Uncommon Ground (sermon, May 29, 2011)

Acts 17:22-31

A few weeks before Easter this year, a church in California paid $5,000 to run a 30-second ad in a local movie theater. But after previewing the commercial, the theater refused to run the ad and returned the church’s money. The ad, they claimed, was too controversial...because it mentioned Jesus.

The senior pastor of the church said, “They told us the ad looked great, it looked nice. It’s just that we couldn’t put the name of Jesus in the ad.”

The agency for the theater claimed that some of their constituents might be offended. It gave the church the opportunity to revise the ad to meet the theaters guidelines, but the church declined.

“We were told we could promote our Easter services with a commercial that featured the date, time, and place [of the service] with some fun bunnies and eggs thrown in,” said the pastor. (1)

Apparently, Jesus, a man whose life of love led to the cross, a man who came back from the dead, isn’t something everyone can relate to. The folks who owned that movie theater were afraid that the life, death, and especially the resurrection of Jesus were just too controversial.

If someone took a stroll through our city or our church or -- God forbid! -- our houses, what would these places reveal about our fears? Locked doors reveal our fear of strangers and theft. Hospitals and first aid kits and medicine cabinets and hand sanitizer everywhere reveal our fear of injury and illness. Banks and offering plates and retirement accounts reveal our fear of poverty and not having enough. Grocery stores and pantries and nonperishable foods reveal our fear of hunger. And each one of these things, in one way or another, reveals our fear of death. (2)

From Athens to Akron, things haven’t changed all that much.

Paul looks around Athens, the center of intellectual sophistication, and everywhere he looks he sees signs of people’s fear...which is to say that everywhere he looks he sees idols. The Athenians were so smart that they not only had idols to all the known Greek and Roman gods, they even had an altar to “an unknown god” -- covering their bases, as it were, just in case there was a god they hadn’t heard of who might protect them or reward them for their reverence.

The reason people have always fashioned idols is fear. To be human in any time, in any place, is to be afraid. In ancient times, religious practices were fairly straightforward: gods controlled everything, and if you made the right sacrifice of animals or money or worship then the drought would end, the harvest would be abundant, sickness would be held at bay. People turned to gods for protection and prosperity, hoping that if they did the right things then the things they feared -- and have we not always feared death most of all? -- would not come to pass.

Jen Lee grew up in a family that had a deep, abiding faith in two things: Jesus and Mary Kay cosmetics. She was determined to opt out of the Mary Kay part, but at a crucial moment she attended a recruiting meeting and before she knew it, she had signed up to sell the products.

Now Mary Kay has a very effective training program and Jen Lee turned out to be an excellent saleswoman. She perfected the art of what Mary Kay calls “warm chatter.” Here’s how it worked. She would go to her local Target, get a red cart and pretend to be there shopping just like everyone else. Really, though, she was trolling for new customers. When she’d see a woman who looked receptive, she would discretely follow her around the store until they ended up alone together in an aisle. Then Jen would casually say the words she had rehearsed hundreds of times, “Excuse me, can I ask you a quick question? I’m Jen with Mary Kay and we have just came out with a new line of lip gloss and we’re looking for some women to try it out. I happen to have some samples here in my purse. Is there any reason why you wouldn’t want to take one home and try it?”

At the same time Jen was successfully building her Mary Kay career, she and her husband had become involved in a local church, a church that, as she says, “was trying to be really hip and modern.” It met in a strip mall and had a rock band in worship. She and her husband were right in the demographic the church wanted to attract -- twenty-somethings, and they began to be recruited into the church leadership, first onto the leadership team, and then onto the core leadership team.

“I remember my first night at one of these meetings,” she says. “I don’t know exactly what I was expecting but I think I’d always imagined them to be...soulful events and I was really dismayed to discover that it is was this tedious conversation about branding and marketing and what the church’s next advertising campaign would look like. So it didn’t take too long before these two worlds -- the church and Mary Kay -- began to look more and more similar. They both had the lure and Mary Kay was giving out free samples. But at the church we were having free events trying to get people through the door. In both worlds I was being trained all the time to listen to people everywhere I went for whatever was missing or not working in their life and offer what we had as the solution. So, if you needed time or flexibility or money, Mary Kay might be perfect for you. But if you’re struggling with your marriage or you’ve had a recent loss or you’re trying to figure out the meaning of life...maybe Jesus is the answer.” (3)

After a while, Jen Lee ended up very confused. Eventually, she ended her career with Mary Kay and left the church, because she could no longer figure out what was the difference between Mary Kay and Jesus.

Can you?

Paul looks around Athens and he sees everything that he and the Athenians have in common: he sees how religious they are, how dedicated they are to serving the gods they know and even gods they don’t. He sees people desperately serving idols, but also desperately seeking a God completely different from the idols they have created.

And Paul can tell them all about this God, because he has seen him face to face...and in seeing Jesus, Paul indeed faced his greatest fear. The one, true God is not a god like all the other gods, Paul tells them, one who will offer protection and prosperity if they follow the right regimen of worship and sacrifice. This is not a god that needs us, but the creator of heaven and earth. Because the difference between idols and God, the difference between Mary Kay and Jesus is that one needs our devotion to exist and the other created us to be in relationship, a relationship that goes beyond our fears, beyond even death. Paul looks around Athens and he sees people enslaved to gods they don’t know and don’t understand, people searching and groping for the God who, it turns out, “is not far from each one of us.”

What Paul says about the people then in Athens is equally true for those of us today in Akron: we are all searching and groping for God. Sometimes it feels like God is so distant from us that our fears take over. We can’t find God and in our fear, we refuse to trust God, to trust that God is as close to us as our own breath, to trust that God has given us everything we need to thrive, to trust that in our darkest moments God is with us. And when we trade trust for fear, we create idols.

But, as theologian Rolf Jacobsen puts it, an idol is “that thing you think is serving you but is really enslaving you.” (4)

Heather Hendrick recently moved to Haiti with her husband and four children. She works in a medical clinic for Haitian mothers -- those who are pregnant or have newborns. Even more than providing these women and infants with basic medical care, the clinic works hard to educate the women about childbirth and infancy in a country with a high infant mortality rate.

One reason infant mortality is so high in Haiti is that there is a persistent myth there that breastfeeding is bad for babies. Many mothers refuse to feed their babies breastmilk, convinced that if they do so, they will make their babies sick. Of course, formula isn’t always available, so instead they feed these infants soda or other drinks watered down with often-contaminated water. Sometimes they even feed the babies table food. But these foods and drinks lack the nutrients developing babies need, so many of them die.

Hendrick writes that there is an evil lie planted in these mothers’ souls, and this is what it says to them: "[Your milk] is not good enough. You can't trust what God created, what God has planned. God is faithless. Take matters into your own hands." It is this lie, she says, that “causes a Haitian woman to hold her brand new baby far from her breast...risk killing the life that wiggled in her womb...when God was all the while pumping life...rich, abundant life...free of cost...liquid grace through that mother's breast.” (5)

Sometimes when we can’t find God, when we can’t figure out what God is doing, our fear takes over and we come up with our own ways to get the protection and prosperity and spiritual nourishment we crave...we create idols. And far too many of these idols are deadly denials of the very thing God has put right in front of us that could give us life. Instead of alleviating our fears our idols feed them, because without us, our idols could not survive.

Paul knows the difference between Mary Kay and Jesus, and, if we’re honest, so do we. Idols are meaningless without people to believe in them and although they may look and feel comforting they nourish us about as well as watered-down soda nourishes a newborn baby. But Jesus came so that God could be in relationship with each one of us, not a relationship that offers us protection or prosperity -- because nothing can do that. Jesus offers us a relationship that will not avoid our fears but take us right through them, all the way to the cross and on to the other side of death. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. Eryn Sun, “Church Easter Service Ad Pulled for Mention of Jesus,” The Christian Post, March 30, 2011.
2. Quinn G. Caldwell, “Living by the Word,” The Christian Century, May 17, 2011.
3. From The Moth podcast. Listen online here.
4. Rolf Jacobsen, ed. Crazy Talk: A Not-So-Stuffy Dictionary of Theological Terms. Augsburg Fortress, 2008.
5. http://allthingshendrick.blogspot.com/2011/05/lies-as-old-asthat-garden.html