The Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan
“Knowing the Unknown God: A Sermon for Rogation Sunday”
Scripture: Acts 17:22-31
May 14, 2023
In today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles, Paul is preaching to the people of Athens, walking a fine line between finding common ground while also correcting what he sees as a deeply flawed religious viewpoint. Polytheism, after all, was antithetical to Paul’s beliefs both as a Jew and as a follower of Jesus. But even this headstrong apostle knew that barging into this sophisticated, ancient city and telling people that everything they believe is wrong was likely not the best way to win friends and influence people.
Having taken the time to try to get to know their city and its culture, Paul keenly zeroes in on a single inscription he saw on one of their altars: “To an unknown god,” it read. This is where he finds a toehold, a place where his argument can get some purchase. If his audience can be reminded that they are already aware of the existence of a God who is transcendent, who cannot be confined to a particular place or function like most of the Greek pantheon, then they might be ready to take the leap to accepting a God who is beyond all other gods, who is in fact the only true God.
The idea that God is a mysterious other, unknown and unknowable, has a lot of appeal. And in one sense, the God we worship is like that. The “God who made the world and everything in it, who is Lord of heaven and earth” is, by definition, far beyond the limits of human understanding. Every image we have of God, every label we place on God, every metaphor we use to explain God, is only ever provisional and incomplete. That unknowability is part of what makes God, God.
In another sense, though, we believe that this same God who “gives to all mortals life and breath” is knowable and in fact wishes to be known. That is why we have the Bible, the living Word of God, where we can see the whole history of salvation and how various people beloved by God have tried to live into the path he set before them. As Christians we believe that is also why God became incarnate in the person of Jesus, a person who lived in a particular time and place, who inhabited a particular body that other people could hear and see and touch.
As members of the Episcopal Church and the greater Anglican Communion, we are inheritors of a faith tradition that beautifully holds this complexity together—that affirms both the ultimately unknowable fullness of God’s being and the infinitely rich ways that God has been made known in the world. In other words, our tradition believes God to be both transcendent and immanent, both out there, beyond our comprehension, and in here, nearer than our own heartbeat.
Now some of us are more drawn to one aspect of God or the other, and that’s perfectly fine. And yet there is an argument to be made that what our world needs right now is to be reminded of God’s immanence, God’s nearness to us, and the ways we can find God in the created world. We certainly know that the world is in need of healing, as are those of us who inhabit it. We are, most of us, profoundly disconnected from creation, from God, and one another. People today are more anxious and lonelier than in previous generations. Deaths of despair are on the rise in the United States, among people who, by global standards, have a high rate of education and affluence. Something is deeply amiss, and just telling people that God loves them doesn’t seem to be enough to solve the root causes of the problem.
Recently, our community has been shaken to its core by a series of violent events that culminated with the revelation that the person accused of these terrible crimes lived on our street. Both the people who died were part of our community, each in his own way, and so was Kimberlee, the stabbing victim who survived, and so was the accused murderer. This is about as close to home as it gets. There are spiritual wounds here that need to be healed. We want to feel safe again. We want to feel whole again. And with God’s help, we will. Reconciliation, healing, and wholeness are qualities that God desires for us, aspects of what we call abundant and eternal life. They won’t just magically happen, but time and intention can help put us back together again—-different than we were before, but still together, still a community of neighbors and friends, caring for one another in good times and in bad.
There is yet another way we can know God that I haven’t mentioned yet, and that is through God’s creation. By creation I mean everything God has made, from human beings to plants and animals and anything else you might find on God’s green earth. Scripture affirms over and over again that all of creation is like a mirror in which we can see the image of God, or a masterpiece that bears the unmistakable imprint of its maker. Some have even called the Book of Nature the first book that God wrote, meaning it is the primary place where all people can learn about its author. As Psalm 19 puts it, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork.” And today’s Eucharistic Prayer adds that all of God’s creation is “a sign of hope for our journey.” This is a profound theological claim.
I believe that spiritual practices, actually doing things that bring us into closer contact with the divine as we understand it, are much more likely to comfort our weary souls and ease our divisions than merely more talking at one another–about God or anything else. An embodied faith, and practices that connect us with an immanent God who knows us and loves us, are both a treasured resource from our past and quite possibly the key to a healthy future. These practices include walking the labyrinth, praying the rosary, and going on pilgrimage. They take us out of our heads and back into our bodies, where we reconnect with the incarnational and immanent aspects of our faith.
One of the spiritual practices that the church is reclaiming, much to my delight, is the recognition of rogation days. These are the days just before Ascension Day when Christians are encouraged to ask God’s blessings on crops and fields, so that the planting done in the spring will lead to plentiful harvests in the fall. Rogation processions were especially popular in medieval England, when the whole town would turn out for the traditional “beating of the bounds.”
The point of walking around the boundaries of a parish, singing loudly and blessing things with copious holy water, while whacking away at hedges with a stick, may not be immediately obvious to us anymore. I understand it to accomplish a few important things. One is the reminder that we are embodied people, living in a particular time and place. In English canon law, a parish is not just the people who show up at a church on Sunday—”a parish is the whole area under the spiritual care of a priest.” So, by delineating the boundaries of the parish, a rogation procession makes clear that the church is here for everyone in the community, not just those who attend services. What happens here to any one of us matters to all of us, because we are all connected.
On a deeper level, rogation processions remind us that we belong here, on this good earth. The land where we live, work, and worship matters profoundly to God and it should matter to us as well. We are not beating the bounds as a means of claiming this land as our possession—-rather we proclaiming that the earth is the Lord’s, that it comes to us as a gift from God and is given into our hands for a time so we can tend it and care for it. For many people this is genuinely good news, a story they have never heard from the church before, and it can be a way for them to move from having a vague inkling of an unknown god to living relationship God who knows us and wants to be known by us. This Rogation Sunday, I hope that we can reclaim our sense of the holy in all creation, and especially in this little corner of the world where we come together week after week to pray and sing and gather around God’s table. We are standing on holy ground, surrounded by beloved children of God, and it is our right and our privilege to join with all creation in singing God’s praises and finding hope for the journey ahead. Amen.
