How to Tell If Your God Is an Idol
Acts 17:22-28
Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way. 23 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. 24 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, 25 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. 26 From one ancestor[a] he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, 27 so that they would search for God[b] and perhaps fumble about for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. 28 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.’
I wish Paul gave us more of a travel writer’s perspective visiting all the great ancient cities; Jerusalem, Rome, Corinth and now Athens in today’s text. What did it feel like to be in the center of ancient learning and walk where Socrates and Plato spoke? What were people talking about on the Acropolis and in the markets, what were the ancient temples like? I like to feel the essence of a place and a story. When I went to seminary, I would take the train to study at the Widener Library at Harvard, imagining all the former Presidents and Nobel Prize winners who may have sat in the same chairs. I would look at the tables to see if anyone carved “JFK” in them on a day when he was bored. It made my studying feel like an adventure to sit where the greats once sat.
At least Acts throws in one little detail for me to ponder. Someone put up an altar with the inscription “To an Unknown God.” Now what would be the point of that? (Were these early Unitarians?) I wonder what the altar looked like. Was it made of marble, wood or maybe even the ancient equivalent of cardboard? I assume altars were used for animal sacrifice. Were there any blood stains? Did anyone sacrifice to an unknown God? Was anyone reverently standing around it, were there any priests dedicated to it, or was it standing alone and forgotten in the hubbub? Or maybe it was meant as satire, mocking the other temples and gods nearby. Perhaps it was thoughtfully placed there for foreign visitors in case there were no temples dedicated to their gods, so they could still feel reverent in Athens, like an airport chapel?
I try to imagine Paul strolling past the various temples; to Zeus with his thunderbolts, winged-Apollo, Poseidon with his trident mastering the sea. The Greek gods were all portrayed in very human forms or at least idealized human forms. This would have been odd to someone who grew up as a good Jewish boy, like Paul. Remember the 10 Commandments, “Though shalt not make a graven image…” Don’t reduce God to an image you are comfortable with. It turned out badly when Moses’ band made a golden calf. Worshiping an image of God is abomination. Even writing down the name of God goes too far; it lacks reverence and presumes too much. When Moses hears God’s voice from the burning bush, he wants to know God’s name and God will only answer with this existential statement “I AM.” This Hebrew god does not want to be pinned down. This helps us understand Paul’s sermon in Athens where he’s not interested in gods portrayed in stone or gold or silver. He is interested in a burning bush god, a god who struck him blind on the road to Damascus. You don’t make a statue out of gold to that kind of God, but you do have great respect.
Congregationalists and Quakers would understand what Paul is saying here about images of God. They worship in sparse places, avoiding religious symbols that can distract and limit their view of God. A New England Congregational Church is a simple, white wooden building with clear glass windows. The architecture says, “God will be God. Therefore, we will worship humbly with the world in full view.” Quakers take an anti-liturgical view of worship, where nothing at all is recited, there is no bulletin to tell you what is going on, you just come and sit in silence and wait for the inner light of the Spirit to speak to the community. To understand these religious practices, you must know that they saw the church of their day as corrupt, too arrogant, a tool for unjust kings, covering over the real God to mask injustice. So, they broke with much of the old symbols of faith and went back to prohibitions against graven images to try to find the living presence of God once again.
I don’t know why some Athenians put up an altar to an unknown god, but I can respect the humility of it — the admission that perhaps they didn’t have the whole picture. How well does anyone know the god they worship?
When we are young, we have an image of God that maybe blends what our parents are like, with a little bit of Santa Claus, a police officer, and our favorite teacher. God is the old man with a white beard who delivers fairness and consistency. We are not alone in this. We make gods out of capitalism and patriotism, out of political tribes that hold all the truth, out of our need for power and control. These idols are more dangerous than those of silver and gold — because at least you can see those.
The danger isn’t that we love our country, which can be good; or our strong convictions, which are essential. It’s that we stop being able to criticize them. When a nation can do no wrong, when my political tribe holds all the answers, that’s not patriotism or conviction anymore. That’s worship. And like all idolatry, it eventually demands sacrifice from someone — usually the most vulnerable.
On a day when we celebrate mothers and family, it’s worth naming the idols closer to home. When we make an idol out of motherhood itself — out of the impossibly selfless, endlessly patient, always-available mother — we burden real women with an image no one can sustain. The idol demands the impossible, and when reality doesn’t match, we either punish the woman who falls short or pretend we don’t see what we see. That’s what idols do: they demand we look away from the real person standing in front of us, in favor of the image we’ve enshrined.
The ancient Athenians had the honesty to label one of their altars ‘Unknown.’ Most of our idols don’t come with that warning.
As we get older God gets more complicated, because justice and fairness are not delivered with the consistency of what we learned in Sunday School. We pass through Job’s trials, and people either develop a more nuanced view of God or forget the whole thing. When we experience suffering, we feel like we are worshiping an unknown God. People often tell me why they’ve rejected God — I ask them which God they are rejecting, because I may not believe in that God either.
Acts do something surprising here, showing respect for our times of unknowing about the divine. Paul doesn’t chastise the people of Athens, rather he says that God’s plan is that we much search and even grope in dark and unfamiliar places to find the divine presence. But he assures his audience (and us) that God is not far off. Paul quotes a Greek philosopher, “In God we live and move and have our being.”
I love that line. I think of that when I walk through the woods when lilacs are in bloom. Their beauty draws you close, and when you enter its sphere of influence, you smell the scent of pure joy. It is more than just something you smell. It is an embrace that surrounds you. For a moment you live and move and dwell in lilac space.
Perhaps you have similar moments of thin space when the Divine seems nearby. It appears in ocean air, the smell after rain. God is in the very breath of life itself. We just forget until something wakes us up again.
Jeanne and I have wall with a plaque that says, “Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.” We are filling the wall with pictures of those moments. We have a picture of the Hudson River taken from the walkway bridge with the Clearwater sloop in full sail. We can see Mary Oliver’s Black Water Pond in Provincetown full of water lilies across its full surface. We hung a picture of the full moon over the Dom du Medi, to remember Jeanne’s home in the Swiss Alps. What would you put on your wall to remind yourself that life is more than schedules and disappointments and the thousand small anxieties that consume our attention. There are moments when the world suddenly shimmers with the presence of God.
Sometimes God feels unknown to us. Not absent — just larger than our understanding. Paul says we search and grope for the divine, yet all along God is not far away.
And once in a while, Divinity breaks through. A hymn that suddenly reaches the heart. Grace given after failure. A kindness from a stranger.
Light on the water. Tears while receiving communion. Courage to do the next right thing.
And for a moment, the unknown God does not feel so unknown after all. We remember, “In God we live and move and have our being.” We remember; and we belong.
