SERMON SPOTLIGHT: Easter 6A, The Rev. Aron Kramer
The Rev. Aron Kramer, Rector
St Edward's Episcopal Church
Sunday, May 10, 2026
St Edward's Episcopal Church
Sunday, May 10, 2026
Acts 17:22-31
Psalm 66:7-18
1 Peter 3:13-22
John 14:15-21
John 14:15-21
Last week I asked: what if the God you are waiting to meet is already outside? Outside the walls, the building, the places we have designated as holy. Already in the street, the wrong places, the off-center places, in the Galilees of our lives.
Today's Epistle has been niggling at my brain for years. I always find myself unsettled by this text. But I had a revelation this week, and I wonder if we have in this story an answer to that question.
Paul is standing in the middle of Athens, and he is upset. Acts tells us Paul was distressed — the Greek word is paroxynō. It is a visceral word, meaning agitation, close to rage. He has walked through this city and the sheer number of religious shrines and devotion has undone him. Every corner, every street, another shrine. Ancient writers said Athens had more gods than people, and something about it unsettled Paul deeply.
But then he finds something that stops him cold. An altar. Plain stone. No statue. No name. Just an inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.
Centuries before Paul arrived, around the sixth century before Christ, a plague descended on Athens. The Athenians prayed to Zeus, Athena, Apollo, every god in their considerable pantheon. Nothing worked. So they sent for a man named Epimenides, a seer from Crete, semi-mythical, mysterious figure. He looked at the situation and made a startling diagnosis.
He said: the problem is not that you have offended one of your named gods. Rather there is a god you do not know, a god whose name you don't have, and that unnamed, unidentified power is the source of your suffering. (Make hand wash joke)
So Epimenides brought a flock of sheep to the Areopagus and released them in the early morning when they were hungry. Follow each sheep, he told the Athenians. Wherever it lies down, build an altar there, to whatever god might be concerned with that spot. The sheep wandered, some lay down, altars were built, the plague lifted, the altars stayed. For six hundred years those stones sat in the city, monuments to a moment of desperation.
This is what Paul finds. Not a philosophical statement about a supreme deity. Not the Greeks secretly yearning for the God of Israel. What he finds is religious insurance. Fear dressed as piety. The ancient equivalent of covering every base when you've run out of options. And Paul looks at this altar, built out of fear six centuries earlier, and he says: I know who this is.
I want to be honest about what Paul is doing here, because this is what makes me dislike this passage. Paul is taking an altar that was never meant to point to the God of Israel, something built out of anxiety and dread, and giving it a meaning its builders never intended. He reframed their fear as hunger. He took their hedge against divine anger and named it a monument to genuine human longing. Whenever I read this text I ask myself, is Paul cheating? A little, maybe. But I think I may have missed something in all my ordained years.
Underneath the rhetorical move is a claim that is either true or it isn't. Paul is saying: God was already in Athens before I arrived. Not hiding, not absent, not waiting to be imported from Jerusalem on the back of some missionary. Already present in the city's restless, fearful, plague-driven searching. Present in the question underneath the altar: is there something we have missed? Is there a power we haven't named that might actually help?
Paul doesn't reach for Moses, doesn't cite the Psalms. He quotes Epimenides, the very man who helped build those altars: "In him we live and move and have our being." The truth was already in Athens, embedded in their own tradition, however imperfectly expressed, however fearfully motivated. The unknown god was already there, already closer than anyone knew.
Last week I said the Spirit moves outward, away from the center, away from Jerusalem, away from the places we designate as holy. Stephen's death scattered the church into the margins and the Spirit went with them. God has a habit of being where the institution isn't.
What Paul discovers in Athens is one step further. The Spirit doesn't just travel with the church into the margins. The Spirit arrives ahead of the church, already present in the city before the missionary gets there, already embedded in the culture, already present in the hunger of each human being. The movement of God is always ahead of the movement of the church. We arrive and find evidence that God was already here. Every single time.
Think about the places in your life you have never thought to call holy. The ordinary Tuesday. The commute. The kitchen at six in the morning. The conversation you didn't plan. The grief that opened something in you nothing else could reach. The friendship that became, without your understanding how, a place where you were truly known.
God could be found in a sea of tulips in the Netherlands. God could be found online as you discover a new community. God could be found in the hands of parishioners laid on you as prayers were said before the birth of your baby. God isn't discovered in those moments, God is revealed, revealed as already present. The Alleluia Booklet has taught us that.
The altar to the unknown god is not a pagan mistake to be corrected. It is a monument to genuine human searching. And the claim Paul makes, audacious, a little reckless, is that God has always been trying to satisfy that hunger. In the wrong cities, in the wrong centuries, in the wrong traditions, in the sheep wandering the Areopagus in the early morning. The unknown god was not as unknown as we thought.
"I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you."
Jesus says this to the same disciples we met last week, asking for maps and visions. His answer to their fear of abandonment is not a promise to stay. It is a promise of something better than staying. You will not follow the Spirit, Jesus is saying. You will carry the Spirit. Wherever you go, the holy goes with you. You don't go looking for God, you go already inhabited by God, and you notice God's presence in the places you arrive.
Which is exactly what Paul does in Athens. He walks into a pagan city, inhabited by the Spirit, and recognizes the evidence of a God who had already been there. This unnamed hunger, he says, is the hunger our God has always been answering.
The Spirit doesn't only live in churches and prayer books and properly designated holy spaces. The Spirit has been seeding the world with the presence of God ahead of our arrival. The church's job is not to bring God to places God has never been. The church's job is to do what Paul did, walk into the places where God has already been working and say: I know who this is. I can name this hunger. I can tell you what this altar is for.
God has been trusting us with God's own presence in the world. In our work, our relationships, our neighborhood, our grief, our longing. We have been doing this, maybe without fully knowing it. The question is whether we will begin to know it.
What in your life have you been circling around without knowing what it was? What hunger have you been feeding without knowing whose hunger it was? What unnamed altar have you been tending that might actually be a monument to the God who was already there?
Jesus says: I will not leave you orphaned.
The word Orphan matters. A child without a home, without anyone to say: you belong to me, you are mine, I know where you are. The disciples had structured their entire lives around following a person, and now that person was leaving. And Jesus says: the safety is not leaving. It is moving. From outside to inside. From physical to portable. From a person you follow to a presence that abides within you.
You are not an orphan walking into an empty world. You are a person carrying the presence of God into a world where God has already been working. Our work, when we are ready to receive it as work rather than burden, is to do what Paul did. Walk into the places of our ordinary lives, find the unnamed altars, and name the Holy.
The unknown god of Athens was never truly unknown. The nameless hunger of our own life has never been truly nameless. The God in whom we live and move and have our being has been there the whole time. We are just now learning how to reveal that God in our midst.
Today's Epistle has been niggling at my brain for years. I always find myself unsettled by this text. But I had a revelation this week, and I wonder if we have in this story an answer to that question.
Paul is standing in the middle of Athens, and he is upset. Acts tells us Paul was distressed — the Greek word is paroxynō. It is a visceral word, meaning agitation, close to rage. He has walked through this city and the sheer number of religious shrines and devotion has undone him. Every corner, every street, another shrine. Ancient writers said Athens had more gods than people, and something about it unsettled Paul deeply.
But then he finds something that stops him cold. An altar. Plain stone. No statue. No name. Just an inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.
Centuries before Paul arrived, around the sixth century before Christ, a plague descended on Athens. The Athenians prayed to Zeus, Athena, Apollo, every god in their considerable pantheon. Nothing worked. So they sent for a man named Epimenides, a seer from Crete, semi-mythical, mysterious figure. He looked at the situation and made a startling diagnosis.
He said: the problem is not that you have offended one of your named gods. Rather there is a god you do not know, a god whose name you don't have, and that unnamed, unidentified power is the source of your suffering. (Make hand wash joke)
So Epimenides brought a flock of sheep to the Areopagus and released them in the early morning when they were hungry. Follow each sheep, he told the Athenians. Wherever it lies down, build an altar there, to whatever god might be concerned with that spot. The sheep wandered, some lay down, altars were built, the plague lifted, the altars stayed. For six hundred years those stones sat in the city, monuments to a moment of desperation.
This is what Paul finds. Not a philosophical statement about a supreme deity. Not the Greeks secretly yearning for the God of Israel. What he finds is religious insurance. Fear dressed as piety. The ancient equivalent of covering every base when you've run out of options. And Paul looks at this altar, built out of fear six centuries earlier, and he says: I know who this is.
I want to be honest about what Paul is doing here, because this is what makes me dislike this passage. Paul is taking an altar that was never meant to point to the God of Israel, something built out of anxiety and dread, and giving it a meaning its builders never intended. He reframed their fear as hunger. He took their hedge against divine anger and named it a monument to genuine human longing. Whenever I read this text I ask myself, is Paul cheating? A little, maybe. But I think I may have missed something in all my ordained years.
Underneath the rhetorical move is a claim that is either true or it isn't. Paul is saying: God was already in Athens before I arrived. Not hiding, not absent, not waiting to be imported from Jerusalem on the back of some missionary. Already present in the city's restless, fearful, plague-driven searching. Present in the question underneath the altar: is there something we have missed? Is there a power we haven't named that might actually help?
Paul doesn't reach for Moses, doesn't cite the Psalms. He quotes Epimenides, the very man who helped build those altars: "In him we live and move and have our being." The truth was already in Athens, embedded in their own tradition, however imperfectly expressed, however fearfully motivated. The unknown god was already there, already closer than anyone knew.
Last week I said the Spirit moves outward, away from the center, away from Jerusalem, away from the places we designate as holy. Stephen's death scattered the church into the margins and the Spirit went with them. God has a habit of being where the institution isn't.
What Paul discovers in Athens is one step further. The Spirit doesn't just travel with the church into the margins. The Spirit arrives ahead of the church, already present in the city before the missionary gets there, already embedded in the culture, already present in the hunger of each human being. The movement of God is always ahead of the movement of the church. We arrive and find evidence that God was already here. Every single time.
Think about the places in your life you have never thought to call holy. The ordinary Tuesday. The commute. The kitchen at six in the morning. The conversation you didn't plan. The grief that opened something in you nothing else could reach. The friendship that became, without your understanding how, a place where you were truly known.
God could be found in a sea of tulips in the Netherlands. God could be found online as you discover a new community. God could be found in the hands of parishioners laid on you as prayers were said before the birth of your baby. God isn't discovered in those moments, God is revealed, revealed as already present. The Alleluia Booklet has taught us that.
The altar to the unknown god is not a pagan mistake to be corrected. It is a monument to genuine human searching. And the claim Paul makes, audacious, a little reckless, is that God has always been trying to satisfy that hunger. In the wrong cities, in the wrong centuries, in the wrong traditions, in the sheep wandering the Areopagus in the early morning. The unknown god was not as unknown as we thought.
"I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you."
Jesus says this to the same disciples we met last week, asking for maps and visions. His answer to their fear of abandonment is not a promise to stay. It is a promise of something better than staying. You will not follow the Spirit, Jesus is saying. You will carry the Spirit. Wherever you go, the holy goes with you. You don't go looking for God, you go already inhabited by God, and you notice God's presence in the places you arrive.
Which is exactly what Paul does in Athens. He walks into a pagan city, inhabited by the Spirit, and recognizes the evidence of a God who had already been there. This unnamed hunger, he says, is the hunger our God has always been answering.
The Spirit doesn't only live in churches and prayer books and properly designated holy spaces. The Spirit has been seeding the world with the presence of God ahead of our arrival. The church's job is not to bring God to places God has never been. The church's job is to do what Paul did, walk into the places where God has already been working and say: I know who this is. I can name this hunger. I can tell you what this altar is for.
God has been trusting us with God's own presence in the world. In our work, our relationships, our neighborhood, our grief, our longing. We have been doing this, maybe without fully knowing it. The question is whether we will begin to know it.
What in your life have you been circling around without knowing what it was? What hunger have you been feeding without knowing whose hunger it was? What unnamed altar have you been tending that might actually be a monument to the God who was already there?
Jesus says: I will not leave you orphaned.
The word Orphan matters. A child without a home, without anyone to say: you belong to me, you are mine, I know where you are. The disciples had structured their entire lives around following a person, and now that person was leaving. And Jesus says: the safety is not leaving. It is moving. From outside to inside. From physical to portable. From a person you follow to a presence that abides within you.
You are not an orphan walking into an empty world. You are a person carrying the presence of God into a world where God has already been working. Our work, when we are ready to receive it as work rather than burden, is to do what Paul did. Walk into the places of our ordinary lives, find the unnamed altars, and name the Holy.
The unknown god of Athens was never truly unknown. The nameless hunger of our own life has never been truly nameless. The God in whom we live and move and have our being has been there the whole time. We are just now learning how to reveal that God in our midst.
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