I was privileged to give this sermon Sunday ( May 10th, 2026 ) at the Episcopal churches, Saint John’s, Lancaster, OH and Saint Paul’s, Logan, OH.

Listen to this sermon here.

In the 1982 movie, “Conan the Barbarian”, Conan and his friend Subotai are sitting at their fire, late in the evening, talking about their religious beliefs. Conan believes in Crom, a god of the earth who lives high on a mountain. Subotai prays to the four winds of the everlasting sky. Subotai concludes that his god is greater than Conan’s god who lives below the everlasting sky. Conan unhappily concedes the argument, but he is not about to start praying to the everlasting sky.

On first reading, the apostle Paul’s sermon in front of the Areopagus or Mars Hill in Athens has that same message as this scene from “Conan the Barbarian”. My God is greater. Paul’s delivery is more polished, tailored to his Greek audience using logical arguments which the Greeks invented, concluding that he worships a God that cannot be depicted in a statue. A God that does not need worship but deserves to be worshiped because He is the creator of all beings that have life and breath as well as everything else that exists. A God that Everyone should worship instead of the many gods that are venerated by the Greeks.

Paul’s sermon may be understood to be quite clever in that he found a shrine in Athens to the “unknown god” and uses this shrine to establish that the Greeks through their own piety have already acknowledged the existence of the living God of the Jews. Paul also includes a reference in his sermon to a Greek idea that this single creator god is the father of all peoples, as written by both the philosophers; Epimenides of Crete, and Aratus of Soli.

In this way, Paul firmly establishes that the Greeks themselves already have this belief in a single creator god. Paul goes on to claim that the time of ignorance is over. Through the incarnation of Jesus Christ, a man sent by the living God who through his resurrection from death reveals to us how all people should live and worship.

In short, this “unknown god”, the living God, is the only God deserving of our worship. 

Paul’s sermon is held by many, to be the model of how to appeal to unbelievers, to bring them to Christ. First, you find some common ground with your audience, then you show that true worship should only be rendered to the creator God who made all things. A God that cannot be physically represented in a shrine or temple and does not need our worship; as He is our Creator we owe homage and worship to Him. You close the argument with the incarnation of Jesus Christ who through his ministry and resurrection proclaim the truth of our way of belief and worship.

Our lessons today demonstrate that we have more to share in spreading the Good News of Jesus Christ. A large part of the appeal of Christianity should be the love we have for God, which finds expression in the love and hope we try to express to everyone we meet. Our reading from First Peter explains it like this:

Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence.

Hope, with Gentleness and Reverence. Not, I’m right and you’re wrong. Our goal is to persuade, not to insult. To win people over, not to drive them away. 

In other words, we should preach and teach from the fruits of the Spirit in hope, with gentleness – which comes from our being patient and tolerant with our sisters and brothers in Christ. Reverent from our understanding, that within each one of us is that of God.

The apostle Paul had every reason to be patient and tolerant. In his younger days, Paul was known as Saul. Saul the religious zealot who had none of these Christian virtues other than a fierce single-minded devotion to his own idea of God, who he thought wanted him to persecute all the followers of Christ, wherever he could find them. Paul’s conversion to being a follower of Jesus Christ, must have influenced him in how he performed his later missionary work. 

Maybe it was not cleverness when Paul praised the people of Athens for being pious. Maybe Paul was thinking about his life before he knew Jesus Christ. Paul thought that he was pious when he was known as Saul. Paul then channels this understanding from his own life experiences, in his sermon to the people of Athens. He is not just establishing ‘common ground’ in his sermon. Paul is honestly establishing an emotional connection to his audience, to personally demonstrate to them what it is to be a follower of Christ, with gentleness and reverence. This honest emotional connection should be the underlying truth of every sermon we preach.

Jesus in our gospel lesson reveals yet another advantage Christians have in our reaching out to others. The presence of the Advocate, the Spirit of Truth, also known as the Holy Spirit, which whispers Truth to All people. When we speak and teach and preach with gentleness and reverence, with the Spirit of Truth as our mentor and guide, we cannot fail to plant that seed of truth in the minds of the people in our midst. And those people to whom we are speaking, teaching, and preaching will go on about their lives with that seed of truth in their minds, nurtured by the Spirit of Truth. We may never see or experience the flowering of that truth, but we need to patiently extend to everyone, gentleness and reverence; because everyone grows in the spirit in God’s time, not our time.

I started this sermon with a description of a scene from a movie about two friends talking about their religious beliefs. One of the friends ‘won’ their debate about who’s god was greater. Their conversation resulted in no-one changing their minds; neither of their beliefs was challenged; there was no spiritual growth in either one of them. As Christians, our Savior and God expects more from us. For we are to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that Jesus has commanded of us.

We possess all the tools necessary to do the good work. We have God’s Truth; the Good News that we are all forgiven in Jesus Christ.

We can practice living into and using the fruits of the Spirit to spread the Good News.

We have the Advocate, the Spirit of Truth as our partner working with us – as long as we practice our outreach patiently in gentleness and reverence. 

The World has never needed the Good News of Jesus Christ more than it does right at this moment. The Greek philosophers and thinkers in Athens invited the Apostle Paul to come and speak to them. The Areopagus in Athens was the Facebook of their time, and these Greek thinkers craved what was new and different – just as the social media platforms of our time are always looking for that idea or image which will go viral.

What we have to offer is not merely different; it is completely at odds with the message of the world and completely affirming at one and the same time. Our message is like a cool drink of water when we are thirsty. Our message encourages and uplifts the spirit.

We can be that quiet voice which speaks to each person in gentleness with reverence.

We can be that listening ear, to each person that needs to be heard.   

We can bring about the kingdom of God, each one of us – one to another.

Acts 17:22-31

Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious 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. 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 nations 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 grope 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.’

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.”

1 Peter 3:13-22

Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good? But even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence. Keep your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God’s will, than to suffer for doing evil. For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water. And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you– not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him.

John 14:15-21

Jesus said, ”If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

”I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”