Transcript
Richmond’s First Baptist, May 3, 2026
The Fifth Sunday of Easter
Acts 17:16-31
Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.”
Last Friday afternoon I was sitting on my front porch, working on this sermon, when I got a call from a guy named Jeff—not a church member, exactly, but someone who has visited with us a few times. He asked me how I was doing and then started telling me about some girl he’d been seeing who was an atheist. He wanted to know how to talk to her. And that’s when I began to appreciate the fact that he had called me. Because he could have just asked the Internet, and the Internet might have told him anything.
When we finished talking I tried it, just out of curiosity. I asked, “How do you talk to an atheist about religion?” A lot of different approaches showed up on the screen, along with some advice about what not to do, and that was actually helpful. For example:
1. Don’t say, “I will now prove the existence of God in three easy steps.” You may have heard this one. It usually sounds like, “Let me explain to you why your worldview is logically inconsistent.” Or, “Have you considered the cosmological argument?” I remember having lunch with someone like that once, someone who had a carefully rehearsed answer for every objection I could think of. It was the longest lunch of my life.
2. Some people believe that if you just say it louder you can convince an atheist. So you quote more Bible verses, you speak with more insistence, more urgency. Don’t do that. To the listener it feels like, “You’re not hearing me, so let me say it again, louder.” This approach assumes that if someone doesn’t believe in God the solution is to turn up the volume.
3. Don’t make the other person feel that he or she is a problem to be solved. Some approaches treat atheists as projects, arguments, or conversion targets. It’s dehumanizing. People can tell the difference immediately between being loved and being worked on.
4. Don’t say, “The Bible says it and that settles it.” That’s like quoting Shakespeare to someone who doesn’t believe in literature. It’s like pointing to the rulebook in a game they’re not even playing.
That’s why I’m glad Jeff called me, because I had just been looking at today’s passage from Acts 17, and if there’s one thing we can learn from Paul it’s that when people don’t share your faith, don’t start with your answers, start with their questions, which is what he does in Athens.
But it wasn’t his usual approach. Paul usually started in the synagogue, where people already believed in God and were looking for a Messiah. It was a simple matter for him to say, “The Messiah you’ve been looking for has come, and his name is Jesus!” That was the good news Paul was so eager to share. But Athens was different. These were philosophers—curious, intelligent, spiritually searching in their own way. So, when they heard Paul arguing in the marketplace they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, asking, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means.” And Luke adds, as a footnote, that “all the Athenians and the foreigners living there would spend their
time in nothing but telling or hearing something new.” And so Paul tries to think of how to present his message to a group of philosophers.
I can appreciate that.
When I was living and working in Wingate, North Carolina, I used to go out to a local trailer park on Saturday afternoons where our church had a mission. Children would come running from every corner of the park for games and snacks, stories and songs. At some point I would share a message with them, and usually it was whatever I had been working on for Sunday’s sermon, but presented in a way the children could understand. The next day, however, I would stand in front of the congregation at Wingate Baptist Church, where many of the faculty at the local college were members, and where at least one of them was an actual philosophy professor. You’d better believe I polished my message before I stood in that pulpit, and that’s how I picture Paul, looking out over that congregation in Athens, the home of Plato and Socrates, and wondering how to begin.
Finally he says, “Athenians, I see how extremely spiritual you are in every way.” And that’s a good start, right? It’s a compliment! He continues: “For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship (notice that he doesn’t call them “idols”) I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god’ (and they may have thought, “Oh, yes! I know exactly where that is!”).” But then Paul says this: “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” And this is where he begins to preach. He says:
“The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he
allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, 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. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we, too, are his offspring.’
And then Paul gets to his point: “Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.” And that was too much for some of them, but not for all of them. Some said, “We will hear you again about this.”
Now, what did Paul do right? He began with observation. He said, “I see how extremely spiritual you are….” He continued with curiosity. He said, “I found an altar to an unknown god! How interesting!” And then he worked to establish common ground. He quoted their poets, and their philosophers, which suggests that he had gotten to know them. He doesn’t attack their worldview; he acknowledges it, even appreciates it. But then, almost gently, he begins to lead them to a new way of seeing. He starts with what they don’t know—“what you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you”—and begins to give it a name. He lifts their thinking from local gods to the Creator of all things, not a tribal deity but the source of everything that exists. He loosens their attachment to temples, reminding them that God does not live in shrines made by human hands. And then, beautifully, he brings that God closer, insisting that “he is not far from each one of us.”
But Paul doesn’t stop there. He doesn’t leave them in the realm of ideas and poetry. He moves, finally, from reflection to invitation—from speculation to summons—calling them to a transformed way of seeing and living, because (as he puts it) “God has given assurance to all by raising Jesus from the dead.” And that’s when some of the Athenians begin to scoff. But others say, “We will hear you again about this.” And a few of those who heard him joined him and became believers.
That’s not a bad day’s work for a missionary.
Last week when Matt Cook was with us he talked about the people who live within a five-mile radius of First Baptist Church, and they are not the people they used to be. They are younger, more diverse, more educated. If we want these people to join us in our mission of bringing heaven to earth, if we want them to become part of this loving, thriving family, the question is not ‘Will they become like us?’ but ‘Will we learn how to speak so they can hear?’” And this is where we can learn something from Paul.
If he were in Richmond today he might not begin with: “The Bible says…” He might begin with our new neighbors’ longing for meaning, their sense of awe in nature, their moral intuition about justice, their language of “spiritual but not religious.” In other words, he might begin with their poets.
He might say, “Start with people where they are, not where we wish they were.” For many people today God is not rejected so much as irrelevant, and religion is not hated so much as untrusted. Paul doesn’t scold the Athenians for that. He honors their searching. We might say to these new Richmonders:
“I see how spiritual you are… I see how hungry you are… I see the altars you’ve built—to success, to security, to meaning…”
And then we might name the “unknown god.” As we think about our nearest neighbors in the city we might ask, “What are their “unknown gods”? What is that ache
they can’t name, that purpose they can’t quite grasp, that beauty that moves them but leaves them tongue-tied? Maybe we could say to them, gently, “What if the thing you’ve been reaching for all along has a name?”
And then: affirm before you challenge. That’s what Paul does. When he’s talking to the Athenians he affirms their spirituality, their poetry, and their insight. Only then does he begin to gently dismantle the objects of their worship, their inadequate images of God. That’s an approach we would do well to emulate.
But eventually Paul gets to his point, and although I don’t love the way he does it I love it that he doesn’t leave the Athenians thinking that God is a gentle breeze on a summer day. He calls them to repent. But he doesn’t mean that he wants them to feel bad. He means, “Let your whole way of seeing the world be transformed.” And yet he preaches with the urgency of a street corner evangelist. He says that while God has overlooked the times of human ignorance in the past, he has now fixed a day on which the world will be judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed,” and then he says, “Of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”
And that’s where some walk away.
If the truth be told, some will walk away from us, no matter how carefully we approach them. And for that reason it’s tempting to stay in the “common ground” forever—to keep it philosophical, poetic, safe. But Paul doesn’t do that. The good news that he is trying to share is the good news about Jesus.
And if we’re going to be faithful to the gospel we will have to do the same. But we can do it in a way that respects other people, that listens to them, that seeks to learn their customs and culture before it invites them to consider a different worldview. Maybe the best motto we could adopt is to “stay curious.”
Near the end of my phone call with Jeff he asked me if he should stop talking to this girl. She was an atheist after all. He probably wasn’t going to win her over. “Should I just stop talking to her?” he asked. And I said, “No! My conversations with unbelievers are some of the most interesting conversations I have.” And I thought about those young people I work out with at the VMFA every Wednesday morning: 150 Millennials and me—the Baby Boomer who just keeps showing up. Not many of them go to church. One of them asked me what a pastor “does.” But they’re getting to know me and I’m getting to know them. Sometimes I offer to buy one of them a cup of coffee after the workout and then I do my very best to just listen and learn. But at the end of the hour I say, “Look, you know I’m a pastor, right? I’m a person of prayer. If I were going to say a prayer for you, what would you want me to pray for?” And I’ve been amazed at how much they open up in that moment, and tell me the deepest desires of their hearts.
Wouldn’t that be incredible? If we could learn to listen to the people who don’t come to church, and who don’t share our worldview? If we could create moments of trust and intimacy where they were willing to tell us the desires of their hearts? Because if we knew that—if we knew what all those young people in the Scott’s Addition neighborhood are longing for and striving for—we might be able to minister to them in a way that is kind, caring, thoughtful, and generous. We might learn to focus on what they need from us more than what we want from them.
I’ve been trying to do that, and I haven’t been completely successful, but at the end of this month I will do my third wedding for that group of people I work out with, and I think that says something: it says they are beginning to see me as someone they can trust.
I see Paul trying a similar approach with these philosophers in Athens. He tried to make connections and establish some common ground before he turned toward his
message. He didn’t win everyone over. Some people scoffed. Some walked away. But a few—a few leaned in. And maybe that’s enough.
Maybe our calling isn’t to convince everyone. Maybe it’s to be present, to be attentive, to be honest about what we’ve seen and known, and to trust that God is already at work in ways we don’t always understand. Because the God Paul spoke about—the God we believe in—is not far from each one of us. And sometimes all it takes is someone to point that out.
—Jim Somerville © 2026
