The First Lesson
Acts 17:22-31
Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,
‘For we too are his offspring.’
Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”
_ ---———---———---———---———---———--- _
What always jumps out at me in this is the results of Paul attempting to be wise among the wise. There are many letters written by Paul, at the very least attributed to his hand, that made it into the New Testament. But among all these epistles, the one that is absent is the Epistle to the Athenians. I cannot help but think here Paul forgot humility. The wise man, instructed in wisdom from his youth, leaned for a moment on his own wisdom, and his efforts gained no fruit.
And yet there are wonderful bits of truth and wisdom in here that we all should embrace. The God of the Church is not a God of distance who is unknown. The face of Jesus shows us a God who longs to be close, to be intimately involved in the daily lives of the people made by the hand of God and in the image of God. This is a God who desires to give us abundant blessings and mercies. All this is rooted in love. None of it is by chance. These are not random acts. God is in our midst, giving us everything that we need to live, and then giving us even more, that we might delight in the graciousness of our God whose abundance is almost beyond words and comprehension. Some days it likely is truly beyond those limits!
Father Tim+
No comments:
Post a Comment