6 Easter A May 17, 2020
Acts 17:22 -31 Ps. Ps. 66
1 Peter 3:13-22 John 14:15-21
Lectionary Link
What is a container? A container is something that has stuff inside of it. A container has a boundary, a border and outside surface. And in many ways we live in a world of containers, entities with outer surfaces which contain inner stuff.
Each of us is a container. Our outer surface is our epidermis with some "attachments," like hair, eyeballs and finger nail and toe nails. And we have inside of us all our physiological stuff that is best known by surgeons who actually get to interact with the same. But we contain lots of "non-physiological" stuff, the stuff of what we call thought, emotions, feelings, sense of self, personal identity, cultural identity and many other things which we have named because we believe that they reside or are contained within us. Through our cultures we have come to accept the mapping of our interior life, and we inherited the knowing of ourselves as body, soul and spirit in our Christian interior map.
The encounter of St. Paul with the Greeks on Mars Hill in Athens is a telling account. It instantiate the fact that Paul, formerly, Saul of Tarsus was a man with a background in the Hebrew-Judaic tradition but he lived in the Diaspora as a Roman citizen within a culture that would be called Greco-Roman in composition.
Athens was the ultimate symbolic place of Greek philosophical world influence. Greek philosophers from Socrates, Plato and Aristotle found a way to hold their beliefs in gods and goddesses even while proposing the very foundation of rigorous philosophical, reasoned inquiry.
Paul is presented, in this account from the Acts of the Apostles as a Christian apologist who is looking for correspondences within the artifacts of the Greek culture. He encountered the agnosticism in the statute with the engraving, "To an unknown god." This is quite amazing, since there were many gods and goddesses in the Greco-Roman pantheon, so to honor an "unknown god," was a place for Paul to begin, since it represented a humility of openness that there might be something further to understand about the meaning of the divine life.
And Paul, also adopted a phrase which suggested that the God which the Greco-Roman people did not know was not just another member of the pantheon of gods and goddesses, but rather this God was the ultimate Container. Paul stated, "In God, we live and move and have our being." Is there a more ultimate Container than such a God? Such a container would not have anything outside of it influencing it from without. Such a container would only be influenced by everything that it contained. We live and move and have our being in God. We are contained by the ultimate Container.
And yet Paul also goes on to affirm the special existence of human beings. We are not impersonal stuff in the great God Container; no, we are offspring of God. Here again, Paul recognized an insight which came, not from the Hebrew Scriptures but which came from a Greek poet. And Paul, as a Jew, could agree, because he believed that in the tradition of Adam, we were made in God's image, so we are higher personality stuff; not like a rock, or tree, or even a monkey. We are higher personality stuff.
God can be regarded to be "unknown." If God is so high and a different kind of existing being, then such an alien would not be able to be communicated with. There would be no common language between humanity and such a God. How does an unknown God become known by human beings? By discovering a human being who is so magnificent that he is bi-lingual in the life and language of God and in the life and language of Jesus Christ we have such a "bi-lingual" Being. And if such a being is made known, then we can be directed to find our own "bi-lingual nature," and realize our identity as children of God.
The Gospel of John is about knowing the power, the authority of being children of God. The Gospel of John is explicit about Jesus presenting God as our heavenly Parent with Jesus as the unique divine Son who bears the image of God in such a profound way as to become definitive of what our relationship with God is to be.
Are we to be trapped in the physical and psychological determinism of our natural parents and cultures? No, the Gospel of John through the oracles of Jesus indicate that we can know our determination by our heavenly parent. We can know that we are offspring of God, sons and daughters of God.
When parents die or leave our lives, we become orphans. The Gospel of Jesus is a message about never being an orphan; our heavenly parent never left, never will leave, and never will die.
"So, Jesus, how can we know that we've not abandoned orphans, after you are gone and we are not able to see you?" "I'm glad you ask," says the Risen Christ, "because I have the Holy Spirit within me to know this perpetual connection with God, the heavenly Parent. And you are going to have this Internal Advocate too, so that you will have your true parentage always verified." The Holy Spirit verifies our heavenly DNA.
Let us summarize some Gospel and Scripture insights for today. 1-We and everything else is contained in God as the Ultimate Container. 2-God is a very Personal Container, and we are made as God's offspring because unlike a rock or water, we are made of higher personality stuff. 3-God can be unknown unless we have a divine-human bi-lingual conduit for communication between humanity and God. 4-Jesus Christ is the divine-human bi-lingual Unique Son of God who came so that we could realize the original blessing of our creation in God's image as God's children.
And knowing this Gospel, let us accept our heavenly parentage and let us follow Jesus in learning how to be better in our bi-lingual practice of speaking the language of heaven within our earthly human experience. The divine language in human experience is best known as love and justice. Jesus Christ became human and spoke human language so that within human language we might learn to speak that which is most God-ward in human experience and so fully possess our inheritance as children of God.
This is the Gospel we celebrate and offer to all today. Amen
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