When God feels unknown
About once a month, I get together with other local clergy. We talk about all sorts of things, from the silly to the profound.
In this month's meeting, we wound up in a conversation about how best to help people who find themselves in a season when prayer just doesn't seem to work the way it once did. People who say honestly and painfully, "I pray and I don't hear anything. I try to connect with God, but nothing happens."
No one had a great answer.
We said things that are true -- true, but not very satisfying. We said that dry spells in prayer are common. That they happen to faithful people. That there are many ways to pray and sometimes it helps to try a new one. That prayer is still worth doing even when your words feel empty. It's all true. But it's not much help when your own prayers are the ones that seem to go nowhere.
The question stayed with me. What does faith offer when God feels far away, unknown, even unknowable?
In this week's readings, we meet St. Paul in Athens, one of the great cities of the ancient world. Its political power is waning, but it's still the city of Socrates and Plato, steeped in philosophy, art, religion, and public life.
Paul is a faithful Jew, and the temples that fill the city upset him because they honor gods he sees as idols. But he doesn't run from his discomfort. Instead, he looks, he listens, he goes to the synagogue and to the marketplace. He talks with everyone he meets.
Among those he encounters are Epicurian and Stoic philosophers, people trained to think deeply about God, about gods and the shape of reality. Some believe the gods were distant and uninvolved. Others believed the universe was ordered by divine reason, by logos, a rational principle woven through all things. They weren't Christians, but many of their ideas would later shape Christian theology.
Paul is an outsider in a city wary of strange new teachings and of foreign gods. The people he meets ask him to give a public account of himself, and so he does. But notice where he begins. He doesn't start with Genesis or Jerusalem or even with Jesus. He begins with Athens and the things he's seen there.
"Athenians," he says, "I see how extremely religious you are in every way. 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."
He doesn't list all the ways they're wrong. He doesn't loudly condemn idolatry and polytheism. He begins with an object in their own city, an altar, a sign of devotion and a sign of humility. An altar to a god they don't know how to name.
What Paul is doing here reminds me of a technique that's used in education for ministry or EFM. EFM is a 4-year program of theological education that some of you may have participated in. We have a group here that's led by Deacon Sandy, who used to serve at St. Paul's and is now in Wamego. Each EFM session ends with a theological reflection. And it often begins with something ordinary, an object, an event, a conversation, something from daily life, maybe a cell phone or a piano or a piece of artwork. You look at it closely. You bring it into conversation with scripture in Christian tradition. And eventually, you end in prayer. The point isn't to force a religious meaning. The point is to notice what's already there. A theological reflection on a pair of glasses might prompt a group to give thanks for the gift of sight and for all the ways we depend on one another for the things we need.
Paul in Athens is doing something very much like theological reflection. He takes an object from the city, an altar to an unknown god, and he lets it become a doorway. He sees in that altar both longing and humility. And through that doorway, he speaks of the God who made the world and everything in it. The God who does not live in shrines made by human hands. The God who gives to all mortals life and breath and all that they have and all that they are.
And then Paul says this, "He is not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being."
I began this sermon with a question about the times when prayer feels empty. Maybe Paul gives us an answer or part of an answer. If Paul is right, whatever our experience of prayer, God is never far away.
The God Paul proclaims isn't one more object inside the world. God isn't a voice to pick out from the noise of the world. God isn't a distant being who may or may not decide to answer us. God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being. God is here now whether we know it in the moment or not.
That's also the promise of today's gospel passage. Jesus is preparing his friends for his absence. He's going away and they're afraid. So he says, "I will not leave you orphaned." He promises that the advocate, the Spirit of truth, will come. And then he says, "On that day, you will know that I am in my father, and you in me, and I in you."
This isn't simply God above us, Christ beside us, but you in me and I in you. We won't always feel this truth. There are seasons when prayer feels alive and seasons when it feels like wasted time. There are times when we pray only out of habit or because we don't know what else to do. But what Jesus promises and what Paul proclaims isn't that we'll always feel God's presence. It's that God is always there, always with us. That we are not orphaned.
So maybe when God feels unknown, we should begin where Paul began: with what's right in front of us. A cup of coffee, a pair of glasses, a hospital room, a hard conversation. walk in the rain. A child asking a question. A silence we don't know how to fill. A grief that's become part of the furniture of our lives. Begin there. Look for God there. Not because there's some secret code to be found in a cup of coffee, but because the whole world is held in God. Because our lives are held in God. Because even our longing for God, even our sense of God's absence may itself be an altar, a holy place in a moment when we don't quite know the name of the one we're reaching for.
Begin with what's right in front of you. You might just find right there the God in whom you already live and move and have your being. Amen.