Saint Paul is a genius. He is the one I most often hold up as proof that when God calls someone to a particular ministry, he calls the exact person for that task. It is not coincidence that Paul and his disciples are responsible for nearly ¾ of the New Testament. The man knows his stuff: a Pharisee, well educated, and a Roman citizen, well traveled to boot. But even beyond that, Paul is a clever man, clever in a good way. He figures out these intriguing ways of bringing his message to the people.

One of my favorite stories about that cleverness is our first lesson today. Paul is on one of his missionary journeys and he is in the city of Athens. The world of Paul’s day may have been Roman politically, but its lifeblood was Greek and Athens was and nearly always had been the center of that Greek world. Athens was the center of culture, the center of philosophy, the center of tradition, the center of religion.

Paul goes about exploring the city. He discovers, first and foremost, that this indeed the center of pagan religion. They’ve got statues and idols to every god imaginable. There’s a statue to Zeus, king of the gods. One to Aphrodite, goddess of passion and love. One to Ares, the god of chaos and war. One to Apollo, god of the sun, and of course, his twin sister, Athena for whom the city was named. All the pantheon of Greek divinities are on the display here, many of them within the area of the city known as the Aeropagus.

Now this is long past the era of the Greek city-states, of the wars with Persia and with each other. And along with the passage of time, these deities had come to share space with other ideas, other religions, other philosophies. The book of Acts tells tale of Paul having an encounter in Aeropagus just before the episode we have as our first lesson with philosophers of the epicurean and stoic traditions. In addition to the new ideas introduced by these and other famous philosophers like Socrates and Plato, you also have the gods of other lands sharing space with their own. Statues of Isis and Marduk perhaps.

Within this great hodgepodge of religious and philosophical ideas, the Greeks had become imminently practical. Fearing that in spite all that space and statuary dedicated to all these gods, they feared they might have missed one and so they dedicate a statue to the god unknown…just in case.

And Paul sees his opportunity.

Clever Paul takes all these traditions of the Greeks, all their devotion to their deities, and transforms it into an opportunity to preach the Gospel. The unknown god is not unknown, he says, not to me anyway. I know his name. He is Jesus Christ. And while you have dedicated a statue to him, he is not made of stone or gold or precious metals. He was once flesh and blood, for he was crucified and then rose again from the dead.

Here, in the areopagus, surrounded by the statues to pagan deities galore, Paul preaches the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And the Greeks respond. The Holy Spirit moves among them and finds receptive hearts to Paul’s message.

Who’d have thought that in that place there, the heart of pagan religion, there might be those hungering to hear what Paul had to say?

We are told this story for a reason and it’s not simply so we can marvel at Paul’s cleverness at turning the Greeks’ traditions on their head. We, like Paul, have been called by God to a task, to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ in word and deed. We know this Gospel well. It’s what draws us to this place every Sunday. That God became incarnate as one Jesus of Nazareth to save this world, that Jesus healed the sick, embraced the outcast, taught us his ways, and then at the end died and rose again for the sake of the whole world. We have received this truth. We believe in it. We trust in it. And we are called to share it.

We are called to share it with our neighbors, our friends, our family. Talking with them about faith is easy. But we may also be called to go into all the areopagus of this world, here and now. Into the heart of a pagan world that bows down to other gods, to greed, to power, to lust, to hatred, and to despair. And that’s a lot harder.

The Saturday before my wedding, Sarah and I have tickets to see one of my favorite rock bands: The Cure. Now the Cure are somewhat infamous for their melancholy songs. I became fond of their music during some of the rougher periods of my life, time when my own emotions were much darker. How do we reach those who live in those dark places of the heart? How do we tell the Gospel to those who are laden with sorrow and despair?

My mother, who many of you know is a nurse, works closely with another woman who is seeking something. She knows there is an empty place in her heart, but she does not know how to fill it. She has asked my mother about church, about our faith as Christians. This woman also happens to be gay. How do we reach those of that areopagus, who have felt rejected by the church for so long?

Often times, during the summer, I head off to the Origins sci-fi and gaming convention. Here are literally thousands of people who enjoy and delight in science-fiction, and fantasy, Dungeons and Dragons, and Harry Potter. All things the church has cast a suspicious glance upon in the past. How do we enter into this areopagus with a word of hope? Every year there is a church service at Origins. The chaplain who leads it finds it important enough to travel every year from his church in South Korea. That’s his answer. What might ours be?

I don’t have answers to these questions, but I think it healthy for us to ask them as a church. The world aches to know what we know. There are people out there hungry for the Gospel, and they may not come to us. If we are to find them, we must go into the places where angels sometimes fear to tread, into the areopaguses of this despairing world, into the midst of pagan idols, powerful emotions, and dark despair. We must be as St. Paul was, confident in faith, knowing that God will be at our side, no matter where we go.

The world is waiting. Amen.