Easter 6 Year A 2026: Acts 17:22-31

Every Memorial Day, it is a tradition in my family to go to the graves of our loved ones. We go as far back as my mother’s great great grandmother who died in 1934. Sometimes as a shorthand we’ll talk about how we’re “visiting” them. Like “let’s start with Aid and Clydia, then go by Grammy Owen and then Howard, etc.” It sounds like in high school when you’re planning your graduation party circuit. The day that Lincoln Memorial got rid of the water spigot that was our landmark to find Grammy Owen was a family crisis. We talk like we’re visiting living people; going to see them. We plan when we’re going to go to Waverly “for Grandpa Hennecke”. But we know they don’t live there. What does live there are our memories. And those names on the stones cause the memories to come back to life. They give us opportunities to talk about the people we still love although we don’t get to see them anymore. About the time my brother played tag in the back yard with our great grandmother who was in her 80’s and told our mother he had to run slow so she could catch him. About my mom’s memories of her mother and uncle together on the piano bench, hearing his booming baritone voice. About my great great grandmother whose preacher husband died while on a revival circuit, and his life insurance enabled her to buy their home, which she operated as a boarding house for Nebraska Wesleyan students. All these stories that I might not have heard if we weren’t there, looking at their names in stone.

In the same way as our loved ones don’t live in those stones, God does not live in shrines made of human hands. God does not live in the altar. In biblical narratives, altars are built at a location where divine-human contact has been, or presumably could be, encountered. They are not habitation places; rather, they provide access to the deity. An altar is the perfect place for Paul to be making this point that we all come from one ancestor. In Luke’s genealogy of Jesus, he tracks Jesus’ ancestry all the way back to Adam - Matthew, who is making a different theological point, only goes as far back as Abraham. Likewise, altars can be traced back in Judaism as far back as the first covenant. Noah constructs an altar in Genesis 8 - it’s the first thing he does upon emptying the ark. That makes them older than Israel itself. The concept of an altar ties the people together almost as much as the simple matter of their humanity.

Paul begins his speech with flattery. “Extremely religious” could be interpreted two ways. It could be pejorative, as in “superstitious”, but since speeches at the time customarily began by praising the audience, it is more likely that it can be taken at face value and as complimentary. Paul will begin another speech in a similar fashion in chapter 26 when he gives his final defense to the king. In chapter 24 Paul’s accuser begins a speech to the governor in the same way, and given the negative descriptions of that governor by ancient historians it suggests that the praise is false in that case. So Paul is buttering up his audience, recognizing the capacity for worship from the people and directing them away from the idolatry of worshiping gods made of human hands and towards the God he knows. Paul does what Episcopal priest and evangelism enthusiast Tricia Lyons encourages when she writes, “We are not mercenaries, who for our own salvation serve the pleasure of God or the purpose of God. We are members of the Triune life of God through Christ with the Holy Spirit in our lives. As we enter conversations with other people, remember that you are not talking about God as if God is some loving person back in your apartment or dorm room, or someone that you might meet if you walk a little further in the dog park. In all the conversations we have with people, we are also joined by God who is already at work in the lives of others.” (What is Evangelism? 52) Paul is speaking of this same God: present and active.

I was at the Mayor’s Interfaith Prayer Breakfast earlier this week where the theme was “who is my neighbor?” And while it is important to have the broad view of everyone in the world being our neighbors, we can sometimes get too broad, too obscure so that it makes it harder to put into practice on the ground. We do the same thing with the reminder that God does not live in a temple built with human hands. We get so broad that we broaden ourselves right out of community with one another. I frequently hear people say some variation of, “I can worship God in the mountains, in my garden, and so on.” And that is true. We can worship God anywhere. But there is more to following Christ than finding joy in God’s creation or being in awe at His majesty. It can also be easier to worship God alone because we then don’t have to deal with one another. But, as difficult as we are, we were made to be together. As the Lord said in Genesis, “it is not good for the man to be alone” - the first thing to be declared not good.

Furthermore, going to church was not what Paul was talking about at all. There was no “come to church” in Christianity at this point in time. Nor was there casual Christianity. Being active in anything that rejected the Roman pantheon and emperor worship was dangerous. Paul is commenting on what he sees in Athens during his travels, as he is evangelizing to pagans. He is saying, “you went to all of this effort to build a shrine to an unknown god; I’m here to tell you about a known God. God who is known to us who transcends this space.” 

The way in which we discern God’s will is in community. There are very few things that happen in a healthy parish that’s due to one person making the whole decision alone. Sometimes the church gets grief for having so many committees but we do so to do our best to discern how the Spirit is moving. If whatever we’re doing is where we’re being called, more than one person should be able to feel that call.

We don’t build our churches, our houses of worship, for God to live in. We know that God doesn’t live here. We build them and come together because this is a place where we have felt God’s presence before - for the same reason we continue to observe the Sacraments, the  rites and rituals where we have experienced God before. We don’t summon God to the altar any more than we summon Him to the church building, we come to this place where we have experienced God before. God has always arrived first and is waiting for us. We come to receive the Sacraments, to remind ourselves of the Sacraments we have received - to strengthen our baptisms. We come to be in community with one another - one cannot be a Christian on their own, alone. To be a Christian is to proclaim the faith to and with others. We promised in our baptismal covenants to remain in Christian community and to observe the sacraments - as the kids sang this morning, “we are the church together”. We have to be here to be the church together, “all who follow Jesus, all around the world. Yes, we’re the church together.” Amen.