Sermon presented to Nagoya All Saints International Congregation on May 17, 2020 based on Acts 17: 22-31 meeting in virtual community.
Are there blessings to being an expat? An expat is simply the word used to describe someone who lives outside of their native country. I came across a saying many years ago that I have found to be true: “The shortest way to yourself is living around the world.” I believe we grow as persons and develop new parts of our identity and character as we experience new and different people and cultures. The expat life lets us learn things about ourselves we would have never found out otherwise and opens our mind and broadens our perspective like no other experience.
Of course it is double edged sword in that there are some painful aspects of expat life. For me, the most tender is not being able to be physically present for my loved ones. Although technology has made it so much better than many years ago when snail mail was the highlight of my day, and I had a stack of aerograms, I have noticed the pain of separation more acutely particularly with adult children who are now half around the world.
For these and other reasons, we who are sensitive to the expat life may not realize that those life experiences do make a difference in faith. As we are reminded in today’s gospel, the Holy Spirit is constantly refining but along with that, our life experiences open us to new perspectives on all aspects of faith. For example, we can see how an expat life experience relates to one person in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul.
Paul born a Jew and a Roman citizen lived at time of Roman imperial power, yet he lived and worked in one foreign context after another as an expat. Saul or Paul lived and studied in Jerusalem at the school of Gamaliel, a famous Jewish rabbinic “international boarding school.” After his conversion, Paul went to Arabia for a length of time and engaged in several missionary journeys including, present day Cyprus, Turkey, Greece and Italy and perhaps even as far as present day Spain. Paul did not travel with the intent of being a tourist but to share the faith while living and working as a tentmaker. We tend to think that the people with whom Paul interacted where all the same, but that is not the case. Although when traveling he would more often than not find a synagogue and fellow Jews, it is not that community alone with whom he interacted.
I lift all this for your consideration because it is with that experience as an expat that I believe drove part of Paul’s encounter in Athens. In a cosmopolitan city known for its many gods, pursuits, ideas and pleasures, all drawn from the world around the Mediterranean, Paul will point out the religious impulse in people and redirect them to the “unknown God” who supersedes all the others. Driven by the Holy Spirit and his life experiences, what is remarkable is Paul’s sensitivity to the people with whom he is living and working, a sensitivity that suggests that he takes their spiritual journey seriously. That sensitivity comes with exposure to a variety of people and cultures.
Today’s first lesson begins when Paul is waiting for his companions Silas and Timothy to join him in Athens, where we are told that he was “deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols.”[1] The pantheon Paul saw of gods and goddesses was well-known to him and the ancient world, for many of the same gods had been adopted and rebranded by imperial Romans as way to hold their varied and diverse empire together. So it wasn’t what he saw, but their number and how the culture around him continued to appropriate new idols and gods.
Most of those gods of the past were linked with some aspect of life, be it romance (Aphrodite/Venus), reason (Athena/Minerva), war (Ares/Mars) or even messaging (Hermes/Mercury), but there were numerous others. In addition to the stone visages of these various gods, philosophers were also present on the streets touting their ideas. For example, the Epicureans were deists who believed the gods weren’t that involved in human life and, if they were, they wanted people to be happy. Life for the Epicureans involved the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.
The connections between our own experience living as expats in Japan and that of Paul and Athens aren’t exact parallels, but there are somethings we can glean from his distress to guide us. Although Paul acknowledges what his audience’s spiritual and intellectual journey has found, he also believes that what he has found is worth sharing.
Translate that into our time and place. As we know many in Japan are nominally and culturally Shinto and Buddhist, but like people around the world people have other quasi-religious leanings around a variety of aspects of life beyond those traditional faiths.
One idol I have noticed is busyness. It is attractive because it does double duty, allowing us to feel like we are on the path of life while distracting us from other, less pleasant realities, like fear, doubt, uncertainty and death. What is unique in this culture is how that busyness has been associated to the careful, planning and consensus-oriented decision-making process. In this cult you are depending on how busy you are.
The other idol I have noticed is food. Food can express the symbolic values of a people as it clearly does in this nation (i.e. rice). Yet, when I see the camera focused on a TV personality eating something new, the hope is for a reaction to be near religious ecstasy. What we are taking to work as our obento has become invested with the deeper meaning of life. In this cult, you are what you eat!
Returning to our story in Acts, what is helpful for us to see is that Paul’s preaching about Jesus and the resurrection caused some of his listeners some level of discomfort, mostly because the truth he was proclaiming seemed to be about something “foreign.”[2] The good news about Jesus will always seem foreign. It did then, and it does now!
Like Socrates before him who was accused of a similar kind of religious disruption, Paul was led to the Areopagus --- the “hill of Mars” --- near the Acropolis where the Athenian court was located. “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting?” they asked. “It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means.”[3] In response, Paul was about to tell them the truth that emerged out of a very old story.
Paul’s address to the Athenians is both courageous and courteous. As I mentioned before Paul begins by acknowledging their religiosity. “I see how extremely religious you are in every way,” says Paul.[4] Paul doesn’t see the Athenians as far from God but as on the way to God; then he acknowledges his own faith journey and shares what his own search has found. Paul respects his audience’s intelligence, convinces them that they themselves are within God’s story, and trusts that his vocation is simply to tell the truth as honestly and earnestly as he can, knowing that those who have ears to hear will hear.
That is helpful reminder for us that when people have a religious impulse, no matter where it’s directed, we are to acknowledge that they are moving in the right direction. They’re seeking something and, like Paul, we can point out the real object of their search. Paul directed the Athenians to the statue they had erected to “an unknown god” and then proceeded to fill in the blank.[5]
In other words, Paul doesn’t begin by saying, “You idolaters! You’ve got it all wrong!” He begins with meeting people where they were, like a seasoned expat with a new job in a new city, while encouraging them to keep looking. “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you,” Paul continues.[6] He proceeds to talk about the one God, the Creator God, and the Lord of heaven and earth, who doesn’t dwell in temples or stones.[7] This God is not served by human hands like the gods in the temples --- and the gods in our kitchens or offices --- who require constant maintenance. God is the One who “give to all mortals’ life and breathe in all things.”[8] This is the God who created humanity and the nations and God did it “so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him — though he is indeed not far from each one of us.”[9]
Paul even quotes from a local poet in order to show his listeners the truth about the God they don’t yet know.[10] “For we too are his offspring” and since God is a living God, God is not the kind of god that can be characterized by materials crafted by human hands, no matter how artistic.[11] This God, Paul says, sees all the intellectual capital of culture as “ignorance.” Ignorance not from stupidity however; rather it is an unawareness that God has been working from the beginning --- a plan that doesn’t culminate in humans creating gods but in God becoming human. “And of this he has given assurance to all,” Paul says, “by raising him from the dead.”[12]
What Paul does here is increasingly narrow the focus from creation to global humanity to Jesus. Paul speaks about essential aspects of belief in Christ without embellishing through rose-tinted glasses, or as you may have noticed particular cultural lenses and without using scare tactics.
Rather, when we encounter the story of what God of creation has done for all humanity in Jesus Christ, it puts our gods into perspective. We recognize how they fail us and how they are really a mask for covering our fear. So, it’s little wonder that the listeners remained with Paul until Paul’s mention of resurrection which then prompted some to scoff and others to want to hear more.[13] Then as today, it is the trust in the resurrection that is a stumbling block for many.
Being blessed as an expat, coming from different perspectives on life gave Paul the language of humility, respect and awareness for the people he met. We are all blessed to live at this place, in this nation, at this time in history. And this nation like any other has a pantheon of idols, old and news, with a people like us ready to hear a powerful story that can ring true to their human experience. As expats, or with a global perspective, walking in the guidance of the Holy Spirit we are uniquely placed to speak with knowledge, humility and respect. Paul felt compelled to tell his story as honestly and earnestly he could, with sensitivity similar to our own, knowing that those who have ears to hear will hear. It is a blessing to be an expat. Amen.
[1] v. 16
[2] v. 18
[3] vv. 19-20
[4] v. 23
[5] v. 23
[6] v. 23
[7] v. 24
[8] v. 25
[9] vv. 26-27
[10] Epimenides
[11] v. 28-29
[12] vv. 30-31
[13] v. 32
