Evensong, Proper 16, 27.8.23
Evensong 27.8.23
2 Kings 6.8-23
Acts 17.15-end
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
It can feel as if war and conflict is proliferating around the world with issues in Ukraine, Niger, Myanmar, Syria, Kashmir, and the Middle East to name but a few and yet the Bible tells us that we can expect to hear of ‘wars and rumours of wars’ so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by that. The deeper question is how we deal with war, conflict, and opposition and our readings this evening offer us two different approaches one at an international level, and the other at a more individual level.
In the first lesson from 2 Kings, we heard about the ongoing conflict between Israel and the King of Aram. It is notable in the passage, the esteem in which the prophet Elisha was held, which wasn’t always or even often the case for the prophets. He seems to have had significant authority.
Elisha, you may recall, was the student of the great prophet Elijah, who at the end of his life, parted from him in a chariot of fire. And just as a reminder, when Elisha and his servant were surrounded by the Aramean army, he told the servant ‘There are more with us than with them’, prayed to the Lord to open his servant’s eyes, whereupon he saw the mountain full of horses and chariots of fire all around them and emphasising he had fully inherited Elijah’s prophetic mantle and authority. When the Arameans were blinded temporarily and captured, we heard how deferential the King of Israel was, even to the extent of calling Elisha Father and asking him for permission to kill them.
This is where it gets interesting. Elisha did not give him that permission and instead instructed him to do something which must have gone against all his instincts and to feed them a great feast and then let them go but as a result of that unexpected kindness, the Arameans, we were told, ‘no longer came raiding into the land of Israel’.
It was surprisingly effective as a strategy and yet it is not one you would have found then, or now, in any military doctrine – and I speak as someone who before ordination was a scientific civil servant involved in developing elements of naval strategies when I worked at what was then called the Admiralty Research Establishment on Portsdown Hill, the job that first brought me to Portsmouth. This strategy might be considered as mad as the idea of suggesting that President Zelensky should invite President Putin and the Russian army to dinner on behalf of the Ukrainian people. It was madness except in Elisha’s case it worked. No strategists or prophets though are suggesting this now.
In almost all conflicts now there is, however, an attempt to demonise the opposition. We see this in other areas of life, with the othering of some people who are perceived as ‘a problem’ in some way. We see it with political parties in what they say publicly about each other, despite some of them being good friends across the political divide. We see it today with the othering of asylum seekers and refugees, and especially those attempting to cross the channel, despite many, though not all of them, running from conflicts and unrest which are often the legacy of failed western interventions and for which we bear some moral responsibility. The fact remains, however, that with Elisha and the Arameans, this was a nation fighting another nation and the result of the act of kindness was a surprising peace.
If this does make you stop and wonder what could be achieved if we were more often to try kindness as a strategy rather than aggression or violence, then that is good.
We come next to the second lesson from the book of Acts in which St Paul went to see the Greeks in Athens. He was critical of the intelligent and sophisticated Athenians for their altar to an unknown god. The indefinite article points us towards what their understanding actually was; to AN unknown God, - one amongst many others, and as if He could never really be known. At one level, they were right, it is impossible to know God fully, but we can glimpse something so Paul challenges their understanding of an unknown God.
Greek culture was one of philosophical debate and of myths about the competing Greek gods of Olympus, and they would have known about the Roman Gods also. Above all, they loved debate. In fact, dialectic was the chief means by which they conducted their business and issues were better understood. We heard about two groups in particular:
Epicurians believed that matter was the fundamental material in the universe but that the goal should be a form of pleasure. It could be regarded as a form of hedonism but not as popularly understood, because pleasure for them was defined as an absence of pain or fear and there was a commitment to a simple life. Colloquially it has become more associated with a love of luxurious tastes or habits especially for food or drink but that was not its origin. We also heard about the Stoics. Stoics believed in the development of self-control and fortitude to overcome destructive emotions. They aimed to achieve clear and unbiased reason which allowed them to understand universal reason.
You can see why each group was attracted to and co-existed in the metropolis that was ancient Athens. Belief in superior beings was fine but belief in only one, and importantly with different values, was quite novel despite the Jews having reached that conclusion rather earlier. Eventually they came to realise that belief in many Gods was inherently flawed. It does not stand up to philosophical scrutiny. There can only be one ultimate divine power. It took Paul to explain it. He tried to show them that God was not remote or unknowable, instead saying that God “is not far from each one of us”. Paul left them to it but we were told they wanted to hear more. We then heard that two people became believers, a woman called Damaris and Dionysius the Areopagite. We don’t know much about Damaris other than she gets billing at the same time. She may have been a Stoic, and quite possibly Dionysius’s wife.
The Areopagus itself was a low rocky hill northwest of the Acropolis, and the term means literally ‘the Hill of Ares’, Ares being one of the ancient Greek gods. There had been an Areopagite Council made up of respected aristocrats for almost 500 years and Dionysius’s title tells us that he was part of it. It functioned as both a powerful council and a judicial court for serious offences. Dionysius was a respected member of the court and a judge. His conversion was significant at every level. Such were his abilities that he later became first Bishop of Athens. He is venerated as a saint in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches but not the Church of England. That, however, did not stop one Anglican church being named after him in Market Harborough! He is the patron saints of judges and judiciary.
This passage is a classic one in the book of Acts, in which Paul is not afraid to go into the most dangerous and difficult places to place before them the good news of Christ but he does so by giving them respect and engaging in the way they wanted to be engaged with philosophical arguments. It would have been one of the most argumentative fora perhaps in the world, the Parliament, or Question Time of its day in a sense, and with lawyers and people who were used to arguing like this all day just for the sport of it.
One of the lessons for us has to be about the willingness to engage people with care, respect and in a way which makes sense to them. That is why it is important to have elements in the church which are pioneering. However hard they may appear to be for some, the fact is that we have a duty to make Christ known in this and in every generation and the way in which we need to do that has changed massively in the last 50 years. In the main, the church has not adapted nearly quickly enough, and we are now behind the curve.
When I was younger, we talked much more about people who had become unchurched, who used to go to church but stopped, having been inoculated against it perhaps at school. That is no longer the case. We no longer live in a society which even knows or understands what we might consider common Biblical stories or would know the words of the Lord’s Prayer. They have never been churched. The good side of this is that they have not been inoculated against faith and many people today are very spiritual. Churches are often just not scratching where they are itching. All churches need to adapt. We need to adapt and to find ways of better connecting with those who are yearning for spiritual growth and understanding but are not sure who to trust. There is a craving for honesty and authenticity and while we may feel we have that; we often make a poor job of showing it.
They see it, though, when we stand up for the interests of others rather than ourselves, and especially those who are weak or have no voice, who would be ‘othered’ by populists; they see it when we look to the greater good rather than our own; when we walk the talk of love, care, and compassion regardless of the cost to ourselves; they see it when we choose to give up power rather than appropriate it.
In a world so easily misguided, so easily in conflict, we have to duty to be counter-cultural and to proclaim that there are alternatives, that love, kindness, compassion, and care can change the hearts of nations, individuals, and even we ourselves. On a bank holiday weekend of music and celebration both here and at the Victorious Festival, we can celebrate the good, and rather than worshipping the created like the idols Paul saw in Athens, use the beaty of the created order to worship instead, not an unknowable God but The knowable and Almighty God of all, whom Jesus reveals and tells us we can know through him.
Amen