Acts 17:16-34 page 1

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It was the middle of summer in England, and it was cricketing weather: cold and wet. I was at the airport and had dressed for the English weather. July it might have been, but I needed a jumper and a warm coat.

I boarded my plane for my holiday without mishap, and at the other end found the bus laid on by the holiday company. Still wearing my jumper and overcoat, however, I looked rather foolish: I had landed at Thessaloniki airport in Greece. The right clothes for England were the wrong clothes for Greece.

In our reading Paul finds himself in ancient Greece. And there is a sense in which he needs a change of clothes, too. Not outer material garments but the clothes in which he dresses the Gospel of Jesus Christ. His sharing of the Gospel in this passage is vastly different from other areas where he could begin in the Jewish synagogue with people who had some of the same convictions and beliefs about God as he had. In Athens, however, it's completely different and he has to change clothes.

I believe that is what the Christian Church needs to do in the West today. We have moved from generations whose views of life and death were broadly related to a Christian understanding to generations who don't know it at all.

I read this description by a hospice chaplain just the other day:

I have ... noticed a marked difference between the faith of people born before the end of the 1950s and those born later. Older people have grown up with a sense of God and Jesus, in traditional Christian terms. Their 'default belief' about dying is that we go to heaven, to the Lord, to Jesus. Younger people have grown up with a much vaguer sense of the spiritual. Their 'default belief' is that we become a spirit in the sky, in the birds, not really 'gone' but still around in a 'spiritual' way. Connecting with older people ...  is easier than with younger generations.
[Roger Harper, 'Terminal Care', Christianity magazine, October 2005, p15.]

As church we haven't adjusted. It's as if we are wearing the wrong clothes. I am not saying we should take on board the new and different convictions of today's generations, but I am saying it is no use reaching out to them as if they have the beliefs and values of older generations. Just as Paul didn't start arguing from the Jewish Scriptures to prove that Jesus was the promised Messiah with the Athenians, so we need to find new ways and attitudes to share Jesus in the very different culture we are now in.

Today I want us to look at some of the ways in which Paul took a different approach in Athens from elsewhere, and see what they might say to us in our day.

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Copyright © David D Faulkner, 2006 except where other sources are attributed or noted as inspiration.