This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 05/10/26, at Berkeley Friends Church. The scripture reading for this sermon was: Acts 17:22-31.
At Berkeley Friends Church, we’re exploring how we can go deeper in our discipleship to Jesus. Through the Day One Taskforce, through our membership class curriculum, through our small groups and one-on-one relationships, we’re learning to think outside of Sunday morning and bring the gospel into our entire lives. We’re practicing reaching out in our personal relational networks, to make the gospel known to others, so that our friends, family, and neighbors have the opportunity to follow Jesus as part of this or another Christian community.
As I’ve been teaching and equipping folks in our community to do personal disciple-making, it’s become more clear to me than ever what a challenging path we are on. The Bay Area is not an easy place to share the gospel!
Traditionally, Christians in North America have thought about ministry in two big buckets: “foreign missions” and “home missions”. Foreign missions took place in countries where Christianity was not the majoritarian religion. Home missions took place within the borders of Christian-majority nations. Home missions were considered to be categorically different from foreign missions, in that home missions took place in areas of settled Christian culture. Here, the goal was revival and reform of people’s lives, rather than the introduction of an unknown gospel. For much of the English-speaking world and Western Europe, this distinction has entirely broken down. In places like Paris and London and San Francisco, Christianity has been marginal for a long time.
Here where we live, Christianity is not the religion of the majority. Perhaps even more importantly, it is not the religion of the economic, political, and cultural elites. In our city and region, the highest status, wealthiest, most educated people dramatically skew secular. In the East Bay, Christianity is a faith that everyone has heard of, but which is generally assumed to be low-brow and simplistic. Theistic faith in general, and Christianity in particular, is often not considered to be for “serious” people.
When Paul was preaching in the Greco-Roman world, and especially in Athens, he faced a similar environment of skepticism, especially from the cultural and religious elites. In our story this morning, those elites are represented by the busy marketplace of philosophers gathered in Athen’s Areopagus. The Areopagus was traditionally a place of elite governance, but in the time of Paul, under Roman domination, it had become a place for elite philosophical debate.
The pluralistic religions of the Greek-speaking Roman East centered idealism and subtle philosophy over Jewish concrete physicality. For most Greeks and Romans, Christianity was just a variant of Judaism, and Judaism was considered a backwater religion, not suitable for sophisticated people. Stoicism and Epicurianism were two respected, elite philosophies. One held that the human spirit was eternal, the other was entirely materialist; neither one had room for something as weird as a bodily resurrection.
In spite of the intellectual and cultural resistance to such strange Jewish truth claims, Paul was able to win many people to the gospel of Jesus, and help establish a number of churches in the Greek Mediterranean. Paul was frequently rejected, and even run out of town. Yet he left a legacy of disciples following Jesus and communities gathered by the Holy Spirit around the message that Paul proclaimed.
How did Paul have such an impact in spite of fierce opposition? Not by resisting the cultures he encountered, but by speaking directly to them in terms that they could understand. As Paul recounts in his first letter to the Church at Corinth, he became “all things to all people, that [he] might by all means save some” (1 Cor 9:22).
Paul bent over backwards to win over anyone who would respond to the gospel of Jesus. In Athens, he was facing a highly skeptical crowd, including hostile people who called him a “babbler”. Nevertheless, Paul approached them with respect even as he presented a message that would challenge their worldview.
At the center of Paul’s approach was listening and attention to the details of the life and culture of the people he was speaking to. In the case of the crowd gathered at the Areopagus, he honored the Athenian’s “religiosity”. He took seriously their quest for truth, even though he was appalled at the idolatry of the city. He never made the mistake of blaming or ridiculing the Athenians. Instead, he focused on connecting with the local culture, and explaining the gospel in the Athenian context. Rather than going into a long speech based in the Jewish scriptures, he quotes from their own Greek literary tradition – Epimenides of Crete and the Cilician poet Aratus. He speaks to them in terms that they will not only understand, but from a cultural layer (poetry, philosophy) that they are inclined to respect.
This seems to have been effective. He didn’t win over everyone of course. Some of the hearers mocked the idea of resurrection, which sounded just as crazy to the Greeks as it does to modern secular Americans. But others who heard him were intrigued, and asked to hear more from him later – the highest compliment that this rowdy group of philosophers could give. It’s not clear whether Paul’s speech convinced anyone immediately. But eventually, some Athenians joined Paul and began to follow Jesus.
I’ve never debated any Athenian philosophers. I’ve never even visited Greece. But my situation – and yours – is in some ways very similar to the one that Paul faced two thousand years ago. Of course, there are some important differences. The place of Christianity in our city is different than Paul’s Athens. In that city, Christianity was a new religious movement that no one had ever heard of before. In our city, Christianity is the formerly dominant religion that has fallen from preeminence. That’s an important difference that we can’t ignore. Still, in many ways our challenges are similar to those of Paul the early church in the Greek world.
The region that we live in, the San Francisco Bay Area, is probably a good candidate to be called the modern Athens. Our city is a place for serious people doing serious thinking that changes the world. We live in a prestigious, high-status metropolis. We are surrounded by a highly-cultured, wealthy, educated, and powerful society in which Christianity is not taken seriously. The gospel is not considered a live option for intelligent, successful people.
Just like Athens, the San Francisco Bay Area is a culture of the mind. Our city is a place of insatiable hunger for meaning, truth, and a deeper connection to the things that really matter. Many of our friends, co-workers, and neighbors are religious skeptics, but they are desperately yearning for something more than they are finding in their secular philosophies, technologies, and politics. Our hearts long for the Unknown God, even if we don’t know his name.
We see it every day. Our neighbors have shrines to an unknown God in their homes and in their hearts. You’ve seen them. The “In This House We Believe…” signs. A Buddha statue in the garden of a non-religious family. People in existential despair, still volunteering for social justice causes. The millions practicing meditation and mindfulness with the help of a smartphone app. All of these point to a longing for the Unknown God.
We have this in common with our secular neighbors. We are hungry, too. The only difference is that we have found a source of nourishment in Jesus. It would be heartless not to share what we have found.
If we are to share the good news that we have found, we can’t start with the Christian story and expect our neighbors to understand it. Just like Paul to the Athenians, we have to begin where they are – we have to name the Unknown God that they seek, and then connect it to the truth that we have found.
Probably the most common and accepted philosophy of educated, intelligent, successful people in our city is some form of secular humanism. Think about the kind of ideologies you’d be exposed to in a TED Talk, or on an NPR podcast: Progress. Reason. Personal responsibility. Pluralism. These are shrines to the Unknown God.
These ideals inspire so many in our society. They want to become better people, more loving, more altruistic, more just, more human. This impulse points the way.
We might ask, whether out loud or just in our own minds, “You seem to really value social justice and you’re working really hard to bring it into being. What gives you hope that we can get there?” “Your heart aches for love and peace. Why?” “You think the future could be better than the past. On what grounds?” The Unknown God is the answer to these questions.
Paul saw the holy longing for the one true God in Athens. He saw how the search for truth was leading people to the gospel, to the Unknown God, to Jesus. They didn’t know who he was yet, but the Holy Spirit was already present before Paul arrived, preparing the Athenians to hear the good news. The Athenians didn’t know the truth, but the truth knew them. They didn’t know the facts about God, but they had an intuition that there was a God to be sought.
As followers of Jesus, our role is not to fight against this Unknown God. Our job isn’t to prove that we’re so much smarter or more righteous than the people around us. Instead, we’re called to help others see that there is an answer to the questions that they are asking. There is a divine source of their highest and truest inclinations. It is the same Spirit who created all things in heaven and earth and who raised our Lord Jesus from the dead.
One of the worst things we could do as followers of Jesus in this culture is to become proud of ourselves. Spiritual pride is the death of real evangelism. We have to recognize that we, too, are thirsty explorers in need of a well. We are so blessed that we have found that source of living water in Jesus.
We should never say to non-Christians, “We have something that you don’t have.” We don’t have anything; Christ has us. All we can do is point the way to the Unknown God that is so powerfully at work in this world, and who is saving us.
When we encounter non-Christians who are seeking that way, that truth, that life, but don’t know who he is, we can encourage them: “That which you have been looking for is real. There is a life and a power that calls you to a greater destiny and greater love. There’s an unknown God in your heart that convicts you when you are wrong and encourages you when you do right. His name is Jesus.”
We don’t own the Holy Spirit. We don’t have a monopoly on God. But we do know his story, and we are gathered in his name. Just like Paul, our calling is to go where God is already at work – unknown and unnamed – and point people to that life and power in their midst. Our calling is to invite them into a community of Jesus followers who are discovering this unknown God and getting to know him better, even as we are fully known by him.
Even in the secular, skeptical culture of the San Francisco Bay Area, we can have confidence as we are sent out. God is already here. Jesus has gone ahead of us to prepare the way. All we have to do is answer the Unknown God, present in every heart, making him known and inviting those we meet into a community that follows him.
When we realize that Jesus is already ahead of us, present in every person, place, and thing that we encounter, we can relax in our interactions with others. We don’t have to prove anything to them; God is already here to do that himself. We just have to share our testimony and invite seekers to join us in finding, as a community in Jesus.
This is the calm confidence that undergirds everything we are building together as a congregation. The disciple-making work we’re doing – in our membership class and the Day One Taskforce, in our small groups and personal relationships – is not a program. It is disciplined practice of paying attention. We’re noticing where God is already at work in the people around us, and learning to say, simply, “The one you are looking for – his name is Jesus. Come and see.”