Oddly, each story meditates on a question that is top of my mind lately: What should we do when we inherit a world already formed by forces beyond us, with political systems, cultural norms, economic pressures, and even religious implications?
Paul’s response offers a path that is neither withdrawal nor domination. First, he pays attention. He walks the city. He observes. He listens in the marketplace and the synagogue. Before he speaks, he understands. This matters. It’s tempting to either reject the world outright or accept it uncritically, but Paul does neither. He refuses to be blind to either the beauty or the brokenness.
Next, he finds points of connection. Standing at the Areopagus, he doesn’t begin by condemning the Athenians’ beliefs. Instead, he names their longing: “I see how religious you are.” He even quotes their own poets. Most strikingly, he points to an altar “to an unknown god” and says: What you are already reaching for, I will name.
This is crucial. When living in a world shaped by powers we didn’t choose, the answer is not simply to tear everything down. There are fragments of truth, echoes of longing, signs of God for those who look. The task is to discern and call them out without confusion. We can also look for those fragments while exploring the Greek myths.
What Pastor Emillie preached eloquently last Sunday about the importance of music and our spirituality, I see this clearly in Anaïs Mitchell's folk opera Hadestown, Orpheus sings of a world as it could be, a world of beauty, reciprocity, and trust. That song echoes against the machinery of Hades, whose realm is built on fear, scarcity, and control. The tragedy is not just that Eurydice is lost, but that the world itself has been structured to find security in a way that this loss feels inevitable.
In Acts 17, Paul the Apostle walks into Athens and finds a different underworld. Rather than being beneath the earth, it is embedded in culture. He sees a city “full of idols,” a landscape of competing loyalties, partial truths, and spiritual confusion. Yet instead of condemning it outright, Paul listens. He observes. He even affirms their longing: “I see how extremely religious you are in every way.” Then he points to an altar inscribed “To an unknown god” and says, in essence: You are reaching for something real, even if you don’t yet know its name.
Both stories recognize that humans build deities, economic and cultural systems to manage our fears. As they are built, those systems begin to shape us.
In Hadestown, the workers in the underworld forget the sky. They sing in rhythm, but not in hope. Their labor becomes identity; their captivity becomes normal. Orpheus will sing a different song, not because it is practical, but because it is true. His song is an act of resistance against a world that says, “This is just how things are.”
Paul does something similar in Athens. He doesn’t simply tear down their worldview; he reorients it. He speaks of a God who is not confined to temples made by human hands, who is not served as though in need, and who gives life and breath to all. This God is not another idol to be added to the shelf, but the one in whom “we live and move and have our being.”
The turning point in this Acts passage and Hadestown is, just like Paul and Silas in prison last week, a call to trust. For Orpheus, he is tested through his terrible walk out of the underworld, leading Eurydice upward, forbidden to look back. Trust becomes the narrow path between love and fear. And we know how the myth will always end. Ultimately, he looks back. Not because he is faithless, but because he is human. The world Hades built has taught him doubt, and in a single moment, that doubt undoes everything.
Paul calls his listeners to a kind of turning, to “repent,” which in this context means to rethink, to reorient their understanding of God and reality. He points to resurrection and to God who has already stepped into death and undone its finality. And yet, like Orpheus' Fates, the lessons of this world continually teach us to doubt.
Hadestown tells the truth about the world as it often feels to us. Systems of fear are powerful. Trust is fragile. Love can fail under pressure.
Acts 17 proclaims a deeper truth to hang onto if we can. The God who made the world is not trapped within it. The systems we build, our “underworlds”, are not ultimate. There is a reality beyond them that is alive and calling us toward something new. Is hanging onto that truth hope or only human hubris?
Even as humans doubt, like Orpheus, we are called to sing the old song anyway. We imagine a better world, even when the evidence is thin. To resist the quiet normalization of injustice, fear, and despair. That kind of creative faith, which is hopeful and defiant, will forever resonate as holy to the living.
Paul’s message invites us beyond limitations. Not to abandon longing, but to ground it in something more enduring than our own resolve or even our reason and everyday "logic". The “unknown God” is not distant or hidden, but nearer and already holding and telling man's overarching story, even when we barely dare to speak it.
In the end, all this leaves us with a question: Will we live as if the world of Hades is all there is, closed, fearful, and unchangeable or will we dare to hope and believe that a deeper reality will break into this world. One that invites us to trust, to turn, and to live as if resurrection is not just possible, but already underway?
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