*This is a follow-up to yesterday’s sermon on Acts 17:22-31. I have recorded it in case you’d rather listen than read. It will also be posted on our regular podcast*
Something I’ve learned in recent years is that no sermon can do everything. A constant temptation is to try and make the sermon do too much. I’m often guilty of this. Sometimes, however, you allow the sermon to not do everything but feel like you wished you really addressed some of the things you only hinted at. There are three things that I wish we’d had more time for in the sermon yesterday so I thought I would briefly say them here.
I. THEOLOGICAL ENGAGEMENT
I started to get at the ways that certain things – things we don’t initially identify from within a religious frame – need to be named and then engaged theologically. In other words, the religious options and devotions in our time and place are often small-r religious, things that occupy our time and shape our mind and our affections. I used Rodney Clapp’s work on neoliberalism as an example. His point regarding neoliberalism, and the capitalism which neoliberalism allows, is that we can’t simply take for granted that this is the way things are, or that this is the way things have always been. Instead, we need to dig deeper and ask how things we too often take for granted as reality came to be and have developed into what they currently are. We do this in order to present a challenge, or at least to challenge certain aspects of it, and offer an alternative vision of what it means to be a flourishing human community through the lens of Jesus Christ crucified and risen. Once you start looking carefully and see unnamed societal patterns/commitments as (small r) religious, it’s hard to unsee. We are more religious than we thought. As I quoted David Zahl saying last night:
“The religious impulse is easier to rebrand than to extinguish.”1
There’s a brilliant theologian named Kathryn Tanner who has written a book which deserves attention here titled Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism. Many of her books are quite dense, but this work is rather accessible (though still not a light read). In this book she demonstrates how capitalism oppressively sneaks its way into key aspects of our lives, and then she offers both a critique and alternative vision rooted in a Christian understanding. How we humans understand time is one the points she returns to again and again. How we view time, or better, are trained to view time, is massively important for what it means to be human. Before mentioning her work, perhaps Henri Nouwen can help us here in terms of how fundamental our experience of time is to our existence. He writes:
Time Becomes a burden unless we convert it into God's time. God's time (kairos) has to do with opportunity and fulness of meaning, moments that are ripe for their intended purpose…Time becomes not just something to get through or manipulate or manage, but the arena of God's good work in us. Whatever happens–good things or bad, pleasant or problematic–we ask, 'What might God be doing here?' We see the events of the day as continuing occasions to change the heart. Time points beyond itself and begins to speak to us of God.2
Stanley Hauerwas states the issue succinctly:
"Christians live in a different time than those who do not share our faith."3
Part of the point of the sermon was to look closely at how our small-r religious commitments shape us. Tanner does this brilliantly by looking at how time becomes a burden within capitalism’s pedagogy. Space will not allow for a full treatment here, but as an example she talks about debt (an often built in necessity of capitalism):
One major way finance-dominated capitalism organizes time so as to structure human subjectivity and hinder the critique is by magnifying the significance of the past for present and future conduct…Debt is increasingly used by cash-strapped individuals to make up for what finance-dominated corporations and governments no longer provide: a living wage, on the one hand, and guarantees of education and more than simple survival in times of troubles on the other.4
Think about what she is saying and the implications regarding how we inhabit time as creatures here on earth.5 One who who has crippling debt cannot live fully in the present moment because they are chained to the decisions (sometimes out of necessity) of the past. You can see how shame becomes a factor here. At this point, the only thing the future, driven by the past, holds is dread. The result?
“The extreme pressures of past demands on future performance in this way come to colonize every waking moment.”6
Tanner then goes on to talk about how, in light of Jesus and his saving power, time is understood differently by Christians. Time, to restate Nouwen, is gift, not burden, and redemption, within the Christian understanding, stands as a life giving possibility.
Now, it’s important to say here that many of us will feel ill-equipped to deal with these issues whether from a theological perspective or a economic perspective. The point is not that you need to deal with all things. Rather, it’s simply to note that we don’t have to take the way things are as given. It is possible, very possible in fact, for things we take as given but are not, to operate in ways that contradict the very ground of Christian understanding. So while our streets are not flooded with wooden or metal idols like they were in Athens, there are ideologies and commitments that flood our streets and we do well, like Paul, to pay close attention to them. It also reminds us that people in various fields of study can speak “christianly” within their field. By this I don’t mean we speak christianese, but that we challenge damaging commitments taken for granted through the ways that we’ve been shaped by Christ. It may simply mean actually naming something instead of taking it as given.
Okay, so if you’re not an expert in these fields? There are other important ways to pay attention.
II. PAYING ATTENTION TO ART & POP-CULTURE WORK
The second thing I wished we had been able to dig into more deeply was the exploration of the positive elements of paying attention. Think of Paul’s brilliant usage of the saying from a Cretan philosopher:
“For in him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28a)
I grew up singing a song with these exact words and I think of them often. They are fitting and beautiful. Paul used these words to say, ‘Yes, there is truth here.” And eventually, ‘that Truth has a name: Jesus of Nazareth.’
Paul then he quoted a Cilician Stoic philosopher who said:
“We are his offspring.” (Acts 17:28b).
Paul though, ‘I can use that.’
As Christians, our posture should not be that of sole possessors of truth. On the contrary, we are possessed by Truth and follow him. We can therefore discern God at work in many places. Sometimes God hasn’t yet been named, in others places, God has been misnamed. Regardless, where there is beauty, or even sorrow that rings very true (often the flip side of beauty), we should pay attention as Christians.
I picked up David Dark’s book Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious last week to help me with this sermon. I only got about half-way through and really wish I had gotten to spend more time on the positive elements of “looking carefully,” what he references as “respect.” As I quoted last night, Dark says:
“Look again, respect, stay with the information, and consider the possibility that there might be more going on in a neighbor, a novel, an image, or a conversation overheard than your mind had grasped the first time around, something worthy of your time, something beautiful.”7
In the fourth chapter of his book he delves into the truth that he often sees while reading science fiction. He writes:
Like nothing else can, science fiction invites us to take the temperature of our own strange behavior, to note the outrageous arbitrariness at work in our organizing fictions, and to proceed more wonderingly in our conception of ourselves. It raises the question of how we’ve been imprinted. At its best, in my own life it performs nothing less than a prophetic and revivifying function. It makes me more alive to incongruities I’ve allowed to become normalized.8
Science fiction, and fiction more generally, awakens us to the unrecognized idols in our unrecognized religious devotion. Dark says,
Ideology is the supreme nut—the hardness of head and heart, the thickness of falsehood—that generations of prophets and free thinkers have sought to crack, the mind-forged manacles William Blake warned us about, the frozen sea inside the hardened heart.9
When we pay attention to the longing, pain and beauty in film, music, literature, and all forms of good art, we may begin to get the feeling that the way things are is not the way things have to be. We may begin to see, in other words, that we have certain harmful devotions and allegiances (idols) that we didn’t realize and may begin to have the courage to glimpse a different reality. This too is the work of Christians in our time. These are the things at which we must look carefully. In the opening of his book, Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God, Poet and Priest Malcolm Guite says:
“This book is a defense of the imagination as a truth-bearing faculty, and more than that it is an appeal to artists, poets, sculptors, storytellers, and filmmakers to kindle our imaginations for Christ, who is himself the kindling imagination of God, who brings all things into being.”10
The Apostle Paul pointed to different philosophers of his time and said, ‘See, they’re on to something!’ This doesn’t mean that he agreed with all of their conclusions, but he paid enough attention to enter into dialogue with them. Precisely because our idols aren’t out in the open, we need to carefully listen to the artists of our time. Artists pay attention and therefore help us pay attention. As Christians, it’s important to not merely ask, ‘Did you like that?’ or ‘Did you find that entertaining?’ but to ask, ‘What did that mean?’
III. SPIRITUAL BUT NOT RELIGIOUS
One final thing that I left unaddressed completely but wish I had had time to say. Many in our time confess that they are “spiritual but not religious.” Even while I’m arguing that if we broaden the definition and more people have religious commitments than it may first appear, I also think that we need to take people very seriously when they say they are spiritual but not religious. A time may come to discuss the various ways we are religious without realizing it, but when people make this confession we really need to lean in.
Last summer I read a book that I haven’t been able to shake. It’s by Dale Allison Jr., a respected New Testament scholar. In his book Encountering Mystery, he makes the case (and backs it up with research) that far more people are having religious experiences than we think. Because it fell out of popularity to say these things aloud, we assume that these experiences or encounters are few and far between. He says that’s simply not the case. Allison makes the case that religious scholars and pastors often dismiss people who have these mysterious Divine encounters. We’re polite enough, but dismissive. Sometimes these people are written off as “New Agers.”11 Allison says that "to dismiss is not to understand."12 He then writes:
What happens when someone unattracted to or alienated from organized religion–perhaps for understandable reasons–is nonetheless overcome by transcendent bliss, or meets God in an NDE [Near Death Experience], or beholds an angel, or enters via mystical rapture some world beyond this one? There are many such people. That they are spiritual but not religious makes perfect sense. Indeed, what else could they be?13
The point here is not to contradict the above – that we are more religious than we think – but to engage people who have been touched by transcendence14 and see what God might be up to in their lives, and how Jesus might be spoken in light of their encounter.
Well, these were a few thoughts that were rambling around my head while preparing to talk about how Acts 17 might inform us missionally in our own context. The B-side of the sermon if you will. I hope you’ve found that some of this might open space within you to think through how Acts 17 might impact your engagement with the world, and how you might be able to speak the word Jesus in the midst of it.
*I’ll try and get some of these books in our church library and will let you know as they become available.*
David Zahl, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics, and Romance Became Our New Religion and What to Do About It (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2019), Kindle loc. 54.
Henri Nouwen with Michael J. Christensen and Rebecca J. Laird, Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life (New York: HarperOne, 2013), 84-85.
Stanley Hauerwas, Hannah's Child: A Theologian's Memoir (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2010), 174.
Kathryn Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 34.
“How To Inhabit Time” happens to be the title of a fascinating book by James K. A. Smith which you should definitely read.
Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism, 50.
David Dark, Life's Too Short to Pretend You're Not Religious, Reframed and Expanded (Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2022), 14.
ibid. 88.
ibid. 89.
Malcolm Guite, Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God (Baltimore, MD: Square Halo Books, 2021), 11.
Dale C. Allison Jr., Encountering Mystery: Religious Experience in a Secular Age (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2022), 179.
ibid.
ibid.
A tip of the hat to Mayra Rivera’s book title: The Touch of Transcendence.