Revelation 4

An exultant vision of a person who is God (Jesus? The father?). On a throne, surrounded by elders, winged many-eyed creatures, encircled by rainbow over a glassy sea. Gleaming like ruby and Jasper.

Numbers are specific: 24 elders, 4 creatures.

Echoes of Ezekiel and Daniel.

Eternal praise rings out, about God’s permanence and significance as creator of all.

Scene set!

Most of the humans who’ve ever lived heard of some image of a splendid creator God. Bigger than us, before us and after us. Unapproachable.

The vision is weird but familiar, pretty much an inevitable consequence of our humanity. The heavens tell the glory of God. It’s hard not to speculate about something bigger and beyond the heavens. Something that ordered them.

We waved goodbye to Ren for 3 weeks holiday in New Zealand with friends. He’ll have a great time. I was coming down with ‘flu and not feeling very positive. My heart ached somehow for my kids. I feel I’ve let them all down. But I have a general sense of being overwhelmed today because of the flu.

Three days off, kind of. We have a party on Saturday, up the central coast going over into Sunday. Then Monday we always have off now, though we have a counselling session at 9:30 in Wollongong. Not with daisy, just myself and Kelly.

The grand vision of God seems quite distant from my concerns and plans, but I think it’s supposed to. We’re scene setting for now.

I’ve been looking forward to revelation, but right now I feel like I’m dragging myself through it.

My song about Ezekiel has a chorus text addressed to God “be with me, be near me, be in me, now.” That’s my prayer today. I want god to come close.

1 Peter 3

Here there is a string of positive characteristics that complement negative sins we were told to avoid in the last chapter:

be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble. Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult.

v8-9

I was moved to tears just then reading about the vigils for Cassius Turvey, an Aboriginal boy who died after a 21 year old Anglo guy whacked him with a steel bar while he was walking home from school. The vigils were full of focus on the 15 years he lived, the importance of loving and protecting your kids.

They were cathartic outpourings of grief by a community that knows too much of it. This death confronts and symbolises the racism and injustice that’s part of all Aboriginal people’s experience. The vigils were obviously carefully and artfully designed to fully celebrate his life and be comforting for a fearfully shocked community. His mum’s statements were full of grace and calls to avoid violence in the wake of such casual violence towards her son.

Peter would have recognised the grace. He doubles down on the passive gentleness, especially in response to hatred, that he talked about in the last chapter. How much he has changed from the loud mouth, speak-first-think-second, born leader.

This chapter contains the call to be ready to explain our faith that has been oft quoted to me over the years “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have”

But in context it’s almost a concession… To paraphrase: “Well ok, you can be ready to give an account of your faith, but be respectful above all, and make sure your conscience is clear, and you are unfailingly good. Words must only ever follow example”

Then Peter has an odd passage about Jesus post ascension ministering to souls imprisoned since the time of Noah when only eight people were saved in the ark, a template of baptism. Which is like woah,woah, what???

But I think I took from the flow of it that he is saying God really doesn’t need a helping hand with the god stuff. He’s onto his mission in ways we can’t imagine. God needs us to work on our sin, our character, not to find a sin-filled earth-bound ego driven way to advance what we understand as His mission and priorities.

Doubling down on being like minded, sympathetic, loving, compassionate and humble. And Peter, who took the rebuke from Jesus of being satan when he wanted to organise booths for Moses, Elijah and Jesus on the mount of transfiguration at the start of the road to calvary… Peter ought to know about doing it God’s way: like-minded, sympathetic, loving, compassionate and humble.

New shift today, they have increased the number of hours I do in a week, which could suit me in the run up to Christmas. The guy sounds a little scary.

Hebrews 7

We need to kill our love of human systems.

We can point to the societal influence of concepts of God, and particularly Christian concepts… The dignity of the individual, means-don’t-justify-the-ends etc. God’s systems, Jesus’system are better than human ones.. Ours are always, despite best intentions, eventually tainted by greed, selfishness, callousness etc.

We can point to that, but our bedazzlment by human systems won’t die, it’s a lifelong effort to let them go. For us, for me because I know it, to trust wholly on Jesus’ name.

For the Hebrews, in this chapter, it’s letting go of the temple, the priesthood, sacrifices, etc. All flawed, all human rituals for earning God’s grace, for being seen as spotless.

Jesus being of the order of Melchizedek means he’s the only priest needed… he doesn’t die. And he doesn’t keep doing sacrifices…. his sinless death is once for all. It’s a huge chunk of Christian theology stated concisely and memorably here. I’ve heard some of these phrases literally 1000s of times in the Anglican communion service.

The author has been weaving this exultant vision of Jesus in with warnings about falling away and the metaphor of not staying on theological milk but moving to solid food.

As I mentioned yesterday, I always assumed this Christian maturity was about leveling up the complexity. “Solid food” referred to theological-college level teaching: looking at the original Greek and being able to pronounce “melchizedek” without hesitating.

But now I’m thinking it’s more about not going backwards, purely temporal. Fighting the tendency, as Jesus was saying in the parable of the sower, for weeds to strangle or shallow soil to starve our initial perspective on the wonder of Jesus, the humble beauty of accepting God’s love.

Keeping the wonder, letting go those human systems!

Fear of the new and disregard for the old can be very human filters. I worry that the split in the Anglican church will entrench even further a denial of the human fears or disrespect we can bring to our readings of scripture.

I’m praying for more energy to attend to my own health, and the family. I’ve got checks I should do on various parts of my body… Eyes, bowel, brain, heart, knees, feet; for starters. Also: I’m doing all this paid caring for others. There’s a risk I’ll be too burnt out to care for my own.

1 Timothy 5

This chapter has the stuff I hoped would be in the letters to Timothy. A more intimate look into St Paul’s mind because it’s leader to leader, not to the whole church.

I think Paul’s practical leadership tips come from an understanding that, on a human level, churches can’t work. We pray “Father may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” knowing that we are by definition a group of people not up to that task. We are like a bunch of alchemists forever praying to make gold from lead. We’re calling on the magic of god’s spirit of course, and it had better be real, because it’s the only way it’s going to happen.

Paul will no doubt return to that key ingredient, but doesn’t mention the Spirit here. He packs this chapter with practical group psychology. It’s all about organising around Timothy’s weaknesses and everyone else’s. Some of it reads a bit strangely today, but it’s all very culturally specific so it’s not fair to read it too wokely.

They run a welfare safety net for older widows. It’s a scheme that displays the deep scriptural theology of the soul, of human value, in striking contrast to their harsh patriarchal Greek society. But Paul is aware that any welfare system is rife for exploitation, so there’s also a lot of knowing detail about that

Then there’s the delicate issue of Timothy, an unattached young man, being pastor to unattached young women. I’ve been in churches where they give up on men having to control their hormones around women, and have single sex small teaching groups. but I prefer Paul’s advice to Timothy to think of the young women his age as people, as sisters, and take responsibility for self control of his sexual chemistry. It’s not impossible!

And again it’s a reflection of that deeper theology of humanity that Paul expressed as “in Christ there is no male or female”. It is probably quite counter-cultural in Ephesus, which was a bit of a dating town because of the Diana/Artimesis temple and festivals… (Think Cancun or Ibiza, or Tinder as a town).

I liked the tricky dance Paul told Timothy to do, of deference to elders, because he is unusually young, but also occasionally needing to call them out, because he is a leader. Love among flawed people is complex, there aren’t neat prescriptions.

I was also struck by Paul advising Timothy to drink a bit of wine for his chronic stomach issues. The church environment can lead to expectations that faithful servants should absorb health issues because we serve a higher power… I’ve seen it. But Paul is thinking about Timothy holistically. I can’t comment on the medical worth of his advice, but I admire his heart.

I had a train of thought about church membership and charity as I read it. Salvos, who I have so much time for, run with the charity idea, but you don’t have to connect with Christianity to get it, or to work for them in their centres. They partner with government, so they can be part of community relief, surrendering the right to preach while they do it. That isn’t the model here. Though maybe it is closer than it seems, in context, because surely some people would have engaged with the church primarily because of the widow welfare program, for example. It would have been a draw card.

That dynamic reminded me of unchurched families who want a church wedding or funeral, and the different responses clergy have about requiring some degree of interaction with Christianity.

It also raises the difficult issue of judgement and Judgement, that is, the human judgement required to practically navigate challenging church situations, which needs to be kept distinct from God’s Judgement, the outpouring of his wrath against human sin and evil, but sometimes gets terribly muddled.

Paul has a good bit about being alert to people’s good and bad deeds over time, even though they might not always be immediately apparent. But I’m pretty sure his purpose is to practically determine who to trust and how far to trust them in a community setting; not who is in or out, who is going to heaven or not!

I’ll return to all that another day I think. For now, is just interesting to see very familiar practical issues being handled in pragmatic ways. Everything isn’t spiritualised by Paul, he’s about making it work so that the spirit is as unconstrained as possible by the predictable foibles of human nature.

Back at work this week, back into the same old problems. The interest from the headhunter for the comms job I was hoping for has gone quiet, so I need to look again at other possibilities. I have clarity: once more into the breach I go!

Reading Timothy is making me take my responsibility to my local church more seriously.

Galations 4

Ooops, I overlooked the last bit of chapter three “in Christ there is no slave or free, male or female Jew or gentile”. Absolute classic! I had actually toyed with the idea of saying how Paul’s vision for the church is so inclusive. He got there too! (my eyes just skipped over it)

It’s an irony that these passages that fuelled the reformation, and are so important to doctrinal purists, are also so broad and inclusive of so much variety, under the umbrella of Christ’s loving grace. I suppose knowing what IS important helps you be brave and bold about what ISN’T.

The temptation towards legalism seems to scratch a deep need we have of pride, and of a sense of being in control, of structure and order.

It links thematically to this chapter. At the end of 3 Paul concluded that in Christ there is no slave or free.  This chapter asks why you would then voluntarily revert to the slavery which is legalism.

Is this a problem for me? Would I get trapped in legalism/slavery?

Part of us rebels against living by faith. It’s drummed into us all our lives, the virtue of self reliance, standing in your own two feet. But here Paul is excited about acknowledging we are god’s children, heirs, getting it all by birthright.

Equally many people’s identity comes from their marginalisation, their victimhood. I’m not sure how, or if, being god’s heirs, undoes that. It should bring comfort. But perhaps somehow the threat of being told you are worthy of love implies letting go of an identity, that of being someone defined by fighting a judgement of unworthiness.

I can relate to a bit of both, self reliance and victimhood. They both have pride in common? Perhaps these are the kinds of slavery I’m tempted to revert to.

Paul’s theology must have been startling. He’s still delivering shock treatment here I think.

From the O.T. if you know one thing about Abraham it’s that his child with Sarah, his wife, founded the Jewish nation. His child with Hagar, his slave, founded another, non-chosen nation. I think traditionally it’s where the Jewish and Arab/Muslim lines sort of separated.

But here Paul says continuing to trust in worship at the defunct literal temple in Jerusalem, continuing the Jewish faith, is slavery – being a child of Hagar. Being god’s children though Christ puts us in the line of Sarah. It’s wildly offensive to traditional Judaism.

He also picks up an odd verse from Isaiah, which says that desolate women, the women of exile, will have more children than those with husbands. It’s another startling way of saying that the covenant promise to Abraham of “many children” refers to the great unwashed covered by Christ, not just those of the chosen nation, Israel.

It’s all spiritual, not literal. Judaism is still a rich religious culture perhaps, but its observance is not a way to God of itself.

I was struck again by Paul’s personal connection to, and heartache for, these people. He breaks off his detailed theological demolition of their errors to remember how kind they were to him when they first met. He was sick and they cared for him, he still loves them deeply.

He’s genuinely perplexed that they’ve strayed from what they were so excited about, and he’s frustrated that he has to write and can’t just come to them.

It’s a deeply compassionate and personalised theology lesson, in the context of a respectful and loving relationship where he is also in their debt. These letters paint that scenario again and again.

I’m the beneficiary of most of his iconoclastic insights. A gentile, part of Hagar’s extended earthly mob, child of the desolate mother. 

I still have a sense of waiting for what God’s Spirit wants to say to me here. I’m circling around some of the questions I raised in the first chapter. I despaired then that I don’t have the character of a prostheletiser. But Paul hasn’t remotely expected anything like that so far. What was that about? It’s sounding like a slavery at this point.

I’m getting a building sense of how living in the Jerusalem above, as Paul describes it, changes your perspective on earth.

Speaking of life on earth, ABC TV are filming our garden for Gardening Australia today. Big day for Kelly, profiling her plant library community project. She really is amazing! We’ve worked hard, but satisfyingly, getting the place, if not pristine, looking like the most presentable version of itself.

I’m looking forward to having some space to catch up with other stuff. Life has felt very much on fast-forward since the end of lockdown. Someone in the internet talked about rebuilding their social stamina. Yes!

Praying for diligence: so many things to get onto! Wisdom as I think about next year, the challenge of global warming, having a first hand experience of how uncaring and unrepresentative Australia’s response is being, and for this powerful book to have more resonance. Am I getting Bible fatigue? Been reading it for years now!

1 Corinthians 15

Paul reminds the Corinthians of the gospel. But as with the rest of the book, it’s not a generic theology lesson, it’s in response to their specific quirks.

They have believers who deny the resurrection from the dead. Paul makes a strong case that the whole faith falls apart if there is no resurrection from the dead. It’s based on Jesus’ resurrection after all. Take it out and we are “most to be pitied”.

Yet I can see how they got there. I have no problems at all believing it. But it doesn’t motivate me that much. And that probably makes me a worse Christian.

I’ve commented before on the term “narrative theology”, which I encountered earlier this year. The phrase summed up something I’ve noticed about the bible: it’s all relationships.

The Muslim faith believes that before the creation of the world, God existed alone. Though we share monotheism with them, we believe God was always in relationship: father, son and spirit. Weird three-in-one monotheism, because love requires relationship.

I appreciate how John calls Jesus the “word”, a good analogy for something that is fully you yet has an existence and an action outside of yourself. When the creator said “let there be light” he wasn’t just talking to himself.

I warmed to how the old testament is full of stories, interactions between God and human. And I expected the new testament to be full of theology, and I wasn’t looking forward especially to Paul.

But we get letters, written into relationships. Full of specific advice, cajoling, arguments, spin and hyperbole. Reminiscences and affection.

It struck me again today because chapter 15 here starts off with Paul saying “here’s the gospel bit” and you think, ok, the theology now. But it’s still all geared to address their issue with resurrection. It’s always personal, never abstract theology in a vacuum, as God is never alone in a vacuum.

To reinforce his point Paul even delivers some terrible muddles that have baffled and misdirected theologians down the years, about baptising on behalf of the dead and Jesus being subordinate to God.

It’s somehow very Western, very Greek, to believe statements of absolute truth can exist outside relationships. Don’t get me started on modernist architecture!

I think this is why Christianity CAN almost function without resurrection. It’s very exciting discovering how your everyday interactions can touch the eternal. And learning how the eternal can also reprioritise your values, deeply satisfies your quest for meaning and purpose in life. Living for others is actually a great way to live. Christians are happier, it’s empirical.

And that process is pretty much the narrative of the bible. Learning that spiritual things are more important than physical. The Jewish people only had a vague idea of heaven.

But not fearing death comforts you more and drives you further. Paul needed it I think.

He talks about the burden of his history here, of being one who persecuted the church. He compensated for the suffering and deaths he was a part of by not caring about his own suffering and death. He gave it to God in how hard and recklessly he drove himself for the gospel. At the extremes, the resurrection is all you have. Like Jonah’s prayer in the fish where he let everything go.

My lightness about it perhaps reflects my privilege, and opens me up to think about what more work I could be doing. A somewhat annoying person I know at the moment describes her job as “activist”. That’s challenging, (but I still think I don’t what to be an activist).

Hmm. I’ll pray for Afghanistan, and maybe get around to writing that form letter to politicians about refugee rules.

1 Corinthians 10

The sense of oneness, the sense of the spiritual issues at play behind our interactions.

How two of the most wonderful things in the universe, love and freedom, can undermine each other

Pandemic lockdown grinds on. I was a bit down the last few days, weighed by a sense of things I’m not getting onto, threads left loose. Anxious.

I’m trying to broaden out my carer work, limit the shifts I do minding the one crazy boy. Finding work for some other people.

Some light there. My first contact, I zoom-called a lovely 24 year old fellow who is two years into being a quadraplegic. We’re working on launching a youtube channel. That was a highlight, for sure.

I feel Rennie is going through a very formative kind of hell, this pandemic has seriously interfered with the last two years of his school career. Currently doing his HSC. He’s having fun making beats, which I’m enjoying. Our connection over music is a bit awkward, because it is also a way for him to have an identity that is separate from me, which I want him to do.

Kelly has had some relief from weirdly sore legs, but she’s so frustrated and bored. I love her so much!

Daisy seems happier, but we only see glimpses of her and she also seems so distant. Pandemic seems to have sealed Daniel as her life partner, which is great in that he’s a very sweet eccentric and reliable fellow and I like him a lot. But it’s a dramatic change and it accelerated so quick. I kind of want her back, and she’s not in our bubble, so the lockdown restrictions are very poignant.

I hurt for Lewes. I’ve wanted to organise an NDIS plan for him for a long time, but I can’t get the process straight in my mind. Do I get a doctor to get a plan, or do I get a plan to get a doctor? I can’t find anyone to give me help and it’s become a thing I put off. Meanwhile he meanders on. He’s lovely, I enjoy my relationship with him very much, but I feel I should give him more hope. 29, deeply dependant on me, I feel that if that I can’t do more for him, who will?

This should be a great time to work on family, but having them all there every day just makes me feel more incapable of connecting in various ways. It throws up the hard bits more insistently without making them any less hard.

So Corinthians? Paul’s returned to unpack the issue of eating food offered to idols in a more profound way. Love should undermine freedom, not the other way around. It’s called sacrifice, it’s what Jesus did.

Paul connects the church to the ancient Israelites. I was startled when he said Christ was there in the desert with Israel as they wandered. Christ was the rock Moses struck and water poured forth. Our oneness with them through time means we still need to listen to their lesson on idolatry, a deft return to his theme.

So a few thousand years in the other direction, am I feeling any oneness with this letter, after all my distractions?

Love is a work. I often wonder what work I will do, but I am a spiritual being, concrete things around me can have spiritual consequences and love is my work. I disconnect into a fantasy world so easily!

1 Corinthians 8

The chapter where Paul answers a question where he’s asked to confirm that Christians can eat food sacrificed to idols.

His answer is about Christianity being love in action. Paul is replying that Christians need to be alert to the loving and spiritual implications of everything they do.

What you eat and where your food comes from has no no particular spiritual significance to God. In a vacuum. But it can have an impact on other Christians, which makes it love business.

Paul contrasts this to knowledge, which puffs up a person… presumably the person who asked the question… But can be a net negative if it expresses itself arrogantly or insensitively, and brings other people down.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this because I’m missing action in my faith.

This interminable lockdown means I can’t see anyone face to face except family and work people. The whole church dimension is missing. The home group, the Friday kids, the people at Sunday church, the wardens, the parish council.

My own mind and my reality are ever present. And tempting. I did an online quiz about autism spectrum the other day. Admittedly it relied on dodgy self reporting, but it did say I was a bit more on the spectrum than most of the community.

Maybe that’s what my mum meant when she called me a dreamer.

At the moment, I’ve been enjoying compiling half an hour of photos and videos to be backgrounds to my album songs, with the idea that it could be used when I launch my album. I love learning the video software, and being lost in memories of my life, and creative endeavour.

I love it so much that I’m sort of finding everything else an interruption. It’s on the verge of becoming a problem.

The irony is that it’ll probably never see the light of day. I tend not to finish these plans because finishing brings me to the reality that I’m largely creating for myself, for a fantasy audience, and I’m kind of embarrassed for actual people I know to see what I have done. If I do go ahead with my album launch, it will just give closure to it, it won’t mean much.

Christianity lives in action, interaction. This chapter makes me feel I’m losing the discipline of forcing myself to care about others.

Paul lightly says at the end that if he felt vegetarianism would preserve the conscience of a fellow believer, he’d never eat meat again.

That’s challenging. I am not that person. It feels like “annoy-ocracy”. Rule by the most annoying people. There’s all this perfectly good food that’s been offered to idols going begging, but we aren’t eating it because Joe is worried about it being temple food. That’s just annoying, isn’t it?

But from where lockdown is leading me, I’m a long way from bending to annoying. I can step up to that. Loving some annoying people, or even slightly different people, means being challenged to step outside your bubble, your own fantasy safe place where you can just be lost in your own thoughts.

Prayer is a great discipline for directing your thoughts to others, even in their absence.

1 Corinthians 7

Marry for sex and love. Don’t feel obliged to marry for appearance’s sake.

Wherever you are, whatever your status, God will understand. God promises there will be a way for you to be a Christian in your situation. You won’t be judged for circumstances outside you.

This passage doesn’t initially read as liberating as that, it takes a bit of context to get there. The emphasis of some of Paul’s typical rhetoric wrongfooted me on the first few reads.

I won’t labor all that journey, but I’ll mention some interesting biographical details about Paul that came up along the way.

He almost certainly was married at some point, because he was a part of the San-Hedrin religious council, and marriage was a requirement. But he was single by the time he was a Christian apostle.

His Jewish culture regarded being married as a civic duty. They virtually suggested being single was murdering your unborn babies, so there was a lot of social pressure for loveless marriages.

It’s against this background that Paul in this chapter delights in being unconventionally single. He makes marriage almost seem second rate. He’s been there, he’s free of it, and he won’t apologize for not doing it again.

And his spin on marriage is not actually that it’s second rate, rather that it exists for the happiness of the participants, not anyone else.

There’s a freedom to it all. He’s liberating both singleness or marriage from stigma, social pressure and moral significance.

And he is scrupulously unsexist about a man and a woman’s needs being equally important.

It challenged me to treat Kelly as well as I treat strangers.

This might seem odd, but a weird outcome of my particular manners is that I try harder to be nice to strangers than people I know well. It’s a trust thing with me to become franker about my selfishness in the context of intimate relationships.

But this passage reminded me that I regularly expect too much of Kelly. That it is OK, in fact even a duty, to care for her more than almost anyone.

And she’s in a bad way. Lockdown has mercilessly disrupted some of the stimulating directions she was cultivating in her life, and now she has a frustrating pain issue in her leg. Saw the doc today, and the doc seemed perplexed and disturbed by it. Not good!

The passage is timely.

It’s essentially 1 Corinthians’ FAQ page. Paul is answering questions. But you kind of have to deduce what the question was, and the issues are deeply enmeshed in their personalities, time and culture.

For example someone has decided to counter sexual immorality by making sex the enemy. They are suggesting that partners in a marriage should avoid it, and that it would be a holy thing if those marriages fell apart, because less sex would be happening.

It’s a pretty crazy question that certainly doesn’t need answering often these days. But Paul’s vision in reply, of marriage as sincere, equal, freely loving, joyous and treasured by Christ, is one for the ages.

He sketches out a similar vision for the dignity that Christ can bring to being single, Jewish or not Jewish, becoming a believer when your partner isn’t, even the evil of slavery, if you are stuck in it.

Christ can transform messy or evil situations with love. God can work with and though sin, there is always a choice to bring grace into your situation and shape it to your cultural background.

But they aren’t promises that life won’t be hard. Seemingly impossibly so.

Like everyone, I’m feeling disturbed and prayerful over the dramatic fall this week of Afghanistan back into the hands of the Taliban. It’s hard to read Paul’s optimism into the seemingly wasted lives and effort of the international forces, and their decision to withdraw. Into the fates of those left behind, particularly women.

All while we cope with this mutating pandemic that keeps killing us, disrupting our economic systems and highlighting the global gaps between rich and poor.

The prayers that my mind forms take the shape of some of the desperate Psalms. How long? Why God why? I come at best to resignation rather than the freedom Paul promises.

But there are still graceful choices around me. I can and will find something to help the world be a more loving and beautiful place, in that name of Christ.

Acts 17

This chapter has Paul’s sermon in Athens. It’s one of my favourite passages.

It also brings back a memory of Billy Graham, who preached on it the night I attended his mission in Sydney in the 70s. It’s vivid, I can hear his intonation.

Paul’s mission journeys are road trips, a venerable genre of story. And road trip stories always deliver vignettes, unconnected except by the narrators who travel through them. So they become a series of mini stories about the human condition, linked by the spiritual journey of the protagonists.

Paul bucked the genre I suppose by having his catharsis at the start of his journey.

The Jews in Thessalonica who agitate against Paul are described as jealous. In Berea, they are described as more noble, because they are open to sincere exchange of ideas, to reading the scriptures and listening to God.

Paul is a man obsessed with his excitement over the gospel. When he arrives in Athens he is distressed by all the idols. He can’t live and let live. But his distress doesn’t play out as attack.

His sermon is beautifully empathetic communication, starting where they are, and emphasising concepts they will understand. I love it because it resonates as my culture. Ancient Greek society, cradle of western thought, and all that.

After years of reading about Jewish culture, suddenly we are in my own, and seeing how the message of the living God, and “the way” of Jesus, builds on it. It is the coming of the light to my tradition.

There is an irony, which Paul latches onto, that a society addicted to ideas winds up with a city jam packed with idols. If humans could explain their condition with ideas alone, I suppose they wouldn’t resort to the carving tools to create an image of a God outside of themselves.

Both ideas and idols come from human creativity, but one has the honesty (humility?) to be open to a spiritual or supernatural element to life that is more than the sum of observable experience.

Paul exploits the logical contradiction that the creator can’t also be the created as his ‘in” to talk about the living God, and Jesus as the way.

I was fascinated by Paul’s line about how idol worship has been, but is no longer, forgivable:

“In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.”

Verse 30

The Jewish people had this message revealed to them since the time of exodus. And their subsequent history shows how difficult this repentance is. Idols are a hard habit to break.

For my culture, ignorance arguably ended in this moment. Or did it?

What about the towns Paul skipped: in the opening verses they passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia. Not to mention all of Asia. There is still this random element to revelation in the plans of God.

I’m meandering. But it’s because I love it, it sets off fireworks in my synapses.

I love it because Paul convinces me. It’s reassuring.

I even love that the opposition he meets is mere sneering rather than brutal jealousy. Some Greeks draw the line when Paul gets to resurrection from the dead. Easter remains a hard sell to logical westerners, at its core. (But so should be the mystery of eggs, eh?)

And even though St Paul is a very different character from me, much more urgent and confident, I love that it gives me encouragement for my own witness.

When Jesus says “I am the way” it is both absolute and endlessly personal. Followers of the way all find the way from a different starting place; they have their own road trip through the human condition.

And Jesus, always Jesus, meets us in our human condition like the father running though the field to embrace the prodigal son, loving what is noble in our ignorance, loving us through both the dramatic reversals and slow slogs of repentance.

Even someone as timid as me can share that.