August 02, 2026
• Rev. Mindie Moore
Greetings From...Home
Acts 17:22-28
August 2, 2026
This is our last week of the series “Greetings From...” where I’ve gotten to share reflections from my Clergy Renewal Leave earlier this summer. I have had so much fun getting to tell you about this and bringing you on the journey with me!
And we’ve been a lot of places together—we've been to Michigan, Ohio, England, and Scotland. But today...we’re ending at home. Really, we’re ending with one of the most important takeaways I had after six weeks of rest, traveling, and tending to my spiritual life in a really concentrated way. And this was something that I KNEW...I’m sure I would have told you this before I went on this leave, in fact I think I’ve said this from this place before...but it’s something that I don’t know if I ever felt so deeply in my soul until taking such an intentional pause. It’s the idea that:
(SLIDE) There is always something new to discover about God.
It’s a surprisingly easy thing to forget, especially for someone like me who has been around the church an awfully long time. I know a lot of things about a lot of things...and it can be tempting to believe that there’s a limit to what we can know about God.
In this Scripture we read today, Paul is talking to a group of people who legitimately know a lot of things about a lot of things. These are the philosophers in the Greek city of Athens. A deeply curious, spiritual group of people who long to know more, who are hungry for any and all knowledge they can get their hands on.
And this longing to know more catches Paul’s attention as he interacts with this group of people. He’s noticed that they’ve put up an altar, among MANY other altars, temples, shrines, all that stuff...and this one altar has him intrigued. Because it simply says: “To An Unknown God.”
Even with all the rich stories and myths that made up the religious landscape here, there was the acknowledgement that there was something more beyond what they had already experienced. They had ALL this knowledge...and there were still questions waiting to be answered. There was still something new that they could discover about God and faith.
And as Paul takes in the landscape here and sees that this is an exceptionally spiritually hungry group of people, he also sees that they don’t know anything about Jesus. Jesus, who by this point has already lived, been crucified, resurrected, and ascended into heaven. That’s ALL in the review mirror—and the don’t have ANY of this information!
It might be strange for us to think about this, but these folks in Athens would really have not had any reason to hear about Jesus before this moment. There was a sea between Jerusalem and Athens, if you wanted to travel by land it was going to take you about 2000 miles, and as a reminder, they did not have the internet! Word did not travel fast in those days! So Paul shows up here, sees this monument, and is like, “Oh. An unknown God! Do I have some news for YOU! There is this whole thing that has happened, a whole way that people have experienced God, and I want to tell you about it.”
Now, when I think about this moment, it sounds like a super epic, exciting moment. And these people love to learn new things, so there’s a good chance they are going to want to hear what Paul has to say.
But we have to keep in mind that what Paul is about to share...is also a LOT. He’s giving them a totally different framework for how to experience God through Jesus. He’s telling them that they don’t need these shrines. They don’t need to put all their energy into the ways they’ve done this before. But that God is with them, revealed through Jesus, present in the Holy Spirit, uncontained by a temple or specific place or anything that humans could create.
And maybe these Athenians were truly exceptional in every way, but what we know is that MOST people, when presented with new information or experiences, usually have some hesitancy or resistance. Pew Research did a study about technology and found that only 28% of Americans are what we would consider “early adopters” when new technology presents itself. The vast majority have a lot of reservations and need time before embracing whatever the new thing is.
I had to laugh while I thought about this, because while I was on my leave, I discovered myself embracing something that I had been deeply resistant to for years. What I’m going to tell you about is NOT actually new...people have been doing this for centuries. But for me, I was CONFIDENT I knew what I thought about it and that it was not for me, that I did not experience God through this specific medium.
And this specific thing was journaling. I don’t know why I’ve struggled with journaling in the past, but it’s just never really taken. I suspect it might stem from the fact that we were always forced to do 30 minutes of journaling in the morning at church camp growing up and I could not stay interested in that activity for that length of time.
But some of our Midtown team got me this beautiful journal for my time away, and a great set of pens. And I LOVE a great set of pens, so I thought I would try it out again. I also let myself do it for however long I wanted and tried to release it from being something obligatory.
And wouldn’t you know that it only took me until I was nearly 40 years old to get out of my own head about this spiritual practice and actually ENJOY journaling! Sitting in my garden journaling (SLIDE) became one of my favorite morning activities and helped me center myself and REALLY HEAR what God was saying to me in my prayer time. It gave me a place to put all the thoughts that are rapid-firing all day long in my mind and has helped me (hopefully) be a little bit more of an anchored, grounded human.
It was a good reminder of this idea that we’re always able to discover something new. And that we have permission to discover these new things slowly—it's not like it has to be an immediate moment of change. God’s not sitting there with a stopwatch like, “come on, speed it up.” There’s plenty of time for discovery and growing into something new.
We didn’t read this part of Acts 17, but it says that after Paul has this conversation with the group of philosophers, some of them are not able to get on board. To be fair, Paul gives them a LOT to digest, including the whole resurrection of the dead thing! So the scripture tells us that a group of these folks are like, “ok, keep moving, this is not for us.” BUT it also tells us that there’s another group that says, “we want to talk about this more. We want to be open and keep discovering this new thing you’ve brought to us.”
That group of extra curious people needed some time. They needed to sit with this new idea of who God could be. To embrace this beautiful tension between mystery and presence that Paul uses to describe God. I love the different ways he talks about this. In vs. 27 & 28 he says that humans were created with some kind of longing inside them (SLIDE)
“...so that they would search for God[ and perhaps fumble about for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. 28 For ‘In him we live and move and have our being.”
I think this might be one of the most underrated and beautiful bits of Scripture in the whole Bible. I love it so much. Because what it’s saying is that, in our lives, we’re going to search for God’s presence and sometimes it’s going to be absolutely confusing. We will feel like we’re fumbling around, it’s going to seem impossible to wrap our minds around or understand. That’s the mystery of something as BIG as God.
AND!!
It’s IN this big, mysterious God that we live and move and have our being. This holy presence...is actually everywhere, in everything, and in everyone. Mystery does not mean that God is distant or removed. Theologian Marcus Borg puts it this way, “This concept imagines God as the encompassing Spirit in whom everything that is, is. The universe is not separate from God but in God.”
Now, I’m maybe a bit less poetic than Borg, so how I might explain experiencing the presence of God is that it’s like when you do a cannonball at the pool. Have you done a cannonball this year? Me either, but my son does one every time we’re at the pool! And the pool we go to has a 12ft deep end, which is just PERFECT for cannonballs. Rhys can jump in with all his might, and he doesn’t even come close to touching the bottom. And as I think about him jumping in like that, I think about how just for a moment, he’s completely enveloped by the water. There’s no endpoint to it, it’s just surrounding him and holding him as he makes his way to the surface.
I don’t think the apostle Paul was out there doing many cannonballs, but I do think this the sort of feeling he’s getting at when he talks about the ever-present nature of God. A Spirit that is holding everything together, making itself known, fully surrounding us and drawing us to a deeper understanding of this incredible love. A love through Jesus that is without a limit; a love that never leaves us and is always revealing a new way to experience that Spirit that is all around us. It’s with us and it’s for us and it will always be revealing something to us.
We’re going to go to the communion table in just a moment, and before we do I want to tell you about the “new thing” I discovered during my time away. And truthfully, maybe, like journaling, it was an old thing that I just had to discover in a new way.
It was the opportunity to experience God’s love, not as a pastor, but as just a person. I absolutely LOVE my work, and I think that was also affirmed while I was gone. I missed you all! I missed preaching, I missed caring for people in this really unique way that this role lets me do. So that was encouraging, that I was coming back to something that I truly do love to do.
And ALSO...these weeks away made me keenly aware that I have been working in churches in some capacity since I was about 21 years old. So that means that the last 18 years of my faith have been strongly defined by what I have been doing. My work and my relationship with God have been tightly woven together. So to take the things I was doing out of the equation ONLY left me with God. You want to talk about experiencing something new?! Taking away the “doing” meant that I had to trust in Jesus’s love and presence in a really different way. A way that wasn’t about me...but was only dependent on who God is and how God loves.
And I have to tell you, that gave me this brand new glimpse into my identity. Into some of the false things I’d been carrying WITH my identity and into some beautiful, freeing understanding that who I am and how I’m loved have nothing to do with a title or a position...being God’s creation is actually completely enough.
It was a deeper and new understanding of something I preach about often: this idea of God’s prevenient grace, which is really just a very fancy way of saying that (SLIDE) God makes the first move towards us. That God is openhearted, generous, kind, full of grace and love for us because that is the core character of who God is. There’s so much great stuff we can do as a response to that grace, and that helps make up a really rich life of faith, but we shouldn’t mistake that with trying to earn it.
We NEVER have to earn it.
Because each of us is so closely held by our creator. Each of us lives and moves and has our being in this container of God’s unending love and grace.
For some of us, that is really new information. That’s a totally different way to think about who God is...because some of us have been served a very different image of God. Just believing that God’s grace is for you and given to you with no strings attached might be enough new and unexpected for one day.
And for some of us, we’ve heard this before. We know it, up here. And even thought we know it, we need a reminder, a chance to know it in more than our logical minds, but in our hearts. In our bodies as we move throughout the world. Maybe we’re fumbling around like Paul talks about, trying to locate this grace and this presence and we just need to take a deep breath and realize that we don’t have to try so hard. To remember that God is already with you.
No matter how you receive that idea, no matter what you’re currently discovering about God...my prayer for each of us as we come to the communion table today is that we would experience that deep grace, that presence that surrounds us, that love that makes so little sense but is always given to us. That as we eat bread and drink juice, we would remember why we do it. That we would remember the way Jesus was showing his disciples something VERY new when they first shared communion together.
Transition to Communion...