I wonder what is the greatest city you’ve visited? In our modern world, there are many such cities. I myself have lived most of my life in London, and I’ve been fortunate to visit some of the other great cities of the world.
In today’s passage, we find St. Paul in Athens: at the time the second greatest city on earth behind Rome, and unquestionably its greatest in terms of learning and culture. But I’m fascinated by Paul’s response to this experience: what he saw, what he did and what he felt. What Paul saw was not a city full of extraordinary buildings and unparalleled learning, but a city full of idols. What he felt was not awe at its grandeur, but distress at its spiritual ignorance. What he did was dedicate himself to sharing the good news of Jesus.
Paul saw through Athens’ impressive facade to its real heart: idolatrous and looking for wisdom in the wrong places. We human beings tend to create god or gods in our image, not the other way round – and St Paul is having none of it. His God, our God, the one true God, is not like this. He’s not small or only concerned with a part of our lives. Notice how he begins the key section of his sermon: ‘The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth.’ Our God is a great big God – he made the whole world, the whole universe is suffused with his presence.
And notice the three radical implications of this statement which immediately follow: first, ‘God does not live in temples built by human hands.’ How could he? How could any building be big enough to house this God? We humans have certainly tried, and who can fail to be awe-inspired by some of those buildings? But God is bigger than all of them; he’s not limited to certain places on earth or in our lives. There is no place on earth where Jesus can’t say: ‘This is mine.’
Second, God doesn’t need anything. Or as Paul says: ‘He is not served by human hands.’ He doesn’t need our libations or rituals to appease him or impress him. He is complete and whole within himself. We do all that stuff to try and make ourselves feel better, not God. And third, it is this God whose breath fills our lives: ‘He gives everyone life and breath and everything else.’
The true God is not limited to certain places or rituals or buildings, to certain boxes and compartments in our lives. He fills the whole universe, and all of our lives matter to him – every breath, every thought, everything that matters to us matters to Him as well. Or as Paul summarises beautifully later in his speech: ‘In him we live and move and have our being.’
Imagine a life where every moment is filled with God’s presence. We can bring every worry to him, we can cry every tear with him, we can share every joy with him, we can celebrate every blessing knowing that he is smiling with us. This is not fiction or pie in the sky: it is the reality of what Jesus came to bring us. God’s Spirit – in other words his very breath, his presence – comes to dwell in us. It is what you might call the with-God life.
And one prayer we can all pray for the church in this nation is that it would rise up again in our generation with this truth etched into every moment of our lives, wherever we are: ‘In him we live and move and have our being.’ Amen.