Scripture: Acts 17:22-28; John 3:16 Series: 2022
Third in the ‘How to Build a Car’ series, this sermon treats Scripture as the church’s ‘power unit’ fuel that must be returned to again and again. Using Paul’s Areopagus speech (Acts 17), Wilson argues that God is the source in whom we live and move and have our being, and that this source, once unknown, has been revealed in Jesus Christ to all people openly, not as secret knowledge for a select few. The Bible is the fuel because Christ is most fully revealed there, but it must be read together rather than à la carte. He offers two interpretive keys: reading through the love commandments (love of God and neighbor) and using clear passages to interpret obscure ones. Unlike fossil fuel, Scripture never runs dry.
Illustrations: formula-one-power-unit, f1-ethanol-fuel-ratio, f1-trade-secrets, church-roofs-like-ark, greek-pantheon-monotheism, secret-society-handshake, bible-app-plans, jefferson-bible, fossil-fuel-versus-scripture
May 15
The Power Unit
Paul stood up in the middle of the council on Mars Hill and said, “People of Athens, I see that you are very religious in every way. As I was walking through town and carefully observing your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: ‘To an unknown God.’ What you worship as unknown, I now proclaim to you. God, who made the world and everything in it, is Lord of heaven and earth. He doesn’t live in temples made with human hands. Nor is God served by human hands, as though he needed something, since he is the one who gives life, breath, and everything else. From one person God created every human nation to live on the whole earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their lands. God made the nations so they would seek him, perhaps even reach out to him and find him. In fact, God isn’t far away from any of us. In God we live, move, and exist. As some of your own poets said, ‘We are his offspring.’ Acts 17:22-28
In Formula One, the engine is called the power unit. They kind of put everything together: engine, battery, transmission and it is all custom. Dodge doesn’t want to make one Dodge charger. You want to make a million. You don’t want to make one Porsche Carrera. You want to make a million, But with formula one, they try to make at least two, sometimes a replacement, but at least two. Unlike the chassis and the aerodynamics of the car, the power unit of any car continually needs fuel and to be refueled. Nowadays in Formula One, they don’t have to refuel a car during a race anymore. The fuel is set at the very beginning of the race. And so the car is going to get lighter as the race continues. Between races, though, the cars have to be refueled. Technology has changed, but modes of transportation always need some sort of fuel. Horses need to eat and drink. Sailboats are propelled by the wind and if there is no wind, you’re not going to go anywhere. Wind is not really fuel, though. You don’t need to refuel a sailboat, but you have to refuel the sailors to keep the boat afloat. From its early days, the church was often compared to the arc (like Noah’s arc) in which the word of God is floating. This is why the top of many churches look like the bottom of boats. This is intentional. In this age of the world, more than the boat, the car is the way people move through the world. And even if you have a hybrid or an all electric car, you need fuel for your power unit.
My friends, we are continuing our series on How to Build a Car, looking at the church at its best, what it can be in this time, not what we want it to be, but what God can do with us in the world. We started looking at the chassis of the car and the the foundation of the church. How the foundation of the church is not just Jesus but hearing the word of God and doing it, putting it into practice. The foundation is both Jesus and Following Jesus. Then we talked about aerodynamics and how we can either cause drag to the movement of the Holy Spirit or cause some downforce that helps the church navigate in this world. Today, we’re going to talk about the power unit. The development of the power unit usually takes place separately from the development of every other aspect of the car. There were only a few engine manufacturers: there are 10 teams (Red Bull, Mercedes, Ferrari, McLaren, Alpine, Alpha Tauri, Aston Martin, Alfa Romeo, Haas, and Williams), and really only four engine manufacturers. There’s Mercedes, that won a lot of championships over the last decade. There is Ferrari, which is in the lead this year, there is Renaud, the French car company that powers the Alpine team. And Red Bull/Honda. It’s a Honda power unit, but it’s not branded as Honda. So this means that six of the teams hire out, or contract out the manufacturing of the power unit because developing and building the power units takes a lot of expertise. And it’s not something that you can alter and tinker with as much during the year as you can do with other aspects of the car. Each team can receive one full upgrade of a power unit, but otherwise you are kind of stuck with it. It is a massive penalty for a third upgrade. Other aspects of the car can be tinkered with throughout the year like, the aerodynamics, and keep improving it. The big aspect of the power unit though, that the team can tinker with is the fuel ratio. There were a number of changes in Formula Onethis season, including a new fuel ratio. They moved from an E5 to an E10 concerning the amount of ethanol. If you are a car guy or car girl, you probably have some thoughts on that, that is, about the propensity of ethanol to degrade into water and cause rust and damage inside the engine. Getting the right mix matters tremendously because you want the lightest fuel that will also give you the most power. You want to keep the weight of the car down and keep power up throughout the race.
What is the fuel of the church? What is the source in which we return to, again and again, to which we have to keep coming back? In Acts chapter 17, Paul is in Athens, the great city, in what we now call Greece. The citizens of Athens had a pantheon of gods, but I think modern retellings of the Greek gods, like Zeus and Poseidon and Aphrodite, made them much more systematic than they really were in practice. We synthesize a system that was much more haphazard in the ancient world. The gods plural weren’t truly an everyday part of normal people’s lives. They were more like reference points for different activities that you did. As well, by the time of Socrates and Plato, monotheism had held a strong position in Athenian philosophy and theology. Plato posits the existence of one God; Aristotle even more so. And this God isn’t named Uranus or Zeus. The Greeks weren’t willy-nilly polytheists believing credulously anything that people tell them. They were sophisticated thinkers of the world, trying to understand what, where they come from, what it means to be a good person, what a good society would look like.
And so Paul comes to preach On the Mars Hill, on the Areapagitica. This is where Paul presents the Christian faith in full to the pagan world. He’s trying to articulate that the source of the pagan world of the Greeks is the same source as the one of the Jews and the Christians. Which is itself, a radical claim. The gods of ancient Greece did not claim universality. They claimed to be the God of the Greeks. The other people around the world had other gods, and that was fine for the Greeks. But what Paul does here is connect the Greek religion with Christian faith. The Godhead is the same for groups and Christians. God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being. God is the source. Paul says that he found an inscription to an unknown God. And so what he’s doing now is that he is claiming that the unknown has been made known in Jesus Christ. We call this revelation. It has been revealed. The reality of the world has been revealed. The reality of creation has been revealed. We now know the truth and this truth isn’t secret. The truth isn’t private. It is offered to all. The truth is offered freely to all. The source from which we come, the source in which we live and flourish has been revealed to all. And that source is Jesus Christ. Getting back to auto racing, one of the aspects that leads to competition in Formula One is secrecy around the development of different aspects of the car. It’s all a bunch of trade secrets between the different teams. Other teams can see what’s on the outside. They can see what’s going on with the external design of the car. They can’t see inside. They are not going to share their own mixture of fuel, as well as the connection between the power unit, breaks, tires, gearbox, etc.. There’s a trade secret. Some people claiming to follow Christ throughout the years have claimed access to a secret, access to secret knowledge about God only for the select. There is a secret knowledge. And it was for the special few, kind of like a secret society or secret club with a secret handshake. Are you one of the in-group or the out-group? Are you on my side or the other side? As Paul says on the Mount of the Mars hill, what has been unknown is now known and revealed to all. This is it. This is the source. It is not Paul. It is not Apollos. It is not Peter or Wilson or Matt or Jim. This is the power. That you were loved by God. You are created for a purpose. You were forgiven of your mistakes and you’re strengthened by the spirit. And you’ve got to come back for this fuel. You gotta refuel. You have return again to the source. What has been revealed around about God is revealed most fully in the scriptures, in the Bible. For the Bible really is our fuel in the church. God is the source in whom we live and move and have our being. The Bible is the source of our knowledge of God. We experience God outside the Bible. We experience God in the morning and the evening: when we awake, when we walk, when we see the flowers and the sunrise and the sun glistening off the lake, when we cry, when we sing, when we laugh, when we experience God. But when we return to Scripture and understand are connection to God, our source and resource with God, we are refueled by God’s love and truth. The Bible has been abused and can be abused. Not because it is ineffective, but because we are humans and we can abuse anything that is good. There is no gift that cannot be turned away from its original purpose. When we read it apart from the self-giving love of Christ, the Bible can serve to justify our own sin and desire for domination. Reading Scripture together keeps us from this temptation.
Some people are very familiar with the Bible. They have been reading it all their life. They are involved in numerous Bible studies. For others, the Bible can be intimidating. “I believe Jesus is Lord, but scripture or the Bible isn’t easy. I mean, I don’t even know if he should call it scripture or the Bible. And then it’s written in these other languages. It’s written in Hebrew, Ancient Hebrew and common Greek. And there’s a little Aramaic in the Old Testament, as well. Do I need to know all of these things? The Bible is the fuel of our power unit, because that is where Christ is most fully revealed, but we must read it together. We must live it together. We must offer it publicly and openly. There is no trade secrets from scripture. There’s no trade secret for preachers. We don’t have all the answers to the Bible. The Bible is always the most powerful when read together. When the child, the elder, the preacher together look at scripture, seeking to understand what God is doing.
The experience of Scripture gives rise to wonder and to questions, and such questions bring readers into contact with the diverse worlds of meaning behind, of, and in front of the texts of Christian Scripture. But all such worlds, for Christian readers, are centered on and find their right place relative to Jesus Christ who is the fullness of the self-revelation of the Triune God…The Christian reader thus takes all thoughts captive unto Christ.1
We have Bible studies at the church. We have our Sunday school. We have Sunday school class at 10 or the Bible B’s on Wednesday night. I’m looking to start a new Bible study soon. We have opportunities to enter more into scripture. If you want to take a step, the easiest way is to download the Bible app on your phone. And there’s a bunch of plans and you can just start with a plan. You can listen to an audio version of almost of the whole Bible in almost any version. You can listen to scripture while you’re doing the dishes or while you’re driving to work. Even when we study it alone, if something comes up and you have a question, you can come and talk to me and I may have an answer. I may not have an answer, but we will look at it together.
If we are going to truly be the church at its best, Scripture has to be our source. How we read the Bible matters. There’s some things in the Bible that are jarring to modern sensibilities. There’s some things in the Bible that I don’t understand. And the simple way is to read the Bible à la carte, that is to pick and choose the things I like and the things I don’t. The problem is that if I do that, then it centers the Bible on me and not on God. An example of this is the Jefferson Bible.
Instead of reading the Bible à la carte, we can look at scripture through the lens of the love commandments: love of God and love of neighbor. Do I see the love of God and love of neighbor in this verse? If I do Thanks be to God. It will enlighten me. If I do not, I need to pray about that. Not strip the Bible of the uncomfortable parts, but seek for it to be revealed in another season. Another way to read hard passages is to use the clear passages to interpret the more obscure ones. There are some clear passages: “For God so loved the world that he gave His only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” God loves the world. This is clear. When I come across a confusing passage, like those found in the book of Joshua and the invasion of Canaan, I’m going to use the clear passages to interpret the obscure one. The Bible is our source because it never runs dry. We need to keep refueling, but we’re never going to get to the point where it’s empty. It’s not like fossil fuel. There will come a day, who knows when, when there is no more petroleum to be found in any part of the earth. On that day, whether it’s in 50 years or 500 years, the Bible will still be as fresh and full as it is today. The source and whom we live and move have our being is here. Our power unit is here. Let us be propelled forward as a body to love and serve and give together through the word. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for revealing yourself to us through the scriptures. Help us to be a people of the book who are open to your movements here and now, in reading and listening and learning together, how to be your people in this world. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Footnotes
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Gordon, 268. ↩