The Unknown God
It is so lovely to be back with you, thank you Ann for inviting me to preach.
I would like to think for a few minute about 'The unknown God' spoken of in the reading from Acts.
While Paul waited in Athens for Silas and Timothy, he must have explored the city in much the same way in which tourists do today.
Wherever he turned, he must have seen statues, temples, and shrines. And we hear that, 'he was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols.'
However he spotted among all their objects of worship an altar to the unknown god. In addition to the twelve main gods and the innumerable lesser deities, ancient Greeks worshipped a deity they called "Agnostos Theos", the "Unknown god"; there was a temple specifically dedicated to him and very often Athenians would swear by his name. The unknown god was not so much a specific deity, but a placeholder for whatever god or gods actually existed but whose name and nature might have been overlooked.
Paul, who was often pretty abrasive, was quite subtle this time and didn't confront them but rather said to them, 'I see you have an altar to the unknown God - I can tell you about him.'
So he speaks to them about the creator God who made every thing, the God who doesn't live in shrines made by humans and doesn't need anything from humans hands, quite the reverse he it is who gave human beings their life and their breath.
Paul argued that they could not be satisfied with their present knowledge of God for surely they could not really think of God as being like their various idols. After all, he said, if "we are his offspring" and "we live and move and have our being" in him, as your own poets have said, then the Lord of heaven and earth cannot live in shrines or be represented by idols.
Rather he may be known by all people everywhere, for he has equipped people with the means to search for himself in creation, history and human life, and to find him.
Over the centuries, layers of legend, expectation, and even dare I say, magic have built up about God and in our own day some people's belief about God is not so very far from that of the ancient Greeks and their gods.
As well as being the creator of all, God is sometimes envisaged as some sort of potentate who is 'up there' directing operations - deciding who shall live, who shall die, who shall be cured, who not; people say, quite often, I don't know what I have done to deserve this, as though, like the Greeks in Paul's time, we see God as a sort of super human who has the same vindictive thoughts as humans beings but also the power to act on them - if we pause and think for a moment about the God of love shown to us through Jesus we can see that in this idea we have made God in our own image and according to our own limitations.
In a way it is understandable because we can only go as far as our imagination will take us, however it has caused great grief in Christendom and beyond; because not only do we make God in our own image but we want others to worship him too and in the same way that we do.
But God is mystery - the unknown God, no-one has the ultimate answer.
On the other hand, many people look exclusively 'out there' for God, when perhaps they should also look within themselves.
In the passage today Paul speaks of mortals being made to 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'.
And Jesus said, "I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you." (John 14.15-17)
The unknown God, how can we make him known? The mysterious, transcendent God is made known by the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit dwells within us; therefore surely, God is grounded in life and experience, within our life and experience.
Margaret Silf in the introduction to her book "Taste and See, Adventuring into Prayer" says, "For most of my life, I see now with hindsight, there was a large and solid wall, firmly dividing my experience of God from my experience of every-day living... How wrong can you be? I began to find out how wrong I was being when someone did a very simple thing: he very gently removed a brick from my wall.
From then on I couldn't keep God out of my world, my everyday, my business. Nor could I keep my everyday out of God's way. And all my friend did to make the hole was to point out the genuine connection between very specific things that were happening in my life and the strands of my longing and searching for meaning, for truth and for God. He placed these two threads in my hand, side by side, the thread of faith and the thread of life and together we let God begin his weaving."
Perhaps one way to discover God then is to be alert to our experiences, seeing God in all things.
But another way, practised throughout the centuries by ordinary people not just mystics, is to go apart as Jesus did, to be with God in silence to discover the Holy Spirit that 'abides with us and is in us.'
If we seek to find God within ourselves then, paradoxically, we need to lose ourselves in contemplation of God. This doesn't mean that we don't continue to lead busy, full lives but when we go apart to meditate, to pray, we must learn to be still and wait upon the silence. People have experienced through silent meditation a deeper knowledge of God. Not a knowledge that has anything to do with scientific proof or words but a deep intuitive knowledge and a power for living.
Rowan Williams says, "God is first and foremost that depth around all things and beyond all things into which, when I pray, I try to sink. But God is also the activity that comes to me out of that depth, tells me I'm loved, that opens up a future for me, that offers transformations I can't imagine. Very much a mystery, but also very much a presence. Very much a person."
I will end with an invitation or advice written by a previous Archbishop of Canterbury, St Anselm who died in 1109
'Come now,
put aside your busy-ness for a while,
take refuge for a time
from your troublesome thoughts:
throw away your cares,
and let your burdensome worries wait.
Take some time off for God:
rest for awhile in him.
Enter the secret room of your mind,
put out everything except God
and whatever helps you to find him.
Close the door of your mind
and seek God.
Say now to God
with all your heart,
'I seek your face, Lord:
Your face I seek.
Amen.
Revd Patricia Powell