In God, We Live and Move and Have our Being

May 14, 2023 • Sixth Sunday of Easter
Reading: Acts 17:22-31 (NRSV)
Rev. Gerald C. Liu, PhD

[You can view the full worship video recording at: https://youtu.be/P-z7ChVjX_c]

Will you pray with me?

O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you in all things and above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Happy Mother’s Day. I’m a dog dad, not a mom. I’ll never be one short of a scientific breakthrough or divine intervention. Neither was Jesus of Nazareth. Yet we’re all children of at least one mother. 

We hold that in common. Some of us are lucky to have two moms or more. We give God thanks for our many mothers, godmothers, grandmothers, great, and even great great grandmothers too, surrogate and adopted mothers and mothers by marriage and partnership and mothers by way of love without any labels. 

Mothers manifest in all kinds of ways. The New York Times had an article this week about “mommunes” groups of moms living together single to split bills and collectively raise kids. Dwight was telling me the other day about grieving the loss of his church mother. The gospel passage from the lectionary or calendar of verses for today comes from John 14. There Jesus advises us not to let our hearts be troubled. He promises not to leave the hearer of his words orphaned. He is coming. 

The Spirit of God abides with his followers no matter what. Blessed are you who mother and receive motherhood in all kinds of ways. So I want to give a shout-out to my mom and all the mothers and all the children of mom’s in God’s house this morning. 

It’s also important to recognize that some of us desire and dream for motherhood. Others of us view motherhood as perhaps complicating or even standing in the way of dreams. Maybe we’re frightened by it. 

Genetics, infertility, miscarriage, tragedy, estrangement, choices, and the capriciousness of life affect the possibility of motherhood. Whatever we think, feel, and know about motherhood, we are family in this church through Christ.

Later in the gospel of John, just before Jesus died on the cross he indicated to Mary that the unrelated beloved disciple was now Mary’s son and she was his mother. In other words, the highest expression of love in Jesus is realizing we’re all family, and that realization can empower us toward unusual family-making love under any circumstance, even the death of God, the death of Mary’s biological son. 

Mary is a mother to model. And Jesus makes us family this Mother’s Day and every day. So Happy Mother’s Day.

Moms or not, whether we know or get along with our mothers or not, whether we wanted to be moms or have been the world’s greatest moms or are just trying to maintain, we are all not only linked by the fact that we are children of mothers. We are children of God, blessed and loved by God, in whom we live, move, and have our being.

This Mother’s Day Sunday also continues the season of Easter, where we celebrate the resurrection of Christ and the promise of new life it brings. 

So it’s fitting to hear from Acts, an account of the earliest Christian churches figuring out for the first time how to live in resurrection faith. Acts is often romanticized as how churches ought to be. A passage like ours shows Acts was an era filled with turmoil. 

Paul is in Athens. But how he gets there is crazy. At the beginning of Chapter 17, Paul is just released from jail. The super apostle of Jesus is a newly minted ex-con. After getting out, the very first place he visits is a congregation, a Jewish synagogue in Thessalonika, a busy port town, perhaps the second largest city in the Roman Empire. But he doesn’t go there to shape up and sing hymns. He starts an argument as soon as he gets inside. And he keeps it up for 3 weeks. The exchange is so intense it incites a mob. Paul and his associate Silas go into hiding. Paul’s friend Jason gets arrested and freed on bail. Paul is advised to move on to a place called Beroea. The Thessalonians come after him there too. So Paul flees for the coast and ends up in Athens waiting on some backup to take him to the shoreline. 

Athens is the intellectual capital of the Graeco-Roman Empire. It’s like Boston, except instead of Harvard, MIT, Boston College, Berklee School of Music, Boston University, Northeastern, and I know there are too many too name, there was the Parthenon and the Acropolis. “Acro” from the Greek Acron, meaning highest point, and “polis” city. The highest city. Parthenon, the temple of Athens means “maiden girl” or “virgin” or “unmarried woman” and in the 6th century became dedicated as a church honoring the Virgin Mary. Athens is also like New York, because it is not only the intellectual capital of the Graeco-Roman Empire. It is THE most important city.

In our passage from Acts, Paul is in a synagogue again, deeply distressed and arguing against the rampant idol worship of Athens. The Stoic and Epicurean philosophers think he is out of his mind, calling him a babbler. A “spermalogos” to be precise. Sperma where we get the word it sounds like. It means seed in Greek and logos from word or to speak, lego. Paul was spreading news about a God they could hardly imagine. Paul stood defiant in front of an outer rock of the Acropolis, the Areopagus, a kind of gathering place for ruling councils of Athens. He proclaims that God is not unknown against the Athenians. God is knowable, but not by what we come up with in our heads or make with our hands. God lives and breathes life in us, granting divine life, love, and purpose that we are called to share with each other and the world. 

As Paul puts it, “In him, we live and move and have our being.” Scholars see his turn of phrase echoing 6th-century BCE Epimenides of Crete.

Acts does note a resonance with Athenian poetry in the next verse that “we too are God’s offspring.”  Stoic Aratus from the 3rd-century BCE is the likely reference. God’s offspring. It sounds nice but is it real?

Doesn’t it seem instead as if we live, move, and have our being in late capitalism rather than Christ? Aren’t we actually heirs of White Supremacy? Even the church, even our own United Methodist Church, even Church of the Village is complicit. And here I mean more than the obvious fact of white pastoral leadership. I mean something broad and particular. What does it mean to live and move and be in God, to be God’s offspring, and not just endure the way things are?

It’s Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month and Jewish American Heritage Month. I’m not Jewish, but my copilot is a Jewish carpenter and I’m Asian. And one of the last times my mother was in this church was another occasion when I was invited to preach. Another woman of color sitting beside her leaned over and whispered with amazement and as a compliment, ‘My! your son speaks such good English!’ Village family in Christ, racism, prejudice, and bias show up in 365 degrees, laughable and lethal. The inescapability of it all – it’s even in Church, a church where I’m a Minister in Residence – makes us, makes me, want to give up. 

Terry Gross recently interviewed Clancy Martin, a Canadian philosopher based at the University of Missouri Kansas City about his book, How Not to Kill Yourself. The title aims to do just what it says. 

Martin shares with Gross that suicidal ideation might presume that self annihilation will end suffering, that somehow death will offer escape from the pain of this life. But the fact of the matter is we just don’t know what comes after death. 

Instead of suicidal ideation, Martin suggests thinking in a less aggressive way, not seeing things “bivalently” - right and wrong, black and white, fight or flight, disaster or thriving.” We must try to accept a little more. The future is not in our control. The past is behind us. Hopelessness doesn’t help. Death isn’t a simple solution. 

Martin acknowledges being gentle with ourselves takes practice. Suicidal ideation can come and go. It did for him and thankfully he remains in a better place. Yet even if we feel unworthy of self-care, he suggests tapping into the belief and truth that caring for ourselves enables us to care for others. We keep living for those who need us in our lives, like good mothers do. And he insists there is someone who always needs us. 

Bringing Martin’s logic alongside the apostle Paul, God needs us, a God who lives after death needs and wants us to live.   

So we can’t surrender our existence. We can’t give up. But we do have to let go. As a church, we have to ‘let go and let God’ as the old cliché goes. 

Even Martin recommends prayer. 

He quotes a Tibetan-Buddhist prayer he reads every day  - “May we be victorious over all our fears. May we be happy without hope. May we genuinely be of benefit to all sentient beings.” Martin’s favorite prayer kinda sounds like the Athenian altar inscription ‘to an unknown God.’ But maybe another way of engaging it Village People is to see that if we live and move and have our being in God, God is with us whether we feel happy or not, whether we feel hope or not, whether we are fearless or scared to death, whether we win or lose, and whether we manage to help anyone, ourselves or not much at all. 

No matter what happens, whether we got this or not, whether we are mothers in the traditional or radical sense or not at all, God has us. Paul was put in jail, beaten, and probably died a martyr’s death. His own people, the Jews, rejected him. The Gentiles, the Greeks whom he sought to persuade to come to faith in Jesus, made his life hell. He lived and died under Graeco-Roman Empire. And yet, knowing the difference between an idol and the real God, and trusting that the object of real faith is not what we come up with in our heads or fashion with our hands was enough to keep him going. In other words, he didn’t give up.

In fact it transformed him into an unflappable evangelist and an author to whom over half of the New Testament is attributed.  

We do not have to become the apostle Paul to be transformed by Jesus. We may not even want to. His writings are patriarchal, confound moral imperatives of Church of the Village, and fuel disagreements splitting United Methodism. In short, Paul is flawed and problematic. And yet paradoxically, we too can utterly fail and still be transformed by Jesus. Maybe everything I’ve preached today will fall on the floor.

The living Christ gave Paul all that he needed to keep going even when it looked as if he was just some jailbird cult leader getting chased out of every town he visited. That same Christ comes to us now offering healing and salvation in unlimited ways. We even get to embody Christ. Paul says as much in 1 Corinthians 12. 

Some of us have had Pauline experiences of our own, crazy life journeys, with our mothers, without our mothers, as mothers or without any reference to motherhood at all. Still, in all of that we are saved and are known by God together. We know God because we too are God’s offspring. God is not who we make. God is who made us to live as family in Christ bearing the responsibility of spreading the good news inspired by the Holy Spirit, no matter what. Thanks be to God. 

Amen.

Copyright (c) 2023 - Gerald C. Liu
All rights reserved.