"You're swimming in it..."
“You’re swimming in it…”
Acts 17:22-29
I love little stories that make me think. Here’s one… It’s short…don’t blink.
There are two young fish, swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys! How’s the water?”
The two young fish swim on for a bit and then, eventually, one of them looks over at the other and asks, “What the heck is water?”
The obvious, but unspoken, answer is, “You’re swimming in it!” What is water? It’s the very thing that you’re immersed in. It’s around you and flows through you. It’s the thing which gives you life and sustains your life. How can you not know what water is?
Of course, we humans forget what we’re swimming in all the time. Today, as we are “swimming” toward July 4th in a village that loves July 4th, as we think about Independence Day, we might ask ourselves, “Well, what is America?” Some who ask that question might want an abstract answer or at least something that sounded like a Wikipedia entry or a chapter from a history book. The much more interesting and honest answer though is that America is hard to define precisely because we are so immersed in it. It is all the crazy arguments, all the moments of collective exasperation, all the news clips that make us shake our heads. It is baseball and apple pie and Chevrolets. It is folks showing up to vote and showing up at a village board meeting and pitching in when volunteers are needed.
Of course, even those suggestions aren’t specific enough to speak about our experience. America, for me, is the national anthem being played at 8:00 a.m. every morning on the base and thinking about young men and women who are being trained, who are probably hungry and a little lonely and a little scared but who are hanging in there. America is both the worst story of what someone did to someone else on the El but it’s also the moment when I am on the train and someone is snoring and the whole car full of people begins to get the giggles. All the obvious differences between us couldn’t stop us from uniting in laughter.
I think this is why the parade matters. What is America? It is the teenagers from North Chicago who have that steel wheel thingy and can ride it right down the street. It is the vets carrying the flag. It is marching bands and girls twirling flags. It is the guy who just thought his car was cool and figured why not join the parade. It is the precision lawn mowing team, walking the razor’s edge between making a point and being offensive. When the fire trucks are blaring their sirens and folks are walking away, you can’t help thinking, “Ya…that’s us.” America? We’re swimming in it…”
It’s possible, of course, to believe that America only shows up in our best moments: the Greatest Generation, rising to the challenge on D-Day; the shared vision of going to the moon and making it there—over fifty years ago; the day after 9-11, when we stood together, just for a little while. Of course, these highlights inspire us and remind us who we can be. However, I believe in an America that is lived 24/7, not necessarily lived well at all times, but a place where were are given freedoms and rights, where we have responsibilities, whether we remember them or not, where we have to get along with one another, whether we like each other or not. These are our constant challenges.
I remember the weirdest 4th of July in my life. I was seventeen and living in Japan. It was a time when I only saw one other American—one time. I woke up on July 4th and realized that this meant nothing to anyone around me. Cognitively, I knew this, of course. Why would they care? Deep down, though, the experience was striking. Up to that point, on July 4th, I had always been swimming in a world where, like the salmon knowing when to swim upstream, everyone just gravitated to the parade route after hanging up their flags. Sometimes, you have to swim in something new to realize what you’ve been swimming in the whole time.
For a while now, I’ve been trying to say to you that we are swimming in the presence of God. This point is even deeper and more heartfelt for me than the meaning of a nation…but there are parallels. It’s very easy to altogether forget this truth or even never realize it at all. It is so possible to think that this truth is only true on specific days or in particular places—that God’s presence is only occasional or only happens on special occasions. It’s also easy to try to limit the truth about God or our nation to the people I like or to the people who belong to the same party as me or to some other configuration of “us” and “them.” If we make the definition of America a partisan issue, America is diminished. If we mold God to our own image and likes, we diminish God.
To put this in a different way, if we limit God’s presence to designated holy places (churches, synagogues, mosques) then we’re missing the point. If we limit God’s presence to obviously holy moments (births and falling in love and other milestone moments), we’re not wrong but we’re missing so many more subtle ways that God is with us. If we limit God’s presence to things that don’t challenge our deepest beliefs—if the only thing God can say to us is, “You’re right again!”—then we’re missing out on the chance to grow, and that’s at least half the fun of living. And, of course, if preachers are the only ones allowed to point at things and say, “Look…there’s God,” we’re all in trouble!
In our text this morning, Paul is essentially trying to make this point to the people of Athens. Athens was one of the world’s most ancient cities. By the time Paul arrived, it had been around for thousands of years. It was the birthplace of democracy. It was a center of learning. People came to do business in Athens from all over the world. An awful lot of what was and still is best about human beings was thriving in Athens.
Imagine you are Paul. You’re smart as a whip. You always were. You always will be. However, you’ve had this experience that taught you about the limits of where that mind of yours could take you. You were thinking perfectly clearly and ticking all the boxes for doing the right thing. Then, you had this experience that changed everything. That moment wasn’t some new lesson gained in a classroom. It was a completely overwhelming, mysterious encounter with God—the kind of thing which can make a smart person seem pretty crazy to other smart people. You’re still smart—and that matters—but now that’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is trying to help other people see what matters most: that there is a God who loves us, even when we’re being total knuckleheads.
Before his experience on the road to Damascus, Paul—who would have still been Saul and would have thought about everything in the same old terms—would have rolled into Athens and made the case for why those people were wrong. Like an internet troll, he wouldn’t have listened to anyone because his whole reason for being there would have been to make them listen to him. Like so many of us today in our encounters with folks who are different, he would have at least had the smug satisfaction of walking away from the encounter thinking to himself, “Well…I showed them!” There would have been no communication or persuasion on either side—just a whole lot of noise and contempts and resentment.
The thing is, it’s Paul, not Saul, who arrives in Athens. His central experience is that he used to be the guy who thought he knew everything and who thought he was right about everything. Having had a transforming experience—that wake up call—I don’t think Paul shows up to tell the people of Athens that they are wrong. I think he shows up to ask them, “What if there’s more? What if there’s something you people are missing?” He doesn’t tear the life of the people apart. He just poses the question, “What if there is a deeper truth, a deeper meaning to be found?”
He does this in the most interesting way. He says to the people, “As I walked around your city. I was struck by how religious you all are. My gosh, you all have a shrine to every god imaginable—the sun god, the fertility god, Athena, Zeus, even the foreign gods from all around the world. I’ve got to tell you, though, the shrine that really struck me was the one that just read: ‘To the Unknown God.’ That’s the God I want to make known today…”
If you think about it, it’s quite a statement about the people of Athens that they had that shrine to an unknown God. One of the amazing things in life is to run into someone who is really smart who nevertheless realizes that they don’t know everything. The people of Athens were brilliant. They were also smart enough to know that there were limits to their knowledge. Smart and humble is rare.
We can translate this truth to modern times. There are all sorts of people who are religiously devoted to all sorts of sacred things. It’s amazing to have access to the whole world available in the palm of our hands. That leaves many of us worshiping our smart phones, checking them hundreds of times a day. Our cars give us a freedom to roam that almost no humans have ever enjoyed. Don’t mess with our cars! Go to a rock concert and join fifty thousand fans who are all singing along. Tell me you’re not joining in worship. Look across our society at all the things that matter—that are sacred to people. Then, make Paul’s move. There is no need to undercut anyone’s relationship to their phone or their car or their favorite rock star. I just think people might be a little shocked when we say to them, “I can see how religious you are!”
Then we would join Paul in the next step. Basically, it is possible to recognize that human beings have a profound craving for the sacred. It may get misplaced onto the wrong things. We may ask this particular sacred thing to mean more than it can mean. But all of us, deep down, crave that “something” that is more meaningful, that is transforming, that satisfies.
Rather than attack what people find sacred, we need to honor what’s sacred to them and ask, “What if I can show you that the sense of the sacred that you’ve found in life is evidence of the God who is the source of all that is sacred? You’re not wrong to be amazed by a phone or a car. Of course it was amazing to be at that concert and sing like that with 50,000 other people! What if the even more amazing truth is that all of what is genuinely sacred in this life is connected because God is their source? What if, every moment of every day, you’re swimming in the presence of God?”
Of course, the argument that Paul might make next is that everyone can totally miss this truth. This is why we need each other. Sometimes, we gather in a church because it can be a place where we can remind each other, over and over again, “Remember, there’s more. God’s in here somewhere, no matter how hard today may seem.” Sometimes, we just need someone who’ll remind us, “Now, don’t forget about the water…”