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? We are dealing right now with extraordinary disagreements on politics, culture, the economy, and even religious assumptions.
Paul’s response offers a path in Athens 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 in Greek myths.
What Pastor Emillie preached so eloquently about the importance of music and spirituality the week before last finds a surprising resonance in Hadestown. In it, Orpheus sings of a world as it could be, a world of beauty, reciprocity, and trust. His song rises in defiance of Hades, whose realm is built on fear, scarcity, and control. The tragedy is not only that Eurydice is lost, but that the world itself has been structured so that such loss feels inevitable.
In Acts 17, Paul walks into a different kind of underworld. Not beneath the earth, but embedded in culture itself. 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 honors their longing: “I see how extremely religious you are in every way.” Then he points to that 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 something unsettling: humans build systems to manage our fears. And once we build them, those systems shape us.
In Hadestown, the workers forget the sky. They sing, but not in hope. Their labor becomes identity; their captivity becomes normal. Orpheus sings a different song that he sees as true. His song resists a world that insists, “This is just how things are.”
Paul does something similar in Athens. He does not 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 add to the shelf, but the One in whom “we live and move and have our being.” Do we believe this is babble or inspiration?
And here, both stories reach their turning point: a reliance on trust.
For Orpheus, trust is tested in the long ascent out of the underworld. He walks ahead of Eurydice, forbidden to look back. Trust becomes the fragile thread stretched between love and fear. And we know how it ends. He turns. Not because he is uniquely flawed, but because he is profoundly human. The world Hades built trains him to doubt. In one moment, that doubt undoes everything.
Paul, too, calls for a turning and calls it repentance. No shame, but reorientation. A willingness to rethink everything we assumed about God and reality. He points to resurrection and to a God who has already stepped into death and undone its finality.
And yet, like the whispering Fates in Hadestown, the world continues to teach us doubt.
We discussed last week the truth about how the world often feels: systems of fear are powerful, trust is fragile and love may falter under pressure.
But Acts 17 dares to proclaim a deeper truth: the God who made the world is not trapped within it. These "underworlds" we build are not ultimate. There is a reality beyond them, alive and active, calling us toward something new.
We may ask if hope is an act of resistance or of human wishfulness? Maybe it is both. Or maybe it is something stronger: a response to a voice that is calling us.
Because even as humans doubt, like Orpheus, we are still called to sing the song. To imagine a better world even when the evidence is thin. To resist is a kind of defiant, creative hope that always carries the echo of something holy.
Paul’s message pushes us further still. Not just to hope, but to root that hope in something beyond ourselves. The “unknown God” is not distant or hidden, but near, closer than breath to holding the whole story, even when we can barely name it.
So in the end, the question lingers: will we fearfully live in some unchangeable underworld? Or will we dare to trust that another reality is already breaking in, calling us to turn, to hope, and to live as if resurrection is not just possible, but already underway?
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