This is another one of the big parts of the story in Luke’s Acts...this is a fantastic scene.  Paul places himself in center of a philosophical debate with some local philosophers, different from the local religious leaders.  This is an important distinction because these philosophers were seeking truth, and they didn’t have anything to protect...they just wanted to learn and to grow.  That’s a great frame of mind in which to exist, especially when juxtaposed against the religious leaders who didn’t want the truth, they just wanted to protect their power.  And so Paul is teaching things around the community and he shows up where these men are meeting and they realize that he is the one teaching these things so they ask him to tell them what he’s telling everyone else around the community.  And here is how he starts:

22 “So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 24 The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, 25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything...” and Paul goes on; but the thing that has always stood out to me is this alter to the unknown god.  This sounds a lot like the prayer that we’ve all prayed at some point, before we became a Christian, and that many non-Christians pray in moments of great distress, “God, if you are out there, if you are real, I hope you can hear this...”.

These philosophers were just like us.  They are just like me.  They are just like you.  They want to know that there is some kind of a grand order in this crazy world.  They believe, deep down, that there is some kind of a plan unfolding in this world.  They want to believe there is a purpose in their pain, a reason for their life, and just in case they got it wrong and hadn’t identified the right god, they put an extra alter in place where they could say, should they figure out who that god is, “Oop, there you go, we knew you were there all along, but we didn’t know your name...that’s your spot right there!”.

There is a little of that in all of us.  We want to believe God is weaving a story to redeems our struggles and our victories, we want to believe our lives have a purpose.  Paul is leveraging that curiosity as a way to invite these folks to examine his claims.  And then, he shifts and instead of giving them a bunch of philosophical content, he drops the resurrection on them.  He cuts straight to the crux of the matter.

I love this because it reminds me that, as Christians, and as a part of our quest to be in the world in the sense that we should be using our influence and our gifts as a means to further God’s kingdom, we should continue to develop our tools for evangelism.  Paul clearly has a gift to meet people where they are, to read the situation and to speak into that situation powerfully.  We should all develop some of those skills.  In the same way, some people have a lot deeper talent in other areas of ministry, and they should develop those skills as well.  But we all can learn to be more like a chameleon from Paul, even if we know we won’t ever has his depth of skill in it.