Speaking Truth in an Op-ed World

I have begun to realize that we are living in an op-ed world. You know what the op-ed page is in the newspaper? It’s where the opinion columns show up, and I have to confess that it’s a section of the newspaper that I am addicted to. Just like about the only TV I watch these days are of political talking head pundits endlessly raking over the barely warm coals of a controversy that doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. I know their names – Chris Matthews, Joe Scarborough, Tom Friedman, Mark Styne – I know the field and I listen and read and I’m addicted.

Lately, though I have begun to think that there is something very shallow about my addiction. I mean, why do I believe that Tucker Carlson’s opinion is any more important than anybody else’s? I mean admire the endless hours these folks spend analyzing political news, but there is something missing. I believe that on many issues, even political issues, the most important voices may not belong to pundits at all. When I’m looking for truth I am just as likely to find it in a clam bed with Kenny Webb or in a painting by Thelma Peterson or in a poem by Mary Karr. I mean I’d sure rather spend time with those folks than I would with Bill O’Reilly. Because that’s what I’m hungry for – not someone who is going to give me the lay of the land from their partisan perspective, but someone who will speak truth from the perspective of a searcher. Don’t you want someone who will speak the truth to you? I guess that’s why I’m also addicted to philosophy.

About eleven years ago I went back to school. Somewhere in my later seminary days I got the bug and I thought about studying further. So I entered the Ph.D. program at UVA to get a degree in philosophical theology. Let me tell you that philosophical theology is a scary thing to get a degree in. Theology alone is bad enough, but when you throw in philosophy on top of theology, well, what you get is a combination that will give you a million-dollar vocabulary of big, long words and an area of expertise that will qualify you teach some of the most unpopular courses in seminary.

But some of us are called to that. We actually like to sit and discuss the meaning of life. We like to get in huge, raging arguments about how Hegel’s dialectic is nothing more than a revision of Augustine’s notion of fragmented time. We can’t believe that someone would actually take Descartes seriously in this day and age. And sometimes we wonder if the hokey pokey really is what it’s all about. That’s what philosophical theologians do, and that is some of what I did for a few years as I worked toward a Ph.D. that finally turned into another Master’s degree.

Which means that were I living in ancient Greece back in the time of the Apostle Paul, I would probably have been one of those folks hanging out at the Areopagus, the philosopher’s hill outside of Athens. The book of Acts describes the scene very well. Paul was travelling through Greece, you see, preaching about Christ. He’s been running into resistance at every step along the way because, you know, Paul is a troublemaker. When he goes with Silas to the synagogue in Thessalonika and tries to convince them that Jesus is the Messiah, they get some converts among their fellow Jews, but they also stir up a lynch mob and they have to be whisked out of town under cover. When the mob finds out Paul’s gone, they say, “This man is turning the world upside down! Saying Jesus is a king. Who ever heard of such?”

Paul and Silas start preaching at Beroea in the synagogue and things are going all right there until the Thessalonika folks hear where they’ve gone and they bring the lynch mob on over to Beroea, too. There are riots and threats and everyone is in an uproar. So they have to slip Paul out of town again and they say, “Now where can we send Paul where he won’t cause any trouble? I know, how about Athens? They’re all very philosophical down there and everybody knows that philosophers don’t riot. Let’s send him there.”

So that’s how Paul ends up in Athens, but he’s not happy with what he sees. He’s walking around town and sees idols here and altars there. There’s a shrine to Athena and Apollo and Ares and Zeus. There’s the Parthenon. Athens is your one-stop shop for religious life—kind of like the Wal-Mart of the gods. But nothing about Christ. So he goes to the synagogue, but he also goes to the marketplace and hangs with the philosophers because that’s where all the cool people in Athens hang out. In trendy coffee shops today, to be cool you have to dress in black and pierce your nose in thirteen places. In Athens, you go to the market and discuss the latest release from Epicureus. It’s one of the only place in the history of the world where it was hip to be a philosopher. This is why I would have been there. The Bible says they were hanging out in the market there, the Epicureans and the Stoics, and they were kind of intrigued by Paul. They don’t get all worked up by Paul like the folks in Thessalonika did. They just say, “What is this guy babbling on about? I can’t understand it so it must be good stuff. Let’s take him up to the Areopagus and find out what’s going on here.”

Now the Areopagus was the place to go for philosophical debate. You know how if you really want to know what’s going on in town you go to the beauty parlor or to Sonny’s barbershop? Well, in Athens if you really want some good philosophy talk, you go to the Areopagus. They get Paul up there and they say, “Would you please enlighten us as to the implications of your Jesus theory for ethical and eschatological exploration? We’re very interested to know what you’re talking about.” (That’s my loose translation.)

So Paul’s got center stage and he could cause a lot of trouble, but instead he talks like a philosopher. Paul is good at this, you know. In another places in the Bible he says, “To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law…so that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law so that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, so that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some.” [1 Co. 9:20-22, NRSV] Paul is becoming one of them and he starts out with some sarcasm that they don’t get.

What he actually says is, “I have noticed that you people are a very religious people.” Well, they are not religious people. They may have a lot of religious stuff hanging around, but it has not made them passionate about God or about their lives. At least the people in the synagogues cared enough about their faith to know that Paul was turning their world upside down. These folks were content to say, “Hmmm. How very interesting,” and let Paul go on his merry way. So, Paul is pulling their collective leg a little bit here.

He says, “I have noticed that you are very religious in every possible way, because as I’ve walked around I have seen shrines to all sorts of different gods. I even saw an altar to the Unknown God.” You see, the Athenians were trying to cover all of the bases and just in case they missed a god somewhere along the way, they had constructed an insurance altar. But this is the altar Paul is going to use to make his point.

“I have an important announcement for you, Athenian philosophers,” Paul says. “The Unknown God is the one I am proclaiming.” And then he proceeds to talk about how God is the one who created the heavens and the earth. This is a God who created all things out of one, who gave life and breath to everyone, who fixed the order of time and place, who created a means for people in the world to discover God. All of these things would have sounded very reasonable to these philosophers because that’s the kind of god they spent their time talking about. And Paul even quotes some of their own poets and philosophers as he talks. “Your people have said that it is in God that we live and move and have our being, right? They said, ‘We, too, are God’s offspring.’ Well, I am telling you that a God like that isn’t like an altar made of gold or silver. A God like that doesn’t need to worshiped with an idol or an image. A God like that doesn’t need anything we might have to offer.

“But if we are God’s children, then we are called to turn back towards the one who made us and God has given us the means to do that through a person whom God appointed to judge us all, a person raised from the dead, a person named Christ.”

The resurrection language turned off some of the philosophers but the rest of them nodded their heads and said, “Very good. We’ll talk about this more later on.” Because that’s what philosophers do. They plan for another session at the coffee shop. But some of them did a very un-philosopher-like thing. Some of them followed Paul. We have the names of two of them—a man named Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris. I like to think that if I had been there, I would have followed Paul, too.

So what does this mean for the rest of the world which doesn’t like philosophy? What could this passage mean for us in an age where Tom Bodett from the Motel 6 commercials is the closest thing we’ve got to a public philosopher? What could it mean for people who couldn’t care less about the debate about whether the universe is one or many? Better yet, what could it mean for us, a people who sometimes treat our churches as if they are shrines to an unknown God?

Oh, there’s the rub. Because you see, I think that we are sometimes to content with an unknown God. We don’t have altars made of stone with an inscription to the unknown God, but some of us are content to lock God away in a church building and only go to visit that God on Easter and Christmas. Some of us are content to leave this God in church when we go out into the world and to let other gods direct our actions and our decisions about politics and behavior and caring for those in need. Some of us are content to read the words of Scripture and to proclaim that “Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life” and then go out into the world and let Oprah Winfrey be our guiding voice on how to act.

What does God have to say about this? I don’t know. God’s up there in the Church or over there in that closed Bible, but there’s a political pundit on the TV, there’s Rush Limbaugh on the radio, there’s Simon Cowell on American Idol—they are offering me some models. Maybe I’ll listen to them.

We’ve got our own Unknown God, you know, and the sad thing for us is that it is the God of Jesus Christ! And so we can’t get our minds clear about how to live our lives, how to govern our cities, how to elect our officials, how to treat other people, how to manage our relationships, how to control our addictions, how to look for healing, how to hang on to hope, how to give as we ought to give, how to love as we ought to love, how to dream as we ought to dream, because we have forgotten the one who has given us life. We haven’t spent enough time in this Biblical story to let it be our story. We haven’t encountered the God who is closer to us that we are to ourselves. The greatest irony in our whole, God-forgetful world is that the God whom we say we so desperately want to meet--the God who gave us life, who breathed that life into us, who loved and nurtured us, and who calls us each by our own unique and irreplaceable name—this God is the one in whom we already live and move before we even realize it.

Oh, we’ve got an Unknown God all right, but this God is not unknown to us because God hasn’t revealed God’s own self to us yet. God has been revealed and it has happened in Jesus Christ. As Christians this is the story that we keep telling to remind ourselves of who we are. Jesus showed that the way to life was open to every person—not just the Jews, though it is for them—not just the Greeks, though it is for them, too—not just to the blacks, though it is for them—not just to the whites, though it is for them—not just to the Americans—not just to the Afghanis—not just to the Israelis—not just to the Palestinians—not just to the poor—not just to the forgotten—not just to the Hokies—not just to the Cavaliers—Jesus opened the door to knowing God to every person, tribe and race. That’s a message for us to proclaim in every language that we know. Whether our audience is a roomful of overly reflective philosophers or the newborn child at our side, we are called to reflect the God we know in Jesus Christ. You want truth in an op-ed world? This is where we look. This is where Paul calls us to look.

Have you been in a Christian bookstore lately? I was in one not long ago looking for a Bible and there were Bibles of every kind—leather-bound, hardback, and paperback---red, black, white and maroon—women’s, men’s, youth, and children—King James, New International and New Revised Standard Version—so many choices. But none of those Bibles, not a single one will transform a life unless it is opened and read and shared and loved. When Paul talked to the philosophers about their unknown god, he knew that his words alone would not change their lives and their minds. It was only when folks like Dionysius and Damaris decided to follow him that the journey was begun. It’s when people put their lives in motion as living witnesses to this God.

I mentioned the poems of Mary Karr earlier as a place where I am finding truth these days. Mary Karr has had a fascinating life. She grew up in a very dysfunctional home with a father who abused her and a mother who tried to kill her. Recently she has become a Christian and her poetry reflects it.

In a poem called “Oratorio for the Unbecoming” she talks about how she had to overcome her own sense of dis-ease with her body and her self to hear how God sees her. The poem makes it sound as if God is unseen and unknown for most of her life. But then she discovered God within herself. “The heart is a mirror also, and in my chest I felt/ this tight bud of petals held a face:/ God, with his stare of a zillion suns.” And what did God tell her when she dared to listen? “He swears now/ this form is carved by him./ Have mercy, the soul/ singer says, and I say/ blessed be the air/ I breath these words with, for/ it makes a body wonder.” (from Sinners Welcome)

When we worship God with our minds we discover wonder. Opinion doesn’t cut it. Punditry doesn’t do it. Philosophy doesn’t take us far enough. The Unknown God becomes the known God when we put our lives in the service of Jesus Christ. Our journey towards God begins when we follow Christ into the world, serving and loving and inviting the people out there to discover the truth that we know through the story of Jesus—that the unknown god is none other than the God who made the universe including you and me. That’s a God worth knowing as much as God knows us. Thanks be to God.

Acts 17:22-31
Then, standing up in the middle of the Areopagus, Paul said, "Brothers and sisters of Athens, I see how very religious you are in every way possible. For in passing through the city and observing your altars, I also found a shrine, on which it was inscribed, 'To the Unknown God.' Now that Unknown One that you worship is the one I proclaim to you.
"The God who made the universe and everything that is in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in shrines built by human hands and does not need to be served by human hands, as if God needed anything, but rather he gives to all life and breath and everything. He made from one all the nations of humanity living upon all the face of the earth, fixing their appointed times and the boundaries of their dwelling place, so that they would seek out God and perhaps even grope their way toward God and stumble upon God, though really God is not far from every single one of us. For in God we live and move and are, just as some of your poets have said, 'For we too are his offspring.'
"Now since we are offspring of God, we should not suppose that this is a god made of silver, gold or precious stone, a thing crafted by human skill and a reflection of a human being, to be a likeness. Therefore while God overlooked the unknowingness of these times, now God commands all people everywhere to repent, because God has fixed a day on which to have the inhabited world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, bringing faith to all by the one resurrected from the dead."