The Creator or the Created?

Here is my wife Beth's devotion for this past Sunday for our congregation. 

Sharpening Our Focus: The Creator or the Created? 

Devotion for July 12, 2020 

Beth Stroble 

The scripture for this week’s worship recounts the apostle Paul’s encounter with the Athenians, as he interacts with a council named the Areopagus in a location of the same name (more often identified as Mars Hill during this time of Roman rule): 

Paul stood up in the middle of the council on Mars Hill and said, “People at Athens, I see that you are very religious in every way. As I was walking through town and carefully observing your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: ‘To an unknown God.’” (Acts 17: 22-23a) 

Various sources indicate that this longstanding council of Athenian elders ruled on matters of importance to the city with a conservative focus—maintaining traditional religious festivals and rites and defending the Greek practices of honoring many gods, even an “unknown god.” Paul had been interacting with those who worshipped God in the synagogue but also spoke regularly in the marketplace. He, like anyone who visits Athens even to this day, noticed the abundant stone edifices to the Greek gods. Called upon by the Council to explain this new teaching he espoused, he built a bridge from their idolatrous traditions and practices to identify the God who is known, referring to their own poets to establish God as their creator, not the creation of human imagination. 

What you worship as unknown, I now proclaim to you. God, who made the world and everything in it, is Lord of heaven and earth. He doesn’t live in temples made with human hands. Nor is God served by human hands, as though he needed something, since he is the one who gives life, breath, and everything else. From one person God created every human nation to live on the whole earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their lands. God made the nations so they would seek him, perhaps even reach out to him and find him. In fact, God isn’t far away from any of us. In God we live, move, and exist. As some of your own poets said, ‘We are his offspring.’ (verses 23b-28) 

From here, Paul concludes that there is no need to limit God to what humans can create from materials and their imaginations, boldly affirming God’s saving grace through the resurrection of the dead. 

As I studied this passage, I reflected first on how Paul not only confronted the Athenians’ idolatry as wrong but turned their love of monuments on its head to make the God we worship known to them. Then I thought about the current debates about the presence of monuments to historical figures. The arguments advanced for preserving these statues or removing them are certainly fraught with 

many implications. As we memorialize humans in the form of statuary, those works of human creation are more reflective of those who choose to create them than those who are honored. Like the statues of Greek gods, they are crafted from our human imaginations. Our reverence for the person and the statue become conflated in ways that make objective discussion about their historic importance and contemporary meaning challenging. Have we, too, lapsed into an almost idolatrous regard as a result of these memorialized legacies? 

Methodism stands in a tradition that values the arts as a companion to worship and vehicle for meditation on God’s power and grace. The arts can capture our deepest connections to God’s presence in our lives, sharpening our focus on God the creator. The arts are a gift from God to deepen our faith, to surpass the limits of our understanding, and function as a medium for placing God’s love at the center of our hearing and seeing. 

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Dear God, help us to focus on you as our Creator, our Savior, our Sustainer. As your creation, we worship you, we praise you, we thank you for the abiding presence of your love. May we keep our focus on the vastness of your being and avoid the human failing of self-focus that limits our understanding of your power and grace, gifts without measure nor limitation. Amen.