True Devotion

Devotion can be a demanding experience.  In Ancient Athens, the cityscape itself was a testament to the depth of Greek devotion, with its monumental altars and temples marking the places sacred to the different gods.   At the centre of the city was a colossal temple to Zeus, and over the city towered the Acropolis, that vast complex of shrines surrounding the Parthenon, a temple dedicated to the city’s patron, Athena, goddess of wisdom.   This magnificent display of piety and commitment impressed all who came near; still today it amazes the many tourists who marvel at the scale and beauty of these buildings.   Most of all, though, it was intended to impress the gods themselves, for it was believed that the gods would reward those humans who offered them worship and reverence and sacrifice.  The greater the offering, the more the gods would bestow in return – hence Athens’ great cultural splendour under their goddess Athena.

But whatever the Greek gods made of this grand devotion, it didn’t impress St Paul.  Or, at least, not in the way that a good Athenian citizen might have expected.  When Paul comes before the Areopagus, the Council of leaders in Athens, he is careful to acknowledge the great religiosity of the people around him, but it is not to the famous temples or splendid shrines that he points.  It is instead to one of the small, out of the way altars, one that was dedicated to ‘an unknown god’.  That inscription was rather curious in a culture of religious exchange; how could an unknown god shower you with favours or help you with your problems, and what might they demand in return?   And yet, for Paul this small altar is a clear sign that the Athenian system of worship, for all its grandeur and sophistication, is aware of its own failings.  The people’s desires remain unfulfilled, for they are detached from the true God; they have only fragments and intimations that somehow God is near them.   And so Paul tells them of a God unlike their own, a God who creates and sustains, a God who wants justice and repentance, not sacrifice or wealth.

For Paul has learnt from Jesus and the disciples that the true God is not interested in exchange or negotiation, in rewarding displays of ostentatious piety.  His is a God who gives love and blessing freely, without thought of return, a God whose true nature is revealed in Jesus Christ.  As we hear in our gospel, Jesus explains to his friends what God desires from us as he talks to them in that long discourse, given on the night before his death.  Here Jesus begins not with obedience or offering, but first of all with love, for it is from that love that true relationship will grow.  ‘If you love me,’ he says, ‘you will keep my commandments’; not as the price of earthly protection, but freely and joyfully, through the Spirit of Truth which will abide in you, intimate and permanent.  This is the relationship Jesus goes on to describe as like a vine, where the branches draw their life from the stem, where disciples are drawn into the love and power of God the Holy Trinity.   This is a God who begins not with demands but with gift, and who is served not in giant temples or through slaughtered animals, but freely and in love.

Thinking about these passages, I’ve been discovering the awesome scale of Greek worship and the drama of a cityscape unlike our own.  Zeus’s temple in Athens was over a hundred metres long, with columns over fifty feet high.  Yet the principles behind Greek religion are perhaps all too familiar, structures of exchange and desire for advantage that encourage us to think of our own interests and use others to those ends.   How much of our own lives are shaped by those structures, economic, political, social even, and how easily we too can adopt them as our own, basing relationships on our own benefit, for as long as that lasts.  Even in church and our own spiritual lives we might feel it too, the temptation to insist that God reward our piety and notice our good turns, or to expect praise from others if we help someone out.    If the Greeks organised religion as a transaction, perhaps this is not sign of their distance from us, but of how similar we human beings are.

And yet, as we hear Jesus tell his disciples, the power and the love of God cuts through all those systems of exchange, shattering our human calculations about benefit and advantage.  Soon those disciples will experience for themselves the truth of Jesus’s words, as they witness his death and resurrection, as they come to share in the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.   They find that the Spirit draws them into a community where all are welcome regardless of merit or status, a community held together by the generosity and abundance of that Spirit, an abundance that resists all effort to channel or control it by human hands.  And they find too, that in giving all that they are to the life of this community, they find their own truest desires, their own deepest fulfilment.   They find themselves worshipping not a God who is distant or unknown, but a God who comes to them in spirit and in truth, a God who will abide with them for ever. 

When Paul spoke to the Athenians, he was inviting them into a new relationship with God, one which would not require colossal temples or expensive presents, but repentance and love.  Luke tells us that though some sneered at the message, others listened carefully and would soon be drawn to this Christian way of living.   Athenians would join Thessalonians and Bereans, Corinthians and Ephesians, Jews and Greeks, as they entered the growing community of disciples, a community bound together in faith and hope and through the Holy Spirit.  Of course, these people were far from perfect, and the New Testament letters reveal Paul’s frequent frustration at their all too human squabbles.  Yet the community held, united at a deeper level by the Spirit and a shared recognition that God’s love can never be bought or deserved, but is given as gift.   

In time, of course, those communities would build their large structures, their beautiful churches, the grand religious architecture which surrounds us still.  Yet the Church itself can never be contained in these or defined by these, for at its core is worship which must never be about gaining God’s favour but about acknowledging God’s love and sharing it with each other.   In response to God’s love and to God’s initiative we come here to sing God’s praise, to hear God’s Word, and to share in the sacrament of holy communion.  Together too we welcome Sean and Jocelyn in this moment of their baptism, remembering their preciousness and their uniqueness.  For they, like all God’s people, are invited to a relationship of love that cannot be measured and of grace that flows without end.  And it is through that love, as Jesus tells us, that God will come to us and dwell with us, that we will know that it is in God we have our truest life and being.