There are some passages of Scripture that feel like home to me. They do not simply report what happened long ago, as if the Bible were only a record of someone else’s encounter with God. They help me recognize where I am standing right now. They give language to things I have felt but could not quite name, and they remind me that the life of faith often begins not with certainty, but with attention.
Acts 17 is one of those passages. Paul arrives in Athens and begins to walk. That detail matters to me because walking is different from conquering, different from correcting, and different from assuming that we already know what is happening before we have paid attention. Paul does not begin by shouting. He does not begin by condemning. He does not begin with a list of everything the Athenians have gotten wrong. He walks, observes, listens, and notices. That feels like a deeply faithful way to begin. It also feels like a posture many of us need to recover.
I have been thinking about that posture a lot. The posture of the curious preacher. The attentive walker. The person who is not trying to drag God into a place where God has never been, but is trying to notice where God has already left traces of divine presence. Howard Thurman once counseled us to “look out on life with quiet eyes,” and that phrase has been working on me. Quiet eyes are not passive eyes. They are eyes that have stopped grabbing, sorting, labeling, and defending long enough to receive what is actually there. They are eyes that can notice the altar before they critique the city.
When Paul sees the altar dedicated “to an unknown God,” he does not treat it as proof that Athens is hopelessly lost. He treats it as a doorway. He sees longing carved into stone. He sees a confession that there is something more, something holy, something worth reaching toward, even if the people do not yet know how to name it. That altar is not only evidence of confusion. It is also evidence of humility. Somebody, somewhere in that city, had enough honesty to admit that their religious language had not exhausted the mystery.
That, I think, is not only an ancient condition. It is a human condition. It is a valley condition. It is our condition. Most of us know what it feels like to sense that something is missing, not necessarily because life is terrible or because we have failed, but because even a life full of work, family, responsibility, achievement, and activity can still carry an ache underneath it all. There is a hunger in us for something deeper than success, wider than comfort, and more lasting than whatever happens to be demanding our attention today.
Paul does not condemn that hunger. He honors it. He says, in effect, let me tell you about the One you have already been reaching for. I am struck by how different that is from the kind of witness many of us inherited or imagined. There is a kind of religious witness that assumes God belongs to us and absence belongs to others. There is a kind of witness that imagines the world as a spiritual desert until we arrive with water. Paul’s witness in Athens seems gentler, wiser, and more truthful than that. He does not bring God to Athens as if God had been waiting for Paul’s travel schedule. He points to the God already nearer than the Athenians knew.
That is a very different kind of witness than the one I once imagined. When I was younger, I thought of witnessing mostly as bringing Jesus somewhere. I thought of mission as carrying God into places where God was absent. I thought I was going overseas to bring Jesus to people who did not have him yet. There was sincerity in that, and there was also a kind of spiritual narrowness I could not see at the time. It took me years to realize that God had arrived long before me.
God was already present in the streets I walked, in the people I met, in the meals shared, in the beauty of ancient stones and modern neighborhoods, in the questions people were asking, and in the longings they did not always know how to voice. I was not bringing God as much as learning to notice God. I was not the owner of divine presence. I was a witness to it. That is what Paul seems to know in Athens, and that is what I am still learning here in this valley, in this congregation, and in my own soul.
Paul’s language is breathtaking: “In him we live and move and have our being.” I do not hear that as a casual thought or as a poetic way of saying God is somewhere nearby. I hear it as a claim about reality itself. We are not reaching across a great distance toward a distant God. We are already held in the life of God. We are already surrounded by the presence of God. We are already breathing, loving, grieving, working, resting, and hoping inside the life of God.
Augustine gave language to this same mystery when he prayed to God, “You were more inward to me than my most inward part and higher than my highest.” That line has stayed with Christians for centuries because it tells the truth about how strange and intimate God’s presence really is. God is not merely beyond us. God is also nearer to us than we are to ourselves. God is not simply at the end of a long spiritual search. God is the One in whom the search is taking place.
That changes how I see people. It changes how I see neighbors who would never use the same religious language I use. It changes how I hear someone say, “There has to be more than this.” It changes how I look at a parent sitting quietly beside a child’s bed, a farmer rising before dawn to tend the land, a neighbor arriving with a casserole after a death because they do not know what else to do, but they know they have to do something. Those are not moments outside the reach of God. They may be altars to the unknown God. They may be places where divine presence is already being sensed, even if it has not yet been named.
This is why I keep coming back to the word “we.” It is such a small word, but it carries a whole theology. You cannot say we and mean only yourself. We requires relationship. It requires at least two. It refuses isolation. It assumes connection. I wonder whether our deepest spiritual problem is that we keep trying to live against the grammar of creation. We keep trying to turn “we” into “me,” and every time we do, something in us becomes smaller, lonelier, and more afraid.
What if “we” is not only a feature of grammar? What if it is a feature of God? The Christian tradition speaks of God as Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I will not pretend that I can explain the mystery of the Trinity in a neat paragraph. But this much I believe: at the center of reality, there is relationship. There is no lonely God. There is mutual love, self-giving, communion, and delight. God is not an isolated individual ruling the universe from a distance. God is communion. God is relationship. God is, in the deepest possible sense, a holy we.
Catherine Mowry LaCugna wrote that “God is essentially relational,” and that insight helps me understand why the doctrine of the Trinity matters for ordinary Christian life. The Trinity is not a puzzle for theologians to solve while everyone else waits politely for something practical. The Trinity tells us that relationship is not an afterthought. Communion is not a church program. Belonging is not a sentimental add-on to faith. Relationship is woven into the very life of God, and if we are made in the image of God, then we are made for communion too.
This does not mean that we erase difference or pretend harm has not happened. It does not mean that every relationship is safe, or that reconciliation can be cheaply demanded from those who have been wounded. A “we” worldview is not the same thing as niceness. It is deeper and more demanding than that. It means the deepest truth about us is not separation. The deepest truth is that all of us live and move and have our being in God, and because of that, I cannot fully become myself by denying your humanity.
Desmond Tutu spoke from the African tradition of ubuntu when he said, “My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours.” That is not a slogan. It is a spiritual anthropology. It tells us that being human is not something we accomplish alone. We become human with and through one another. If you are diminished, I am diminished. If you are treated as disposable, something in me is damaged too. If I build my identity by standing above you or against you, I have misunderstood both you and myself.
Dorothy Day put it with aching simplicity: “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.” I hear Acts 17 in that sentence. I hear the altar to the unknown God. I hear Paul standing in the middle of the Areopagus, speaking to people who had built temples and altars and systems of meaning, yet still had room for one more inscription, one more question, one more confession of longing. The long loneliness is not solved by more noise, more success, more certainty, or more winning. It is answered by love, and love comes with community.
This is also why Jesus matters so much to me. If God can sometimes feel too large, too mysterious, or too hard to name, Jesus gives us a picture. In Jesus, we see what the life of God looks like when it walks among us. It looks like someone who loves recklessly. It looks like someone who eats with the wrong people. It looks like someone who refuses to answer violence with violence. It looks like someone who tells stories about lost sheep, lost coins, lost sons, and a God who never stops searching.
Richard Rohr’s work in The Universal Christ has helped many people recover a larger vision of Christ’s presence in creation. Rohr writes that the first incarnation was the moment in Genesis when God joined in unity with the physical universe and became “the light inside of everything.” I know not everyone will use that language in exactly the same way, and it deserves careful theological conversation. Still, I find something deeply resonant in the claim that Christ does not represent God’s sudden interest in the world after a long absence. Christ reveals the pattern that has always been true: God is for creation, with creation, and lovingly present within creation.
That does not make Jesus less important to me. It makes Jesus more beautiful. Jesus is not the exception to God’s character. Jesus is the clearest revelation of it. In him we see the love that has always been holding the world together. In him we see the God who does not stand far off from human longing, suffering, joy, and flesh. In him we see that God’s answer to the world is not escape from creation, but communion with it. The Word becomes flesh, and suddenly we are invited to see all flesh differently.
Once we begin to see that, witness becomes less about winning arguments and more about pointing. Less about carrying God into the world and more about naming the God who is already there. Less about proving we are right and more about helping one another recognize the holy presence that has been holding us all along. The church is not at its best when it acts like the sole distributor of God. The church is at its best when it becomes a community trained to notice, name, embody, and celebrate the God in whom all things live.
I want to become that kind of witness. I want to become more attentive. I want to walk through my community with better eyes, quieter eyes, and a less anxious spirit. I want to notice the inscriptions of God’s presence in ordinary places: in fields and kitchens, hospital rooms and classrooms, grief and laughter, silence and song. I want to learn how to say, gently and truthfully, “What you have been reaching for has a name.”
And I want to remember that I am reaching too. This reflection is not only about other people and their unnamed longings. It is about mine. It is about the part of me that still forgets God is near. It is about the part of me that still slips into us-them thinking. It is about the part of me that still assumes I need to manufacture meaning, rather than receive the life of God already holding me. It is about the part of me that needs to hear Paul say again that God is not far from each one of us.
Maybe that is the good news we need right now. Not that we have finally mastered the mystery, but that the mystery has been holding us all along. Not that we have reached God by our own brilliance, but that God has always been nearer than we knew. Not that the world is divided into those who possess God and those who do not, but that all of us are being invited to wake up to the One in whom we live, move, and have our being.
Paul’s word in Athens is still good news. God is not far from each one of us. We are not alone in a cold and empty universe. We are not isolated selves trying to invent our own meaning from scratch. We are held in the life of God, drawn toward communion, and invited to become the kind of people who reveal what has been true all along: all of us, together, already, live inside the love of God.
