St. Thomas Evangelical Lutheran Church
3800 East Third Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47401
(812) 332-5252
Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter (April 27, 2008)
Liturgical Color: White
Reverend Doctor Lyle E. McKee
The Unknown God Revearled
Grace to you and peace from God the Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
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.'
Paul was, at least occasionally, a clever preacher and a keen observer. We see these attributes at work in Luke's story of his sermon at Athens.
As he goes through the city, Paul makes mental note of anything that might make a connection between the lives of the Athenians and the gospel of Jesus Christ. He finds what he was seeking in the altar with the inscription, 'To an unknown god.' What a brilliant and perfect way for him to suggest that what he was bringing was not a totally new god, but rather the god the people of Athens had only a vague notion about.
He even claims a common heritage for Jews and Gentiles:
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 find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us.
The place to which Paul goes to preach is identified as the Areopagus, literally "Mars Hill." This refers to the senate of Athens and to the physical location where it met—a hill next to the higher location of the Parthenon.
Paul is preaching not merely to these Greeks, but of them and with them. He is asking them not to hear an alien history of salvation drawn from a religious experience not their own, but to hearken to the traditions of their own people to see how compatible they are with the good news recently revealed in Judea through Jesus Christ.
Paul looks for the signs of God. He identifies traditions that can be used to distinguish the Christian witness in the eyes of those to whom he preaches. One wonders what Paul may have seen in our day as signs of our connections with the message of Christ—apart, of course, from the churches.
Among all the grand doctrines and confessional statements Christians have available to distinguish our faith in a world of religious pluralism, there is still a need for simple signs that help to give Christians a basic identity—that set us apart.
Indeed, British sociologist David Martin has suggested that Christianity is basically a sign language: These things "shall be a sign unto you." Christians are people who read the signs and decipher the codes. In fact, this is the best we can do-make sign language about the eternal, the infinite, the God who does not think our thoughts or whose ways are not our ways ("Divinity in a Grain of Bread," pp. 53-55, 69-70).
We usually associate "sign language" with the beautiful and effective means of communication developed and used by the hearing impaired-American Sign Language. Not only does ASL make communication possible for those with hearing and speech impairments, it also sets them apart and identifies them as a distinct community of people. There is a fierce sense of loyalty and belonging among those persons made a part of the "family." At a glance they can recognize who "belongs" and who is an outsider.
Just as sign language does not use words but hands, so the real language of the Christian faith is formed not with our mouths but with our whole bodies—especially our hands. In many ways, Christianity is what we do with our hands. Faith is in the handiwork, Jesus said. "Do this in remembrance of me." Not say this, or sing this, but do this.
Watch the hands. The signs they make are our sign-language, the language of the Spirit. Symbols are essential to a faith that does not see the God in whom we believe. At least not see in the literal sense.
As we look in our day, as Paul did in his, for simple signs of the faith, Christians need look no further than our worship. We may look with the eyes of faith at something as simple as a line and a circle as symbols of who we are.
In worship we make two signs that occur almost simultaneously—signing ourselves with the cross and then stretching out our hands to receive the sacramental meal. Almost every tradition engages in this body language—the Eastern Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, the Anglo-Catholic. Almost all, that is, except many Protestants. Increasingly, some Lutherans and Episcopalians exercise this form of body prayer.
We might rediscover something of the message that lies behind the sign if we look more deeply. The signs that are present and the signs we make in our worship reveal something about who our God is.
First, the line: As we make the sign of the cross, we might notice how it is a linear sign with two parts, two halves. Beginning with fingers at the forehead a vertical upright is drawn down to the chest. Then a horizontal crossbeam is drawn from the left to the right shoulder.
Second, the circle: The circle sign is the signal of both invitation and acceptance. This gesture, made by both server and recipient during the act of communion, makes an upside-down "U" as the hand moves from one's own shoulder out in an arch towards the one facing you to either give or receive the bread and wine—in effect connecting the half circles. This is accentuated in our practice of worship simply because we gather in a circle, standing shoulder to shoulder.
What are these gestures but the circle and the line? Both are incomplete without the other, just as the right brain is incomplete without the left brain. In the circle, the human community faces each other. The line then breaks through the circle to point us to what is beyond and above. The line is text, the circle is table. The technique of the line is logical demonstration. The technique of the circle is meditation and silence.
I remember a presentation by an artist well-known among many here at St. Thomas—Richard Caemmerer, Jr., founder and former director of the Grunewald Guild. It was during a teaching event related to religious art. He showed a picture of that glorious and ancient church in Istanbul known as the Hagia Sophia—the Church of St. Sophia built by Constantine's son Constantius and completed in 360 A.D. It brings remarkably together the line and the circle in three dimensions-the cube and the sphere. Richard Caemmerer, Jr. suggested that the architectural form—a half-sphere resting on top of a cube—suggests the spiritual and geographical reality of the church. I have placed a picture of the church on a bulletin board in the narthex in case you aren't familiar with it.
The Hagia Sophia sits at the intersection of East and West; the city of Istanbul itself rests on land that is in both Europe and Asia-on both sides of the Bosphorus. So, Caemmerer creatively put forward the idea that the spiritualities of East and West also merge here. The logical left-brain precision of the West represented by the cube merging with the Eastern right-brain aesthetic signified by the sphere. Line and circle. Cube and sphere. Cross and globe. Mind and soul.
One recalls that the circle has always stood as a symbol of eternity and transcendence, like the wedding ring. Circles represent the perfection and the eternal nature of God. But the best we can do on our own is a half-circle. God must act too, through the spirit active in another. To complete the circle we must connect with someone else in the body, whether in communion or in the offer of peace or embrace.
This is what happens when we participate in communion. The Eucharist brings us together. Where the circle and the line, the spirit and the law, the meal and the cross come together is called sacrament. The catechism of the Church of England calls this "an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us." St. Thomas Aquinas made the simple point that what makes sacraments distinct is what they are for, the activity in which they are caught up, which is making human beings holy.
As the signs of the line and the half-circle are made (the cross followed by the invited extension of the hands) there is that remarkable moment when those who come forward to receive, connect with the outstretched hands of the servers offering the bread and the wine. At that point the circle is completed in the context of the cross. In that mystical moment of holiness, the grace of a God-created, Christ-centered, Spirit-driven life is reborn and given new energy. We are fed.
What many churches and Christians have forgotten is how holy the signs of the cross and the circle have been for generations of Christians, how these holy gestures have defined and distinguished us from the larger population. The earliest Christian emblem to appear on a coin, after all, was a cross topped by a circle or globe; it was on one of the Roman Emperor Constantine's coins, as early as 313.
The Celtic cross also has a circle behind the middle intersecting part of the cross. It was common in ancient times in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and it symbolizes the eternal effect of the redemption secured on the cross by the death of Christ. The Celtic cross remains a favorite sign on church bulletins, chancels, books, tombstones, steeples, and altars. It uses the same combination of symbols as a cross I grew up with while I sat in church with my family. It is the cross and orb embossed on the Service Book and Hymnal, copyrighted in 1958. The cross and the orb have long been symbolic of authority and the global spread of the gospel. At every coronation, the ruler of England bears these two signs.
What the church has remembered rightly is that Jesus himself is the greatest sign of our distinctive faithfulness. He is our sacrament, the sign of the new people of God, the sign of a new reign of God, the sign of new hope for our world and of the wholeness and unity of heart and mind and soul.
Christian sign-making provides the world with its saving gestures. A world that prefers temples to other gods needs holy reminders. A culture that seems to favor profane gestures, like the obscene act of raising a single finger or raising a fist, cries out for a saving gesture instead, a holy gesture of hope and wholeness.
The people of God can provide it. It may be offered in lives that bear the signs of the cross and the circle, signs that reveal to a searching world what even today may seem to them a totally unknown god. Amen.
May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep our hearts and minds through faith in Christ Jesus our Lord unto eternal life. Amen
