In this passage we see Paul actively waiting – exploring the city of Athens and engaging with the culture. He started, as was his custom, at the synagogue, beginning at the religious center that was closest to his starting point, where religion is a matter of ethnicity and nationality. From there, he goes to the marketplace, a center of both material commerce and intellectual commerce.
We see in this Paul’s versatility – he can move between these two worlds and go back and forth between these cultural contexts in order to meet people where they are at and speak in their language.
From there, he is taken to the Areopagus, aka the Hill of Ares, aka Mars Hill if you ever wondered where that came from. The name was both a place and a ruling council that met there.
Note that Paul starts his Sermon by finding common ground, rather than by highlighting their divisions abs differences. Some might react against his use of something pagan in order to talk about God, but Paul does not shy away from it.
We have a tendency to be anthropocentric in how we look at the world and the Greek gods were examples of that. Paul worked to get them to look beyond their own humanity, including that humanity reflected in these invented deities. Paul specifically uses their own poetry to point out that God does not come from us, but we come from God.
How does this impact us? We also are called to engage the marketplace. We are not supposed to build our own fortress to hide away in and create our own culture, but we are to be out in the mix of the society that we live in. And we don’t always need to do it in the same way Paul did, by standing up in a public place and talking. God goes before us in the person of the Holy Spirit and all we have to do is be open to that He is doing. We don’t have to have it all put together, we just have to engage.
— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church, Lynnwood WA, May 14, 2023