Sermon from July 2003

Here's Cameron's sermon from July 2003 based on the reading from Acts 17: verses 16-34
Now there’s a question! ‘How upset / distressed do you get when you see idolatry all around you?’!

Of course that’s a question grammatically speaking – but it’s not just any old question. I’ve raised it now at the start because it might well be the most important question this passage from Acts 17 invites us to ask today. So let me repeat it – and then give you some time to brood over it: ‘how upset / distressed do you get when you see idolatry all around you?’ …

Now I could hazard a guess as to how most people would have answered that question: ‘you what?!’ Idolatry isn’t a topic that usually crops up in everyday conversation within most churches let alone outside them! I think we tend to see idolatry as an Old Testament problem rather than a contemporary one. I think that’s a serious – even dangerous – mistake to make, so it’s an issue I’ll be coming back to later. For now let me simply remind you that idolatry is anything that takes a place ahead of God in our life – and then point us back to Paul.

As we come to the end of the series we’ve been engaged with since Easter, we need to review where we’ve been and why. Regulars will know well that we’re embarked on a year of growing outwards. This is the year in which our main focus is on seeing other people come to faith in Jesus. To encourage and help us, we’ve been looking at how the early church grew so effectively and quickly. We haven’t thought specifically about what drove the early church to want to grow – but that has been an important sub-text throughout this series.

Today I want to bring that sub-text to the forefront for a while – in the hope that will carry us on into the summer. And I want to say there were 2 main factors in the desire of the early church to see others come to faith. The first factor was positive: sheer enthusiasm for Jesus!

What we have to remember is that the early church was mostly made up of Jews. As a nation Israel had believed in the promise of God’s Messiah for centuries. They had looked forward to his arrival eagerly. Remember, they expected the Messiah to bring not just liberation from their enemies but a whole new start with God. So when these Jews came to believe God had kept his promise and had sent Jesus as his Messiah, that was something to be hugely excited about!

I’d liken it to the first flushes of being in love. Those first Christian experienced that all-consuming rush of passion. With it came an overwhelming desire to tell everyone what had happened to them. The faith they now had in Jesus as Messiah changed everything: it dominated their lives and their purpose in how and why they lived. Persecution may soon have become part of the package. But despite even that, they could no more not talk about what God had done in Jesus than they could choose to stop breathing!

Of course they wanted to tell the people who were most likely to grasp the significance of Jesus. Throughout most of Acts, in every town the Christians went to preach the gospel they headed first to the Jews – as Paul did here in Athens. Their enthusiasm for Jesus drove them to share this good news with people who would understand it as such. And they persisted with that approach – even when
the reaction wasn’t always what they would’ve hoped for.

So that’s the positive reason the early church grew as it did – the sheer excitement about what God had done. Is that how you feel about your faith? Do you long to share it with others because you’re so excited about what God has done? Are you so passionate about Jesus that living for him dominates every part of your life? If it’s not then we need to be reminded that God expects us to maintain that kind of passion for him. And it may be that hearing how these Christians lived will rekindle our passion too.

Perhaps it won’t; maybe then we need to hear the second reason the early Christians were so keen to share their faith. We might call it a negative reason, or at least a less positive one. It’s the reason we see stated outright here in Acts 17. In Paul’s words in verses. 30-31: “in the past God overlooked the times when people didn’t know him; but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has fixed day when he will judge the world with justice by means of the man he has appointed”.

That’s why Paul was upset / distressed by seeing a city so full of idols. What it represented to him was ignorance – not just of what God had already done, but what he had promised to do. I know judgment is not a trendy subject; but that won’t make it go away! If there’s 1 thing the Bible makes crystal clear it’s there will be a day of judgment. and Paul says here that God has already fixed the day – even if we don’t know when it will be.

This is a subject Peter tackled in his second letter. We may think God is being slow – but the day of judgment has not happened yet because God wants all people to turn to him. And that was the 2nd driver to mission for the early church. It was the certain knowledge that judgment is coming, and that how people respond to Jesus plays a vital part in deciding their eternal destiny. So their job was to tell people how in Jesus they could escape judgment.

Now you might think that’s another untrendy notion, this idea that how we respond to Jesus counts for anything. I’m sure people will tell you that if you talk to them about it. But knowing that didn’t stop Paul in Athens. Greek culture in Paul’s day didn’t believe in the existence of an afterlife at all. The concept of eternal judgment was totally foreign to them – and as for resurrection, that was madness! But Paul wasn’t going to be put off by local culture. What he saw in the idols in Athens was a dangerous ignorance of God’s action. He knew he needed to speak about that danger as widely and as persuasively as he could.

So Paul left the Jewish synagogue for the pagan market-place. And there he preached about Jesus to anyone and everyone who passed by. Of course the local intellectuals didn’t let him get away with that. The market-place was their territory; there they debated philosophy and politics and whatever else came their way. So the Epicurean and Stoic teachers went at it with Paul – and were impressed enough by his learning to offer him a bigger stage.

Paul was invited to speak at a city council meeting and present his case for the gospel there. How he did so was very clever - and very instructive for us. It clearly wouldn’t have made any sense for Paul to speak about Jewish history; his audience didn’t have the background to understand the significance of it. Instead he found hooks into the local culture, and used those to talk about God.

There’s another good question for us: how well do we find hooks into our culture? We live in a society in which the vast majority of people say they believe in God, but only a tiny minority believe in Jesus. How do we make the kind of jump that Paul did? He picked up on the altar he’d come across in Athens – the one dedicated to an unknown God. Paul used that to introduce them to Jesus. He also affirmed the local culture, quoting Greek poets to them. So how do we do that too: how can we affirm our local culture for the sake of the gospel?

Those are questions well worth grappling with. But I invite you to note that wasn’t all Paul did. He said very clearly that the local culture was wrong, and so were their poets because they didn’t go far enough! Paul told the brightest and smartest people in Athens outright: they needed to repent, turn to God, if they wanted to be safe when God’s judgment comes. And there’s another set of challenges for us: when and how do we tell our culture it has got things wrong? And yes, I know that’s very hard in the post-modern era when we’re told there is no one right way.

I want to go back to Paul again because there’s plenty more to learn from his evangelistic exploit in Athens! I think we need a lesson in evangelistic realism. It was a lesson that Paul learned the hard way in the Aeropagus that day. When he spoke of Jesus being raised from the dead, people began to sneer at him. In fact that pretty much ended Paul’s chance to present the gospel. What he had said was so far outside the Athenians’ frame of reference they couldn’t hear him.

I think we need to have that in mind when we present the gospel too. For some people the story of Jesus is literally in-credible: it can’t be believed. And there is a chance we will be sneered at as losers or weaklings or frauds if we say that’s what we believe. Anyone who watches or reads about Big Brother may have spotted something of that in the way my namesake has been treated in the media.

Well, that’s life: it happens! We can’t win them all, even if we wanted. But we can win some. And that’s what Paul also experienced in Athens. In the last verse of the reading we’re told that a handful of people believed; they weren’t enough to start a church as far as we know. But what’s important is that some people came to faith in Jesus even in a sophisticated trendy city like Athens. And the story of Acts is a story of what can happen from small beginnings.

The events in Athens are a great note on which to pause our Acts series for the summer. I say pause because we are coming back to Acts in September. Then we’re going to see what impact just one person – Paul – had for the gospel. But since Easter we have seen a wide range of people in action for their faith. Many have been rather more ordinary people than how we tend to see apostles like Peter or Paul. And what we’ve seen is these ordinary people praying, serving and preaching – which are the 3 things that make up our evangelistic strategy this year.

I hope this series has encouraged you to pray, serve and preach, and to feel you can. Today I hope you’ve thought a bit about what your motivation to do those things might be – sheer excitement at what God has done; or because you are sure there will be a day of judgment? And I hope you will begun to think of ways we can engage with our local culture. We need to know both how to affirm it and find in it a starting point to explain how Jesus is good news.

I said at the beginning that I needed to come back to the issue of idols. I need to because our city is full of them! Think of how many distractions there are from God round us. The list is long and seductive: money, power, sex, drugs; and more subtle ones like success, education and prestige. At the right time and in the right way we need to name those things for what they are: idols that our society worships.

Maybe we should be challenged by Paul’s distress at seeing such things in Athens. Maybe we should be just as challenged by what he did about it. His response was to preach the gospel – and to do it in a way that got him a hearing locally. There’s a challenge to take away for the summer: how can we present our faith in a way people won’t immediately dismiss us as naive or foolish? And if you want more, where do we need to tell postmodernism that it’s wrong or deluded? I have ideas – but no time!

Of course I want to urge you to go on praying, serving and preaching over the summer. Other ordinary people have done it before: God used them to bring people to faith: why shouldn’t he use you? Pray, serve and speak, knowing that individual people can make a difference – and come back to learn how Paul did. Above all this summer remember: what counts is not that we have great faith. What matters is that we have faith in a great God who wants people saved. So let's pray ...