Acts 17:22-31; 1 Peter 3:13-22; John 14:15-21 

One of the saddest things about Christianity is that we often let religion get in the way of encountering God.   Our inclination is to make God over in our own image, rather than being willing to discover what God's image looks -- face to face-- in Jesus of Nazareth. Today's gospel reading from John addresses this particular tendency of ours when Jesus tells the disciples that although the world will soon no longer see him, they will still have him present forever as their very own...and it reminded me of a young redheaded girl in one of the Sunday school classes I taught years ago. One morning, with children gathered close by, I asked them, "What would you do if Jesus walked into our church right now?"  After a long and edgy silence, the redhead spoke up, loudly and said, "I'd be scared silly".   I think that finally after all these years of letting her answer have its way with me, there are times I find myself wondering, "How willing am I to see Jesus, even though it will surely scare me silly?"

Usually we all lose our nerve and tell some other story rather than risk the Gospel story.  We choose to stay in our comfort zones rather than being "scared silly" by a story of Jesus who goes around turning everything religious on its head - like telling the poor that they're closer to heaven than the rich, inviting to the head of the table those the world would rather keep outside, and that Jesus was so full of eternal life that even murdering him couldn't keep him from rising from the dead.  It should scare us silly to take seriously that Jesus is really present with us at the altar during communion, that the Holy Spirit is really alive in the life of this parish community, that God made each of us in the divine image and wants us to act that way!

Today's Gospel lesson has Jesus telling his followers just before his death that although he's not going to be with them in the flesh forever, "I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever."   The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life just released its 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, in which it's reported that the fastest growing religious group in our nation is not Catholic or Protestant or Jewish, Muslim or Buddhist.  It's the 12.1% who when asked what they believed, answered simply, "nothing in particular"!

Lest we think our generation has invented this category, however, we need only to listen to Paul of Tarsus, who wrote most of the letters included in the New Testament, who one day while visiting Athens spoke to a group of Greek citizens, with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek, saying: "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.'

Paul knew how tempting it is to believe in religion, while not really believing in God, present and active in our very DNA.  He knew that to believe in "an unknown god" is to believe in "nothing in particular," while he wanted them to encounter in the midst of their lives "the God who made the world and everything in it." Let this Jesus, this God near, Paul tells the Athenians, even if it scares you silly!  And it probably will, since letting God close to your life day by day is far more dangerous than to believe in "nothing in particular"!