The Objects of our Worship - Acts 17:22-31

Occasionally on display at the Art Institute of Chicago is what I can only call a golden calf. It is ancient, perhaps one of the oldest things in the collection there. If you are imagining a Cecil B DeMille bull staring over people as they dance around it, you will be disappointed should you see it. In fact, it is so small that you might miss it: only two or so inches tall, and it does not look very much like any calf I have ever seen. But it was apparently an object of worship in its day. It had power, or perhaps I should properly say that the people who worshipped it gave it power over them. Now it sometimes sits behind a glass case for the sort of person who is interested in metallurgy or design or history to stop by and examine it.  

Paul, speaking in today’s lesson from the Book of Acts, would not have seen this idol when he took his tour through Athens sometime after Jesus’ death. It was much older than his contemporary Athenian culture, and by his time it had probably been left behind somewhere in a Middle Eastern city, the power it had been given, long gone. 

But traveling tourist that he was, Paul found plenty more things in Athens that were worshipped. In fact, he tells his audience that he has spent time looking carefully at the objects of their worship. We can presume that, at least in part, these were items that his audience decided to worship because of the power that generations of people had given them, just like the power that had once been given to that tiny golden calf.  

Let’s not assume that Paul’s speech got into holy scripture because he was speaking simply of gold or silver or carved marble to first century Athenians. I say such a thing because, as I continue to remind myself and anyone who will listen, holy scripture is still with us because the story it tells is just as relevant today as it was when first told around an evening fire or in a room of frightened followers of Jesus or written down on papyrus so that the story and its implications would not be forgotten. 

The initially uncomfortable news is that as we listen to this piece of scripture, Paul is talking to us as surely as he was talking to the Athenians, telling us that he has been looking carefully at the objects of our worship. We don’t carve much marble these days, and there are not too many goldsmiths around, but we still have so many objects of worship, items to which we have given power to control our lives. Paul would likely see silver and gold and marble replaced, for example, by a stock market chyron running across the bottom of a TV screen or our membership cards in political parties or social causes to which we subscribe, or a signed discriminatory piece of legislation held high in pride for all to see. They are but three examples of how tribalism and our quest for personal advantage replace respect, let alone concern or love, for others. We love our idols, which come in so many forms. I remain fascinated by a comment made by Alex Travelli on a New York Times podcast I heard two weeks ago, in which he said that the economic miracle of China was to turn all its people into low-cost labor. An object of worship that objectifies others. A low-cost labor that enables cheap merchandise for us: Calling it a miracle, of all things. And we dismiss as primitive people who may have once danced around a golden calf. 

Paul knows what we see and worship. As one who had his own history of persecuting others, he knew a thing or two about idolatry that went beyond stone. And deep inside ourselves, we as well know what we worship. We are always attempting to turn dross into gold. We subscribe to an untruthful alchemy  

The gospel addresses this reality as well, when today’s gospel story has Jesus saying that, unfortunately, the world does not see the Spirit of truth. Both lessons start with bad news, but out of that bad news eventually comes good news. Where this good news comes into play is what we in the day-to-day religious world call a metanoia moment, a change-of-heart and change-of-focus moment. Centuries ago, this change was clear in the baptismal liturgy, when the question, “Do you turn to Jesus Christ?” involved physically turning around from facing outside the church door to facing inside. The good news is that what we do here, through open doors and warm hearts and scripture proclaimed and liturgy enacted, helps us start seeing new and different possibilities in the lives we lead.   

The messages of Jesus and Paul start to merge.  Paul tells us that God is as close to us as the lives we lead. We live and move in God, he says. Don’t look for exterior objects to give us meaning. Moth and rust consume. And to boil down what Jesus tells us, it is in effect that when we love, we see God. God is not found in human constructs, as in which political party we support or our desire for personal ease or advancement at the expense of others. Our chosen messiahs will disappoint.  

God—that is, that which is holy—is found in looking in the faces of the people around us and deciding that they will be treated with love and respect, treated as our equals, which is the resurrection message I have tried to come to grips with myself and hopefully proclaim to anyone who will listen for going on thirty-three years now. As Jesus says later in this same gospel, “Do you love me? Then feed my sheep.” There are so many ways, both literally and figuratively, through which we can fill empty stomachs and starving hearts. 

Our call is to stop giving power to that which will disappoint us. Stop following idols. I have not yet fully learned how to do so, and most likely neither have you. It is hard to stop looking at those bright, shiny things with awe. But we will keep looking for the resurrected Christ in the next person we encounter, and the next, and the next, and the next. And then one day, we will discover that idolatry will lose its power; we can put them away in a box just big enough for a tiny, golden calf. Then, we will finally understand why we have clung to resurrection as the central story of this faith we call Christianity. There is no better way to live and by which to get ready to die. Amen.