SERMON  EASTER 6 2005 (Year A) 

Acts 17: 22-31        Psalm 66        1 Peter 3: 8-22        John 14: 15-21 

In the name of God, in whom we live and move and have our being.   Amen. 

In my office at the back of the hall there is a fish tank. I’m not really a fish person but I agist these fish for Elaine and Greg, who had run out of fish space in their home. And, as was inevitable I guess, I have grown quite attached to them and enjoy watching them live out their fishy lives and go about their fishy business, which contains, I might add, quite a bit of gratuitous violence. Angel fish they may be but… if heaven is like that, remember to take some weaponry.  

As I gaze on the fish I occasionally wonder whether they notice the water. Is there a parallel between the way they relate to water and we relate to the air? Are they as blasé about the water that sustains them as we are about the air which sustains us? For most of us, it really is only when something goes wrong with the air, or when it is particularly delicious, up in the mountains say, that we pay much attention to it. And yet, it is there all the time, and we are utterly dependent upon it.  

When Paul arrived in Athens, his natural audience was the Jewish population. He was coming to tell them that the Messiah that their Scriptures spoke about had come, that in Jesus God had honoured all the promises of the preceding centuries. Jesus was the fulfilment of all their hopes. Although he was unlike anything they had been expecting, his life, death and resurrection offered extraordinary hope and new life. He was the Messiah. It was a powerful and challenging message for the Jews but one which built on their conceptual framework, on their existing knowledge and understanding. 

But Paul did not limit his preaching to the Jews. The text tells us that Paul was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols. And so, as well as talking to the Jewish population, he went to the marketplace every day to engage in debate with all the philosophers who gathered there. We might have hoons in Braddon every Friday night but the Greeks had philosophers and their groupies in the marketplace each day. And they say humanity has progressed! It seems that Paul’s distress and grief prompted him to extend his target audience beyond the obvious ones who would at least have an idea of what he was talking about.  

This led him to a quite different approach from the one that he might have used with the Jews. Rather than pointing to the Hebrew scriptures and demonstrating that Jesus really was the one they had all been waiting for, he met the Athenians on their own conceptual ground, drawing on their customs and literature to make connections with them and to talk about God and about Jesus in terms that would make sense to them. 

And the way he did it was to use the argument that we are all immersed in the presence of God. God is to us as water to the fish, or air to our bodies. In his passionate speech to the Athenians, Paul challenges them to become aware of the God who has created everything and who sustains all things. In the spiritual supermarket of Athens, he claims not just to proclaim to them a new god, but the God – the one who is at the heart of everything, the one in whom we live and move and have our being. As close to us and as vital for our well being as the air we breathe or as the water in which fish live, Paul’s God is the one for whom we yearn spiritually and for whom we search. Qualitatively different from the various gods worshipped by the Athenians, Paul’s God is the source of all being, not some idol made of metal or wood and imbued with divine significance by human imagination. 

Western society today is, I suspect, quite similar to the Athenian spiritual supermarket. Close textual argument is unlikely to convince many people about the Christian message. The context in which we live and into which we speak is one which has, by and large, forgotten that it lives, moves and has its being in, through and because of God. But it does and once we have seen that, once we have understood it, then there is no going back – the world is transformed. We are like people who have truly understood the air we breathe, we are like fish who have realised the significance of the water in which they swim. Every thing, every action, every relationship has a different dimension to it.  

Seeing God in this way means that the life of faith is to be inhabited day by day, not visited once in a while. To be disciples means to live as Christians, with every aspect of our lives touched and changed by our perception of the presence of God and the transformative message of the Christ. It is not a matter of reading a set of propositions about God and saying ‘Yes, OK, I believe’. It is much more a matter of getting a glimpse of what it’s all about, and then living in the light of that glimpse, gradually seeing more and more of what it means. As our eyes become accustomed to the light, so we see more and more of the landscape of faith, of the nature of God. 

One of the many theories about learning says that we humans  learn in a number of ways. We absorb and process information through reading, through listening and by interacting with the world physically. Some of us learn most effectively visually, some by hearing, some by doing. Most of us use all three methods in some kind of preferred balance. What this means for faith is that actually living the Christian life helps us to learn more about God; it opens up things which were mysterious to us. It is not simply a response to God, it is part of learning more about the very nature of God and about Jesus. 

The New Testament reading today is one of the many texts in the New Testament that give us guidance on what this might actually mean, day by day. The standards are high. In the Canberra Centre carpark when someone pinches my parking space, it is tempting to repay evil for evil. It seems trivial, but aggression expressed at that level contributes to an overall level of aggression and violence within the society. Within family life, feuds can go on for generation after generation as we fail to seek peace and to repay evil and abuse with blessing.  

But it is terribly important that we try to live the life of faith. The way in which we live as Christians is significant at several levels.

• It is a witness to the wider community. People are drawn to or repelled by Christianity by the way in which we go about our lives.
• It is a gift to God from us – in treating other people well, in living the commandment to love one another as God loves us, we are bringing joy to God
• But perhaps most importantly of all, it is an essential part of growing ever closer to God, to learning more about what it means to be a Christian. To love God and to seek to live with other people in peace and love, is to come to know God.

May each of us love and come to know the God in whom we live and move and have our being.  Amen.

Sarah Macneil