Sermons

Promiscuous Homage

Rod Frohman	Third Presbyterian Church
April 27, 2008	Daniel 5: 1-12; Acts 17: 16-34

    
John Calvin, who died in 1564, had a very interesting phrase which you'll find quoted on the front of your bulletin, “All men [people] promiscuously due homage to God but very few reverence God.” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, Volume 1 page 42, Erdman’s, c. 1960)

In both the Old Testament lesson and the New Testament lesson today we have apt illustrations of the practice promiscuous homage. Promiscuous homage is more than just paying lip service to one's ultimate concern. It is both a conscious and unconscious practice of hedging one's theological bets, playing both sides against the middle, betting against your own team, because one cannot predict with certainty what the outcome will be. It is in short, a carefully practiced hypocrisy.

And in both our Old Testament and New Testament lesson today we have two persons, Daniel and Paul, who see through the promiscuous homage of their respective cultures and label specific behaviors of those societies as idolatry. In both cases Daniel and Paul can be called a “semiotician,” a person who decodes what the average person misses in a culture. Semiotics is a general philosophical theory of signs and symbols that deals especially with their function. (Webster’s Dictionary)

I hope you will stay today for the 10:45am presentation of the story Daniel in the lion's den (“Rescue In The Night”) put on by our elementary age children. The Old Testament text, which was just read, is actually the story that immediately precedes the story of Daniel in the lion's den, the story of Daniel at Belshazzar's feast. It sets up the lion’s den story.

The book of Daniel is a novelette about four Hebrew young men who, along with the rest of their Hebrew neighbors, were taken into captivity to the strange culture of Babylon. You remember the boys are Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego and Daniel. They were, as the story tells, (1:4-5) educated for three years in the language and literature and culture of the Babylonians. That is, they were trained to be civil servants. But they all resolved to remember their Hebrew faith.

Now, it so happens that the Babylonian emperor, Belshazzar, was giving a party, a big party. He decided to use some of the dishes and sacred vessels in this big bash which had been taken as booty of war from the Temple in Jerusalem. Now if you are Jewish this is a “no, no.” If you are Babylonian this is an “in your face” type of act. So, get the big picture: here is the Babylonian high society gathered at a magnificent feast and getting hammered using the sacred vessels of Yahweh. It was an exercise in promiscuous homage.

In the middle of the party a disembodied hand appears and writes on the wall. Daniel is summoned and deciphers the handwriting on the wall as a prediction of the decline and fall of King Belshazzar. “You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting” intones Daniel. That night Belshazzar was assassinated.

This story of Daniel is a parable for us. Daniel helps us to ask several questions: “What is our ability to discern the signs, the symbols, the writings, and the idols of our culture?”, or “How do we read the signs of our times?”, indeed, “CAN we read the signs of our times?”

In our New Testament lesson today from the book of Acts, we have a display of classical promiscuous homage in Athens atop of Mars Hill where the Areopagus was located. The editor of Acts is clear in his opinion about what went on in that environment, “They had no time for anything but talking or hearing about something new,” which seems to be a fairly cynical and reductionist summary of the activity of one of the greatest debating societies in the ancient world.

There were two sides in this Athenian debating society, the Epicureans and the Stoics, both philosophical traditions were at least 300 years old by the time of St. Paul

“For Epicurians, the highest pleasure (tranquility and freedom from fear) was obtained by knowledge, friendship and living a virtuous and temperate life. They lauded the enjoyment of simple pleasures, by which was meant abstaining from bodily desires, such as sex and rich foods. It verged on asceticism.” (Wikipedia: Epicurianism) Their main opponent were the Stoics.

“The core doctrine of Stoicism concerns the relationship between determinism and human freedom.

In the life of the individual stoic, virtue is the sole good; such things as health, happiness, possessions, are of no account. [Hence comes the popular understanding of being “stoic.”] A person may become poor, but what of it? He or she can still be virtuous. An individual may be sentenced to death, but can die nobly, like Socrates. Stoics felt that every one has perfect freedom, and should strive to be free from mundane desires.” (Wikipedia: Stoicism)

Into this rarefied atmosphere comes Paul, the architect of early Christianity, a pharisaic Jew converted to the Jesus movement. Paul had apparently drawn the attention of the Stoics and Epicureans in the synagogues of Athens and had been invited up to Mars Hill. But it wasn't exactly a friendly invitation because as we know from the text that he was called a “babbler” or in Greek-- a “magpie,” a “picker of seeds”) and a “propagandist of foreign deities.”

So here's his big chance: the apostle to the Gentiles is moving out of the synagogue into the secular big time, to the Areopagus, no less. It is an opportunity to “Face the Nation” and “Meet the Press.” Or maybe, even the Lion’s Den.

Like the boy Daniel, Paul, as a semiotician, can read these signs of the times. He has seen the nobility of the Athenians experiment, but the statue to the “unknown god” in downtown Athens has revealed an Achilles heel, a promiscuous homage. The Athenians were hedging their theological bets. So Paul does a little theologizing of his own. As the text says:

He stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. Then he launches into his sermon.

* God is the one who made the world and everything in it. Well, the philosophers of the Areopageous believed that the world may have been authored but was mostly accidental. Paul continues:

* God gives all people life and breath and everything. But Paul’s audience didn’t need God. They got along just fine without God getting too close, thank you.

* Paul bores in about this intimate deity, quoting authors know to his audience, Epimenides of Knossos, a sixth century B.C. philosopher, In God we live and move and exist, and then Aratus of Cilcia, a Stoic third century B.C. philosopher who had famously opined, We are all God's children.

Paul affirms the value of searching for God and for God's presence. But he also testified to the nearness of God. God who is closer than even the greatest imagination can conceive. God is already at home in us and with us through Jesus the Christ.

And it is at this point that Paul gets into trouble with the Athenians because he tells them they need to repent of their promiscuous homage of attempting to manufacture a home for God either intellectually or in art.

They don't want to be told to repent or change to be reconciled to God, at least not from this seed-picking magpie. The Greeks don't want to repent because they cannot conceive of a God who would respect a vulnerable mortal, let alone care for one.

Paul gets into further trouble when he talks about the resurrection. The Resurrection is the supreme testimony that God is user friendly to the human race.

“For Greeks in particular, the notion of resurrection seemed both impossible and downright offensive. To affirm that God raised Jesus from the dead is to acknowledge once and for all that life itself belongs to God. And there is the rub of Paul’s sermon. For the Athenians, as for the remainder of humankind, acknowledging that God made us sustains us [means that] our lives are never alone.” (Beverley Gaventa, CC, “Life Comes From God” April 28, 1993) God is as close as the air we breathe.

Well, as one can imagine, Paul got mixed reviews; “some scoffed, but others said that we will hear you again about this.” -- a polite brush off at best -- but the writer tells us that some of them joined Paul and became believers.

If all life belongs to God then like Paul in Athens, and Daniel in Babylon, we are called to discern where homage to God is promiscuous. That is: Christians are called to look at our culture in depth to see it for what it is.

As Christians we need to re-discover cultural discernment. It is not just for personal introspection any more. Discernment is the ability to evaluate not only ourselves but our culture in light of the Biblical story.

There are many signs, symbols and idols of modern times to which we all give promiscuous homage carelessly or carefully; such idols as: the television, the gun, the game, the computer, the body, the mall, the car, to name a few. How in the midst of all these signs can we see God's work? How in the midst of the rule of these gods of culture can we see the God of Daniel, the God of our Lord Jesus, at work?

Alternatively, what are the signs and symbols of God's presence?

In Christian worship we affirm many signs and symbols of God's saving presence: table, bread, cup, fount, cross, pulpit, bible, sanctuary, choir.

These are wonderful signs of God's presence. But if they stay in the church building because the culture tells us to keep them private, or because we don't know what they mean, or because we are embarrassed by them, then those other symbols out there (the television, the gun, the game, the computer, the body, the mall, and the car) become the dominant teaching and forming values of our lives.

What are we supposed to do then? Like Daniel and Paul, we take the symbols out of the church closet and into the street, out of a private religious life and into the marketplace and translate them.

Doing this translation:

* the communion table becomes a soup kitchen,
* the sanctuary becomes a shelter for the homeless,
* the cross becomes our identification with suffering of all sorts,
* the pulpit becomes the message that the poor and the oppressed are to be set free,
* the baptismal fount becomes the cleansing of our society of evils,
* the healing of Jesus becomes a hospital.

Ultimately, our theology shapes our anthropology. That is, what we think about God shapes how discern what goes on in our society, how we treat others. Promiscuous homage of God can be a carefully practiced hypocrisy. Or maybe it is not so carefully practiced, like this:

A woman was being tailgated by a stressed out man on a busy boulevard. Suddenly, the light turned yellow, just in front of her. She did the right thing, stopping at the crosswalk, even though she could have beaten the red light by accelerating through the intersection.

The tailgating man was furious and honked her horn, screaming in frustration, as he missed his chance to get through the intersection, dropping his cell phone and spilling his coffee, while giving rude gestures.

As he was still in mid-rant, he heard a tap on his window and looked up into the face of a very serious police officer. The officer ordered him to exit his car with his hands up. He was patted down and handcuffed. The policeman got back in his car and got on his phone and computer. After about fifteen minutes he got out of his police car and took off the man’s handcuffs, and told him he was free to go.

He said, ‘I’m very sorry for this mistake. You see, I pulled up behind your car while you were blowing your horn, flipping off the woman in front of you, and cussing a blue streak at her. “I noticed the ‘What Would Jesus Do’ bumper sticker, the ‘Choose Life’ license plate holder, and the chrome-plated Christian fish emblem on the trunk; naturally. I assumed you had stolen the car.”