One of the first words in today’s Lectionary reading from Acts is Areopagus (are-e-op-ah-gus). A word that is easy to stumble on and I have had trouble saying on occasion.

Are-ee-op-ah-gus. It was the name given to an open air place just outside of Athens, and it also came to mean a place where a council would hear public debates and issue verdicts.

So this is a story about Paul appearing before a council to make a case that the teachings he’s brought to Athens are not just babblings, but grounded in intellectual concepts and authority.

Basically, the council Paul is appearing before wants to know which Paul is more akin to: a loopy street prophet or an itinerant teacher with knowledge of prophetic truths.

The council is curious to learn what Paul is teaching to Athenians. And there is a sort of set process to validate religious claims in Athens at Areopagus. According to tradition Paul needs to demonstrate (1) that he represents a deity, (2) that the deity wishes to reside in Athens and (3) that the deity’s residence in Athens will benefit the Athenians.

The Lectionary starts today’s reading at this demonstration. Paul introduces himself as an authorized representative of God, the God a shrine in Athens referred to as “the unknown God.”

Paul claims that he can make known to them “the unknown God;” that the unknown God is in fact the One who made all of creation and that this God transcends residence in shrines like those in Athens and accordingly requires no Athenian residence. Moreover, this one God is not seeking admission into the Pantheon –God is already everywhere.

Paul argues that what God seeks is for humanity to seek God– the God– this One God who is as close as where we are. Paul argues that like Greek poets claim, it is in God that “we live and move and have our being.”

And he goes on to note that not only is God as close as where we are, but, we are also God’s very offspring! And Paul claims that God seeks for humans to change their ways – to repent as it were– so that we can be judged in righteousness through one whom God raised from the dead. 1

The Lectionary cuts the story off, but, at verses 32 to 34 we learn that Paul’s demonstration resulted in some of the council scoffing at the resurrection of the dead, others wishing to hear more, others still who “joined him and became believers.”

I have to confess that for years I really did not like Paul. He grated on my nerves. I heard out-of-context his letters and understood him to be sexist and homophobic, a zealous Christian and someone I was sure I would never have had anything in common with. In other words I too have scoffed at Paul.

But it turns out that Paul is not such a bad fellow. I hear him in Galatians (3:28) as standing for equal rights when he wrote “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” I have long been for equal rights and it turns out now that I am also a zealous Christian.

As I was preparing for this sermon and considering the text it dawned on me that Paul and I have a lot more in common than just being zealous for Christ and for equality.

As today’s text indicates Paul understands God not to be just out there up in heaven and inaccessible to creation, but, understands God to simultaneous be “Lord of heaven and earth . . .” to transcend creation while at the same time being “not far from each of us”

God is so close in fact that Paul claims – in that famous saying we hear here a lot– that it is in God “we live and move and have our being.” I have come to understand God in this way too.

God is not just up there somewhere reaching in to stir an earthen pot when petitioned for help or when God wants to otherwise interact with creation. Rather God is always in the here and now soaking us through-and-through like water surrounding and saturating a sponge.

I take great comfort in knowing that God soaks us all; is what we move around in, what we live in, where we have our being. Truly all we have to do is grope in front or behind or to the side or even inside of ourselves and there is God.

God is bound by no shrines.

God is not attended to, nor made, by human hands. Nor is God “an image formed by the art and imagination of mortal.”

God is Love; boundless, every-where-ness Love.

That’s the intellectual, the theological, the thinking side, of spirituality that I find myself in accord with Paul.

But, I also share what I am going to call a “mystical” side with Paul. I have rarely shared this story with anyone, let alone a gathering of folks, because it is really quite “woo-woo.”

You know “woo-woo,” it’s a west coast colloquialism for new-agey sounding mystical experiences. Supernatural stuff. Stuff that is hard to believe, hard to get our minds around.

For most of my life I have considered myself a man of reason, I still do, but this stuff, this mystical side, defies ordinary reason and accepted logic (at least for me).

And so, honestly, I have hesitated to disclose this in public before, but, it is an integral part of my story and affects how I understand God and so, of course, it affects how I preach and therefore what you hear at church most Sundays. So please prepare yourself for woo-woo.

Paul in his earlier days, as a young man, was an ardent persecutor of the followers of Jesus. Acts 9 tells us he was “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord.”

Then “a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard [Jesus’s voice asking him why he was persecuting Jesus and the voice that was Jesus’s told Paul what to do].”

Paul was blinded by the light for three days and eventually his sight was restored (we are told “scales fell from his eyes”) and he converted, was baptized and became an apostle and the greatest missionary in all of Christina history.

First, let me get this out of the way: my mystical experience is different from Paul’s in a lot of ways. I did not breathe threats against followers of Jesus. Nor was I blinded by the light. And of course I have not become the greatest missionary ever–and chances are I never will. Despite what I may daydream about I am not even close to the Saint that Paul was.

But like Paul a pivotal moment in my conversion story was a mystical experience with light that I cannot logically explain. A light that I believe was Christ coming to me just as I was wandering away from Christianity in my teens.

I was eighteen to be exact. I had left the church and I had bad feelings toward it – as I have mentioned before– and like a lot of folks I thought Church was full of anger against others.

In one of the churches that I had attended a few years earlier I had dated a young woman and had become close to both her and her family. By the time I was eighteen, although we had not dated for a couple of years, I still kept in contact with the young woman and her family.

One night I had a very intense and what I can only describe as a mystical dream. I dreamed a man was in a room at the top of Sather Tower at University of California. The man was dressed in khaki clothes and he was attended to by people in lab coats. His heart was outside his body in an aquarium connected to him by what looked like tubes.

During the entire dream the whole room and everything in it was bathed –absolutely soaked– in a warm yellow golden glow. The glow exuded utter love, peace and joy. The glow ceaselessly and effortlessly permeated everything– including me.

I have to stop here and point out that there really are no words that can do justice to the feeling of that light. I have since come to think of “Shalom” (God’s ultimate peace) to mean for me what I felt from that light. Otherwise the best I can do is say it was God’s utter love, peace and joy. And I have never felt anything like it before or since.

I kept thinking as I was dreaming that this dream is so clear and vivid it must be extrasensory, you know psychic. Woo-woo. I heard the voice in my head telling me that I had to remember this dream.

After I was oriented in the space of the dream I watched the man and his heart all the while feeling exuberant with that Shalom feeling (it was quite a high).

While all of us in the room were under the influence of Shalom suddenly the people in lab-coats rushed to the aquarium to tend to the heart. It was at this point that I awoke with a start. I looked at the alarm clock and noted its time.

I told my mom and my best friend the next day about the dream wondering aloud what it could mean?

Two days later I learned that my young woman friend’s father had died at the very same day and the very same time that I was dreaming. I learned that he died of a heart attack. This father had often dressed in khaki clothes.

See, I told you it was woo-woo.

The knowledge that I had this dream at the same time that this lovely man died scared me. The dream did not scare me. I did not want it to ever end. It filled me with Shalom. What scared me was the idea that someone dying had been able to enter my mind ghostlike – and I have never been to keen on ghosts, let alone unauthorized access to my head.

I decided the dream must be a message for my friend that her dad was bathed in love, joy and peace as he died. I went to the grave side with the family and met with my friend a few times shortly after the death, but, I did not bring up the dream. It did not feel right. It was too weird, and frankly it seemed inappropriate to bring it up in light of her loss and overwhelming grief.

I decided I would tell her when I felt right about it. I moved from that town and have never seen my friend since, but a few years later I decided to write her a letter at her old address (where her mom still lived) and tell the story. After I wrote the letter I figured I had done my duty to the dream.

But that dream stuck with me through all the years I went without a church, always reminding me in no uncertain terms that God was peace and love and joy that permeated everything.

After I came back to church and embraced Christianity, I began to see this mystical dream in a much different light.

I began to understand that this dream was not just to get a message to my friend (or maybe not even to do that), but a vision for me to cling to and experience and continue to learn from as I wandered without church, and then to continue to appreciate and learn from as I re-found church and went deeper into my faith.

Indeed, I still learn from it. I see it now as an incredible, perhaps once in a lifetime, gift from God to keep me connected to the Sacred as I was leaving the church, even to teach me new things all throughout my life. Maybe even to one day help me find my way to seminary and become a pastor.

From this gift I understand that Shalom light, that I was bathed in that night, to have been a vision from God, a visit by God. Why God chose to give me that gift I do not know, but I carry it with me and cherish it deeply. That vision is an integral part of my story and journey and affects how I understand and relate to God.

You see, I don’t understand God as a person far, far away that we pray to. I understand God to be as close as where we are; to be in you and in me; to be in our breath and in our very existence; to be pure Love and Joy and Peace; to be Shalom.

When I started going back to church I was surprised to read that Paul –that fellow I used to dislike– understood God exactly as I did, as the Greek poets did, as the One in whom “we live and move and have our being.”

I cannot tell you how to visualize God. I cannot even tell you all that God is. I can tell you that for a moment in a dream scales fell from my eyes and I experienced being in a very Sacred presence. That presence was not some old dude with a beard on a throne but, rather Light. Light that flooded me and filled everything with Shalom.

Looking back, I can say that since that dream my life has been incremental movements to try and be closer and closer to living fully under the influence of Shalom.

As I wrote the last sentence that I just spoke, a new lesson from the dream dawned on me: Boiled down the Gospels – all that Jesus did and taught– all are about just that, trying to move self and humankind closer and closer to being fully under the influence of Shalom.

You do not have to depend on my tale of woo-woo, my weird mystical dream to know that God’s right here, right now inside and outside of each of us calling us to Shalom. Paul and Jesus and all the Gospels tell us the same thing.

And if you just look, really look at yourself you can see that it is true too. You, the person beside you, me, this whole building and the world out there are soaked with God.

And it’s a good God.

The One God who is Love itself.

The God who calls us to Shalom.

This week, this day, may each of us take a step closer toward Shalom, that glorious enveloping Light of Love and Joy and Peace.

Amen.

Scott Elliott Copyright © 2008

—- Endnotes—-