This sermon was originally preached at Calvary Moravian Church in Allentown, PA on the Sixth of Easter on May 10th, 2026. The biblical text for this sermon was Acts 17:22-31. A full manuscript of the sermon can be found below.
In the book of Acts, we encounter this story about the Apostle Paul and his big speech in Athens to a lofty, spiritual, highly educated community of people who prided themselves on being “thinkers,” people who thought about things in big ways, abstract ways, who studied and wrote poems and prose. They were a people who loved to know things. They were also a religious bunch, and worshipped many gods and saw their lives, their entire beings, as having divine purpose. Everything was interconnected, and so when Paul sees shrine for an “unnamed god,” it was through this image, this symbol, this way of knowing and worshipping for the people of Athens, that is how he decided to introduce the crowd that had gathered to the resurrected Jesus. Because, as Paul firmly believed, the image of the unknown god can actually illustrate an important truth not only for the folks of Athens, but even us, the folks of the United States, some two thousand years later: the Good News, the Gospel of Jesus, will always meet people right where they are, no matter the setting, the language, or the everyday concepts that are unique to them and their circumstances.1
The Good News, the Gospel of Jesus, will always meet people right where they are, no matter the setting, the language, or the everyday concepts that are unique to them and their circumstances.
Every time I read this story, I cannot help but reflect on the moments in life where I was introduced to Jesus and maybe didn’t know it at the time. Now, I may not have encountered Jesus through a statue for an unnamed God, but I like to believe I met Jesus through a woman named Laurie, who taught me week after week in Sunday school, in VBS programs, on Wednesday nights and so many other times I lost track, that God’s love was grand and that even children, especially children, could know and understand and encounter the love of God. I think I met Jesus later on in life too, when I stood atop an Irish hillside, staring out at a field so green, so vast, dotted with cows and sheep and trees, and a dear, dear friend who stood next to me whispered, as we were both lost for words to understand such beauty: “you know, God could have put us in a blank white void and we would have never known the difference. But God gave us this.” I’ve met Jesus time and time and time again at the communion table, sometimes in the form of grape juice and a wafer, at other times fresh-baked bread and wine. I like to believe I met Jesus in my great-grandmother, who, without fail, always had a table overflowing with food waiting for us when we would come by for a visit. I’m pretty sure I met Jesus in the college professors who dared to invite me to imagine a God who was bigger and beyond the box I had subconsciously been taught to put God in. I know I met Jesus when I rocked a little boy from Iran to sleep in a church nursery on the south side of Cleveland, Ohio, while his mom was in the next room over, doing all she could to learn English and to try to make a home for her and her family here as refugees in the United States. In countless ways, experiences, people, and even symbols, I have met Jesus in a way that affirms what the Apostle Paul was saying to those who had gathered to hear him speak: the God of all creation has come near to be among us, and desires to not be some “unknown god” but a known God in that nearness, through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
When did you meet Jesus? Maybe like me, you can look back on your life and point out several times where, in a moment, God felt unknown to you, but now, you see how God has been revealing Godself time and time again. Maybe at a specific place, like in a church pew or beside a bonfire at a camp. Maybe with specific people, a teacher, a neighbor, an unlikely friend. Maybe you’ve met Jesus in some of the symbols around us: the changing of the seasons each spring and the promises that life is once again anew even after the brutal death of winter. Maybe you meet Jesus in the sacraments of communion, in the bread or cup, and the waters of baptism. Maybe scripture itself has helped take a God who was unknown before into a known God in your everyday life. Maybe you have been introduced to Jesus through music, sacred or secular. Or maybe, it is in the abundant goodness of Moravian sugar cake that you have come to know the abundant goodness of the God with us.
How will we choose to make the risen Jesus known?
This story of Paul sharing the Gospel with the people of Athens also always makes me think, by what means might we introduce others to Jesus? How will we choose to make the risen Jesus known? How will we look at the world around us, the culture in which we live, the moment in time we occupy, the language we speak, how might these parts of who we are help us to imagine ways to share the ever expanding love of God with those who still do not yet know the God who came to live among us, in the flesh, who lived, died, and rose again because there is absolutely nothing, not even something as final and ferocious as death that can keep God from being with us? The Rev. Dr. Matt Skinner, a professor out of Luther Seminary in Minnesota, notes that Paul wanted everyone listening to know that “salvation doesn’t exist in some pure, unadulterated form with no connection to human languages, cultures, and our foundational assumptions about the world.”2 The Gospel message that Paul preaches, is an embodied one, an alive one because it is the Good News about an embodied, a living God. And in this season of Eastertide, we joyfully celebrate this Good News because it is in the resurrected life of Jesus that our hope resides.
“…salvation doesn’t exist in some pure, unadulterated form with no connection to human languages, cultures, and our foundational assumptions about the world.” - Rev. Dr. Matt Skinner
God does not just want to be known to us for knowledge’s sake or for some twisted sense of vanity and power. No, God wants to move from being unknown to known in our lives because God has made a promise to all of creation through the resurrection of Jesus. Through Jesus, through the work of the resurrection, God has promised to restore what has been broken, to change what has been stuck and stagnant, to bring justice and righteousness into our embodied way of life. Knowing God is not merely this lofty, spiritual endeavor, but an enfleshed, life-long, lived experience. Because we believe that ours is a resurrected God, a living God, we can also believe that in countless ways every single day, God is connecting with people like you and like me, making the change from being unknown to known. God is in places and spaces, revealing Godself through symbols and sacraments and people. Ours is an enfleshed God who we get to know through particular and unique and also universal ways that connect with who we are. Because, beloveds, first and foremost, we are known by God.
So wherever you might find yourself this morning, maybe as someone who has known Jesus for decades or maybe as someone who feels as though you actually have never quite known Jesus, wherever you are, hear this good news: ours is the God whose love is always drawing closer and closer, making Godself known to you in a way that connects with exactly who and how God made you. And this is certainly very good news, thanks be to God, amen.
Matthew L. Skinner. Intrusive God, Disruptive Gospel: Encountering the Divine in the Book of Acts. (Brazos Press, 2015) 123.
Skinner, Intrusive God, Disruptive Gospel, 128.
