Day of Praise

Tue, 02/28/17, "Day of Praise"

"Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: 'Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.'" - Acts 17:22-23

When I was in seminary in Philadelphia, PA, I was blessed every night to have a classmate, named Mary Gabler, who led a beautiful little service of prayer and chanting, called Compline. It didn't hurt that Mary had performed on Broadway and sang like someone famous. But what made the service special was a collective hunger for God that was so thick that you could cut it with a knife. 

Whether it was four people or twenty-four people gathered around that single, brightly-burning candle, you could feel God fill the silence and the space of that cavernous church with his unquestionable presence. It wasn't hocus pocus. What it was is that it was late. We were all tired, bone tired, from serving and studying and working three jobs to make ends meet (even with the dirt-cheap white-labeled government food from the food bank that was started by my forty-one year old classmate, Jack Farwig, and his wife, Mary Beth, who needed to feed their five kids.)

Yes, we were all tired and ready for bed, but not so tired to keep many of us from walking to the far end of campus for twenty-five minutes of heaven. 

The leader began by chanting scripture, "Hear my prayer, O Lord." And we chanted the scripture in reply, "Listen to my cry." Then the leader chanted, "Keep me as the apple of your eye." Then we'd reply as one, "Hide me in the shadow of your wings."

Thus began the last words, God's words, that most of us heard audibly each night before the blaring alarm would call us to a new day just a few short hours later.

Now, twenty-five-plus years later, a few times a year, mostly at the beginning of Holy Week before Easter, we share that little, slice-of-Heaven, prayer service at our church here in Birmingham.

I tell you all this because it reminds me that there are things in life that just flat out testify to how much we hunger for God. I mean, why do y'all read this little Day of Praise every day and then pass it on to your friends who ask to be put on the list? I write this little thing for the same reason that all of you read it, namely, we all hunger for God. 

And we all want to be a part of a group of people who hunger for God. That's why God gave us the church, the family of God, the fellowship of believers, people who follow Jesus all the way to the next person so we can tell them about Jesus, whether it's men eating wings or discussing John Eldredge's "Wild at Heart," or young moms who want to know if anyone else feels exhausted and bleary-eyed, or widows at a Merry Widows dinner, or a frail senior who's thankful for another day, or people just hangin' out on the church patio after worship.

When St. Paul said what he said to the Athenians in today's verse, he was saying, "I know something about you folks. You're hungry for God."

People, Paul wasn't a rocket scientist; he didn't even need to be discerning. He had just lived long enough, which doesn't have to be very long, to know that every human being longs to know and yearns to know and hungers to know the God who alone can feed your hunger and fill your soul and quench your thirst and forgive your sin and give you that peace and make your life so worth living that you're willing to give it up so others can have their hunger filled too. 

All Paul did was look for a connecting point, an empty spot that hungered to be filled. And finding that empty spot, Paul pointed it out to them, saying, "For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god."

And then he filled their hunger with the God who alone can satisfy, the God who alone can fill, saying, "Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you."

Friends, you have friends, and you have coworkers. You have friends and coworkers who are hungry. And, having God, through faith in Jesus Christ, you have the ability to feed your hungry friends and coworkers. 

Get together. Eat some wings. Discuss a book. See if anyone else feels bleary-eyed. Go to a widows dinner or a Seniors luncheon. Hang out on a patio doin' nothin' but talkin'. Find a connecting point. And connect it to Jesus. 

It's enough to feed your hunger when everyone's hungry for God.

And God says that everyone is!

Praise God!