and some want blood. Pick the deity, make your bargain, and be sure to hold up your end: that’s paganism in a nutshell. It’s not about morality, or even eternity. It’s really about economics, supply and demand.

There is also an aspect of paganism which we generally overlook, and that is the notion of the Unknown God. Whether we speak of Voodoo or Hinduism or Greek philosophy, great thinkers have looked at the pantheons of pagan spirits and thought: is this it? Isn’t there something greater, something more? Isn’t there some Being that does more than dance in Nature, more than bargain with Man? Isn’t there some great, limitless, almighty God—indeed, some God as far above the common gods as gods are above Man—from Whom all things arise?

And the answer, surprisingly, is yes. Most pagan religions, no matter how many gods to whom they bow—the twelve Olympians of Greece or the 33 million gods of Hinduism—come to the philosophical conclusion that there is the One, the Almighty, the perfect and unknowable God above it all, Who cannot be dealt with, Who needs nothing from Man. Thus there is a sort of monotheism in the old pagan faiths.

But this One God, the Source of All, is considered so far above and beyond the concerns of our world that there’s no sense praying to Him, for He has better things to do. The great philosopher Aristotle believed that so great and perfect a God would, of course, have a mind full of nothing but great and perfect thoughts. That means, Aristotle concluded, that God could only think of Himself, since only God was perfect. Aristotle, the pagan, believed in God, but he did not think that God so much as noticed our existence. We were a byproduct, not even an afterthought.

And so the great One God of Plato and Aristotle and the Upanishads was ignored, and instead worshippers turned to Zeus or to Ceres or to the household gods passed down by grandma and grandpa. These lower, darker spirits could be dealt with, could be bargained with. We all know that the devil likes to deal.

Now I confess that I very much like the old pagan stories. In middle school, my favorite year of English class involved studying the Greco-Roman gods, their heroes and monsters, their epic poems and myths. Somehow this didn’t make me feel less Christian, but more Christian, which was a puzzle at the time. I love the Viking stories too: of the death-god Odin who tore out his own eye to gain wisdom; who had two pet ravens, Memory and Thought, that flew about the world and whispered their secrets in his ears at night. These are amazing tales, the inspiration for Narnia, the Hobbit, and Harry Potter. These are stories that bring to us a magical world, a miraculous world, through which divine power surges in every stone and tree and brook. Let no one say there is nothing good in paganism; there are great things in paganism.

And St. Paul seems to like these stories as well, because, believe it or not, Paul—as a highly educated Jewish Christian and Roman citizen to boot—is familiar with the pagan poets. This morning we read about Paul’s arrival in Athens, seat of Greece’s long lost Golden Age, and still the cultural capital of the Empire. He is vexed by all the shrines and idols that he sees: statues of spirits great and small, of gods and nymphs and demons in the deep. And then he sees a shrine erected to an Unknown God.

Paul knows the story of this altar. 500 years earlier, so the legend goes, the pagan poet Epimenides counseled the city fathers of Athens on how to lift a plague ravaging their fair city. Paul likes Epimenides; he quotes his poems in our Bible. And in response to the poet’s good advice, Athens erected a whole series of altars, thanking every god they could think of for banishing the plague, and finally erecting one to an Unknown God—just to make sure that they had every possible spirit covered. But now, 500 years later, Paul says to the Athenians that they are mistaken.

The altar to the Unknown God is not a catch-all. It is, in fact, erected to that great God, the one high God above all gods, whom the great philosophers and sages all acknowledge as existing, but Whom, they confess, they cannot ever know. Forget all these other altars, Paul insists. House gods and river gods and sex gods—honestly! Your own pagan poets, men like Epimenides, acknowledge that there is only one God, the Source of all spirits and all men and the entirety of Creation. Here Paul quotes the pagan poet: “In Him we live and move and have our being, for we are indeed His offspring.”

This is the one true God, the only God worth worshipping, Paul declares. It was He Who lifted your plague, He Who gave to you life! He is the Father of all nations, for though He needs nothing and is not served by human hands, nevertheless He made from one man every nation on earth, and gave to them their times and their boundaries. And it pleased God that each nation should seek Him in their own way, in the hope that they might grope about and find Him there in their midst.

Isn’t that something? The pagan religions, those crazy stories, pleased God, because they pointed beyond themselves to Him. The ancient myths of pagan peoples were how they sought, blind though they were, to discover the one true God of all. Yes, Israel was God’s special chosen nation, a priestly people formed to be a blessing and light to all nations. But all the other nations are God’s beloved children as well! And now, in Jesus Christ, the Unknown God has become known. He has descended from Heaven, been born of a Virgin, died on a Cross and rose from the dead—not because we can offer to Him anything that He needs, that He might be bargained with as a pagan god—but out of pure mercy, pure love, pure grace.

The time for division and falsehood has come to an end; now God calls all men, Gentile and Jew, philosopher and pagan, poet and sage, to repent and be one in Christ Jesus. The prophets of the Bible all clearly pointed to Jesus, but in some strange and broken way, so does Thor point to Jesus; and Zeus; and Osiris. Our pagan dreams are fulfilled in Jesus Christ, as were all the promises given to Israel.

In Jesus, God adopts us all into Israel, into God’s chosen people, out from the darkness into the light. But we see now that even the in the darkness God was with us: preparing us, grooming us, pointing us toward the Messiah. As He prepared Jews by the Law and Greeks by philosophy, so He prepared our barbarian forebears to recognize Christ by the myths and the poets of old. Jesus was there, hidden, in our barbarian dreams. Jesus was our Unknown God, revealed now in grace.

We are all children of God, never forgotten, never abandoned, even in our ignorance, even in our sin. He was with us always, even when we worshipped trees like fools. And now, in Christ Jesus, at long last, He calls us all home in Him.

Thanks be to Christ, Who fulfills God’s promises to all people. In Jesus’ Name. AMEN.