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"Joy for the Underwhelmed"
There is not enough joy in our world today. Some people have just enough religion to make them miserable, not enough to make them truly happy.

Scrupulous followers of rules and regulations, they are haunted by the specter of dutiful legalism with little love and heart. They condemn themselves to dour, somber righteousness. Churches should be the most joyful places in the world, serendipity sanctuaries where new discoveries of grace and glory are made every day, not museums of the recorded experience of others.

Linked to the dynamic spirit we are freed from such stranglements, and joy is creatively released within us. Religion in general is not enough. One needs to go all the way.

This distinguishes Christianity from other religions. The Stoic endures trouble; the Hindu accepts it; the Mohammedan submits to it; the Buddhist takes it as inevitable; only the Christian can exalt in the midst of trouble. There are some religions, as James S. Stewart of Scotland reminds us, that are without joy; they have very little song in them. They do not know how to strike the harp. Early Puritanism has been caricatured as rigid, repressive and rigorous, and without joy, overlooking the fact that in the heart of these creative people that came as the first wave of settlers to the American shore were songs and praises made rapturous by the Holy Spirit within.

The most characteristic word of the Christian religion, therefore, is joy! If you had to choose one word to focus the essence of Christian faith it would be joy.

This is what the gospel offers today to our chaotic, confused, disoriented, and depressed world. Karl Barth, the theologian of our century, who gave some splendid lectures at a great university in this very city a few years ago, defined preaching as the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. As we look at our world today we see nations stirring in a cauldron of unrest, social classes pitted against each other, wars erupting around the globe, our beautiful world running red with blood, tensions and stresses destroying the peace and happiness of individual hearts, home life and society in general. It is a sobering fact that a recent mental health survey indicates that sixty million Valium prescriptions are written every year in the United States. Doing what comes naturally does not necessarily bring on a high. People awake in the far country with the husks of imagined happiness, having sought the wrong ends and goals. They have worshiped Gods that failed.

This is what makes our Gospel, written in a grimmer age than our own, the most exciting and relevant news. The whole Bible echoes with a note of joy, even though it is the most realistic book in the world. Human nature is starkly sketched by its authors. But with the invasion of God’s Spirit, lives are radically transformed, and a new joy is born, fulfilling God’s intention for us. At the creation the morning stars sang together for joy, according to the poetic description of the Old Testament. Psalmists wrote their paeans of praise to the Creator and Sustainer of life. When Jesus was born there were good tidings of great joy to all people. He promised his disciples that he would give them his joy. And at the center of the Christian faith is the resurrection of Jesus, which transformed not only the lives of the early disciples but has been decisively refashioning lives throughout history since that pivotal day. Not a syllable of the New Testament, it has been said, has been written apart from this Christian experience of resurrection.

Among the early ambassadors who carried this good news of the glad God throughout the then-known civilized world was St. Paul, the chief of apostles. He transversed the Roman world establishing churches of happy Christians everywhere. Rabbi Sandmill of Hebrew Union College classified him as the greatest mind in the ancient world. With two rabbinical schools to choose from, he selected the broader one, where in addition to the literature of Judaism, Greek writers were also read. Thus he was admirably equipped to become ambassador-at-large for Christianity to the civilized world of his day.

So it was that he came one day to proud, sophisticated Athens, the cultural center of the world, steeped in a hundred philosophies, and dabbling with a curious array of outworn religions. Jaded by it all they spent their time listening to every new thing that came along. Like many today in our TV-saturated culture, they were not easily impressed by anything. They were underwhelmed, minds and souls wearied by a multiplicity of choices. Thoughtful, curious, religious, but unsatisfied and uncommitted to anything ultimately real.

When Paul appeared on the scene with his new dynamic religion, they were intrigued, for — “... all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.”

They were not greatly different from many today who have the same itch for novelty, especially if it claims to be “scientific”! Faddists have been and always will be with us. There is the story told of two movie starlets on the beach in California, one telling the other that she was currently into “zen.”

“I didn’t know you believed in zen,” said the other. “I believe in everything,” she said, “just a little bit.”

At all events, the Athenians invited Paul to Mars Hill, at the foot of the Acropolis, their favorite place to dialogue, discuss, and debate the issues of the day. They wanted to hear what “this babbler would say.” It was a pejorative term, the Greek word really means “seed picker” — like a sparrow picking up little tidbits of intellectual food in the gutters of life.

A few years ago on a summer morning I stood on what I thought was that very spot where St. Paul addressed the intelligentsia of Athens — a small hill commanding one of the great panoramas of history. As I looked up to the Acropolis with its many decaying temples to myriad deities crowning the high point that overlooked the majestic city, I repeated in my mind the words of Paul on that momentous occasion. He had found his text, of course, on the way to the forum when he saw the altar with the inscription “to an unknown god” — you see they were not taking any chances! But that was his starting point, as it is still today. Never underestimate the intelligence of people; but never overestimate their information! Perhaps you remember the story. He had sauntered about the city, his soul in a paroxysm as he reflected on their multiplicity of religions, and he said, “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘to an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything since he himself gives to all men life and breath and everything. And he made from one every nation to live on the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their habitation, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him.”

And then he thought to himself: are they philosophers? are they poets? Then they shall have some of each, and he continued: “Yet he is not far from each one of us for ‘in him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your poets have said; ‘for we are indeed his offspring.’ Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the Deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, or representation by the art and imagination of man.”

But after he had given them a dose of their own philosophy and poetry, the culture of their day, he suddenly put the gospel trumpet to his lips, and said: “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all men everywhere to repent, because he has fixed the day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man who he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all men by raising him from the dead.”

What he was really saying was that in Jesus Christ, the man of Nazareth, our crucified and risen Lord, God has come to us, and shared our common lot, conquering sin and death and reconciling the world to himself. God has invaded history in the person of Jesus. We are living in a new age, and God calls us to change our minds (to repent), and to commit ourselves to him, for it is by Jesus that God will judge the world.

This is the very heart of the gospel. The quintessence of the gospel is the new life given to us by Jesus’ resurrection. It has been well said that not a syllable of the New Testament has been written without the conviction that the Jesus whom the disciples had come to know so intimately on the soil of Palestine was with them and alive forever more, and that they too would share in his resurrection life. What Paul preached on the Areopagus is still the heart of our Christian message. This we affirm if we wish to remain within the mainstream of Christianity. And this is the ultimate cause of all rejoicing.

When Paul preached that to the sophisticated Athenians, three things happened. There was derision, delay, and decision. Raphael’s celebrated painting of Paul’s preaching at Athens depicts the scene graphically. Paul stands as a person of commanding presence on marble steps facing the Temple of Mars, his hands uplifted as he proclaims the great theme of God the Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer, and Judge. An Epicurean listens with friendly curiosity, his head tipped to one side; a cynic, leaning on his crutch, registers a face of disgust; a Stoic, arms folded, eyes closed, appears to be in deep reflection. Various other folk show disdain, mild interest, or fascination. What a picture of body language!

There was a segment of the congregation on the hillside then that began to raise their eyebrows, snicker a wee bit, and mock — saying, incredible! impossible! No philosopher or poet can be quoted to document or substantiate such nonsense. They turned him off! We find the same reaction today among people who are interested in religion-in-general. Talk about a god who is the sum total of the forces making for goodness, a god who is a projection of human thinking alone, and some audiences applaud. Inject into such an audience something supra-historical like this and immediately the scandal is created. That is the way Kierkegaard, the great Danish existentialist critic of the establishmentarian religion of the Denmark of his day put it: “The moment I take Christianity as a doctrine and so indulge my cleverness or profundity or eloquence for my imaginative powers in depicting it, people are very pleased: I am looked upon as a serious Christian. The moment I begin to express existentially what I say, and consequently to bring Christianity into reality, it is just as though I had exploded existence — the scandal is there at once.”

To some all religions are equally good. Claims to truth are absurd! But as the philosopher Mortimer Adler puts it: “Truth is correspondence to reality.” It is a worthy quest to discover it and to hold to it!

But there was a second thing that happened. If there were some whose reaction was derision, there were others whose reaction was delay. They listened and said, “we will hear you again about this.” It is not difficult to imagine their amazement and puzzlement, that they. needed time to think about it. There is such a thing as honest doubt. In fact, nothing is really our own until it has passed through methodical doubt and testing to personal certainty.

Yet we too know the polite evasion which Paul discovered here, for people underwhelmed by this magnificent good news still tend to apathetically put off until tomorrow what ought to be decided today. You remember the occasion when Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” They quoted the rumors; and he said: “Who do you say that I am?” And Peter answered, “God’s Christ!” Jesus replied, “Blessed are you Simon, for no one human has revealed it to you but my father who is in heaven, and on this rock of confession I will build my church!”

There are people who habitually put off anything that asks for a commitment, or a decision. So conditioned are they by the cultural milieu that they are incapable of being thrilled enough to take a stand. Underwhelmed, they take everything in stride, as a matter of course.

This is a peril for all of us. Every year we go through the cycle of the Christian calendar, and we know how the story turns out. So it can become a prosaic rerun. It’s like going to see the same movie three times — by the third time it has lost its serendipity, and there are no new discoveries. It’s perilous for us in the church to face the great mysteries at the heart of our faith, unexplainable in human categories, and become blasé, underwhelmed! To hear the ways that God seeks to save us from aimlessness and sin, and to inject into our lives his own living presence, to change each of us into transformed personalities, to make everything new and different — to hear all that, and then remain underwhelmed, and detached like spectators watching a performance, is a pity. Some become critics. Not able to do it oneself, not able to get into it, but with a marvelous gift to appraise what others have done! Don’t you get tired of critics sometimes who can witness the most gripping movie, or play, or concert, who could never pull it off themselves, but who can always find the fly in the ointment of others’ endeavors! Pity the underwhelmed! Anyone who faces the stupendous super-historical deeds of God invading our history with his own life in Jesus Christ, and remain blasé, is to be infinitely pitied.

But this is also our opportunity — to face these facts of experience, embrace them, speak about them, and rejoice in them.

There was a third thing that happened when St. Paul preached on Mars Hill. Some were derisive, some delayed, but others decided. They believed. Now, some of our friends think that St. Paul made a mistake on this occasion, that he dabbled too much in Greek philosophy, poetry, and culture, and never really achieved his purpose, that he never got off the ground. Believe me, if types like Dionysius the Areopagite, and the woman named Damaris sat in my church every Sunday, with the several others mentioned in this chapter sitting in the back of the balcony, and every Sunday that I preached believed, and would join the church, I’d consider that to be a success, wouldn’t you?

Thank God for this magnificent apostle, with his great mind, and tremendous heart, and committed will, who dared to stride as a child of Zion over against the hills of Athens to speak to the underwhelmed the magnificent, overpowering news of God invading our world to seek and to save us in Jesus, splitting history into B.C. and A.D.! And thank God for those people mentioned by name, one a man and one a woman, made immortal with their names inscribed in the sacred literature by their decision.

There are many folk today wistfully contemplating a fuller life, eager to move from disillusionment to faith, to a broader religious experience, whose lives would be liberated, enriched, satisfied, made truly joyous if they believed this good news of the glad God!

C. S. Lewis, the great British lay apologist, was so surprised by joy that he came to the point where he could confront a nonbeliever and ask: “Is it true that you are not a Christian?”

The coming of Christ has changed the world. And he can change the world of your own lives. “Christ,” said Clement the ancient Alexandrian, “has turned all our sunsets into dawns.” Thanks be to God!   

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