The Rev. Dr. Brandon Perrine
Easter 6A
Acts 17:22-31
May 10, 2026
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. The God who made the world and everything in it, who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is served by human hands, as though God needed anything, since God gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor all peoples were made to inhabit the whole earth, and the times were allotted of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps fumble about and find God—though indeed God is not far from each one of us. For ‘In God we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we, too, are God’s 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 all people everywhere are commanded to repent, because a day has been fixed on which the world will be judged in righteousness by a man whom God has appointed, and of this assurance has been given to all by raising him from the dead.”
~o~
A kindergarten teacher was observing her classroom of children while they drew. She would occasionally walk around to see each child’s artwork. As she came to one little girl who was working diligently, she asked what she was drawing. The girl replied, “I’m drawing God.” The teacher paused and said, “But no one knows what God looks like.” Without missing a beat, or looking up from her drawing the girl replied, “They will in a minute.”1
Such confidence. Quite like the apostle Paul in our reading from the book of Acts. It’s one thing to talk about God. It’s another thing entirely to proclaim a God who changes what it means to be human—who frees people. Not just in some distant, spiritual sense—but in the texture of ordinary life. Freeing people to live differently, to see themselves differently, to imagine that the world itself could be different. Fresh off the boat in Athens, Acts tells us that Paul immediately became disturbed by the number of idols he found around the city. Always up for a debate, Paul argued in the synagogues and marketplaces with rabbis and philosophers and eventually ended up in the Areopagus—the high court of Athens. In the presence of the most powerful judges in the city- state, Paul delivered one of his most famous sermons.
Playing to the city’s deeply religious sensibilities, Paul remarked on seeing an altar to an unknown god. Like the little girl in the anecdote who was so sure of God’s appearance that she prepared to unveil the divine likeness for her classmates, Paul confidently told the Athenians who their unknown god surely was—none other than Jesus the Christ.
What must it have been like to listen to Paul, I wonder. His words did have an effect on at least some—including a woman named Damaris and one of the judges named Dionysus—but they remain voiceless in the story, so we don’t know exactly what they felt.
In a much-beloved second-century Christian writing, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, we get a glimpse of what Paul’s message could do in a person’s life. When Paul arrived in Iconium, the story says he began to preach. A young woman named Thecla sat at her window, spellbound by his words—ignoring her mother and resisting the future that had already been decided for her. When Paul was jailed, she visited him in prison, hanging on his every word. When he was tried, she appeared at his side—and for her defiance, she was sentenced to be burned. But the fire did not consume her. And neither did the expectations that had once defined her life.
Thecla went on to follow Paul, preaching, teaching, and claiming a life that had not been available to her before. The faith she encountered freed her—from fear, from constraint, from the limits imposed on her by her time. And in her freedom, others found freedom too. If Paul’s message could do that in Thecla’s life, what might it have done in Athens?
“God is not confined to shrines and idols,” Paul says. “God knows and values each and every person—giving them life, giving them place, plotting out their days. God is close to each one—so close that it is in God that we live and move and have our being. We are God’s beloved children—all of us.”
In a society built on the backs of enslaved people, where women had no voice, and those in poverty had no power—where your place in life was largely decided for you before you ever had a say—who might have heard that message as freedom? Who might have heard, for the first time, that they were not an afterthought—but beloved? Isn’t that exactly what Christian faith is meant to do—free people? And if it’s not, then either people who need freeing aren’t hearing the message, or the message they are hearing isn’t a message of freedom.
Paul refuses a God confined to shrines. And yet, we are still tempted to confine God—to our politics, to our fears, to systems that benefit some and harm others. We hear messages that draw hard lines between who belongs and who doesn’t, that baptize power instead of challenging it, that make some people smaller in order to make others feel secure—and call it faith. But they don’t speak for me. And they certainly don’t speak for Jesus.
If the Christian message isn’t freeing people from oppression, injustice, marginalization, need, hopelessness, and isolation, then either it’s not reaching the right people—or it’s not the right message. Christian faith frees people. And if we proclaim that kind of faith—then we are called to become the kind of people through whom others are set free. People who loosen what has been bound. People who tell the truth about dignity and belonging. People who refuse to accept that this is just the way things are.
Maybe that little girl was right. Maybe people will know what God looks like—in a minute—when they see what freedom looks like in us.
May it be so. Amen.
1 Marlo Thomas. “Picturing God,” Huffingtonpost.com, August 5, 2012.
