I preached this sermon on Sunday, May 10, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH. The lectionary text cited is Acts 17:22-31.
Have you ever wished you could go back and tell an old version of yourself something that they might need to know?
This weekend I’ve seen lots of old versions of myself—I started pulling out boxes of old photos and sifting through them in preparation for the wedding in June—Matt and I are putting together a little table with pictures and mementos for the reception.
So I’ve been looking at some way-back-when pictures from childhood, and high school, and young adulthood. And frankly I’d like to have a word with those earlier versions of myself.
I’d like to tell that little boy with an awkward smile on his face: don’t worry. There is indeed a place for you in this world.
I’d like to tell my high school self: Phil, that look was not fashionable even then. What were you thinking?!
And I’d like to tell my younger adult self: cherish your loved ones; you don’t know how long you will have them.
But, of course, we cannot access our old selves in that way. Each snapshot simply captures the best we knew at the time. So perhaps the best we can do now with those images of our old selves is to bless them, love them, and to forgive ourselves for all that we were, and all that we were not. Same goes for the photos of our mothers…and our fathers and friends and lost loves. Bless, love, forgive.
We have to do that, I think, if we ever hope to make peace with this life.
I also think that God looks upon us in the same way, from the wide perspective of time and with the deepest sense of peace. Because God knows our past and our future all at once; God can see where our lives fit together, and God can see where they’re broken, too. And whether we ever figure it all out for ourselves or not, God loves our lives anyway.
So I like to imagine God sitting somewhere in heaven, thumbing through the infinite snapshots of us, patiently and with great compassion, wanting to say, “just wait! It will often be better than you fear. And sometimes it will be harder than you think. But you can do it. You’ll see.”
I’m thinking about this not only because of my photo box, but because of our reading from Acts today, a passage I really love. Paul’s interaction with the Athenians gets to the heart of all our knowing and not knowing in this life, and it reveals what God wants to do about it.
The Athenians, you see, were very adept at knowing things. Though Athens was part of the Roman Empire in the apostles’ time, this ancient Greek city was the cradle of western art, philosophy, and politics. The Athenians KNEW many, many things and were proud of that knowledge.
And yet even they suspected that there were things that had escaped them along the way. They didn’t have embarrassing old photographs to remind them this was the case, but perhaps it was just a sneaking suspicion that for all their philosophical wisdom, they were still just barely brushing up against the great mystery of existence.
So Paul sees an altar in the city inscribed with the dedication “to an unknown God.”
Some scholars think this was a “blanket insurance policy” altar; that the people were ensuring no Roman deity was accidentally overlooked and therefore dishonored—sort of like our understanding of the “tomb of the unknown soldier” today.
Others think it was more abstract: an altar dedicated to that divine truth that is simply beyond all knowledge. But in either case, the Athenians knew that there was something that they did not know, and they wanted to honor it.
And then here comes Paul. We can think of his remarkable speech to them in a variety of ways—an early Christian sermon; a challenge to the Roman social order; a pastoral message—but I think it’s also something even more remarkable than any of that. I think it is like a message from some future version of ourselves. Let me explain what I mean.
Paul, when he had that Damascus road experience, did not just have a nice cozy little chat with the Risen Christ. They didn’t just sit down to tea. No, Paul was drawn into a direct encounter with Resurrection life—he saw, he felt, he was immersed in, the destiny of all of us—the very thing Jesus promises in today’s Gospel: how someday there will be no space between us anymore, no space between us and God, and all creation will be able to love and feel itself new and whole and fully alive.
That’s what Paul saw, and it blinded him for a bit, and it saved him, too, and he was driven and haunted by the vision of this great glory til his dying day. Understand that, and you will understand his whole ministry better.
And so he has come back from this encounter—as a sort of time traveler into God’s ultimate plan for us—to tell anyone and everyone what he has seen. In the same way that we wish we could go back and tell an older version of ourselves what to hope for, what to cherish, what to let go of—well, that’s what Paul is doing in all his speeches and letters—telling us what will ultimately come to pass, so that we might know what to bless, what to love, and what to forgive in the meantime.
What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.
Let me tell you about the bigger picture of yourself, Paul says. Let me tell you of the God who made you and loved you from the start. The God who came to be with you, and die for you, and who destroyed death for you. The God who, even now, holds your entire life in loving hands, all those snapshots that make up who you are becoming.
Let me introduce this God to you, Paul says. His name is Jesus.
I tell you all of this, friends, because every day I hear big, important questions being asked. I ask them, too. What will happen to the economy? What will the next election hold? How will we bridge our divides and care for our parents and raise our children and heal the earth and survive our grief? And how can we possibly do these things when the future looms like a great specter over us?
These are important questions that require us to work toward faithful answers.
But here’s the funny thing about Christian life: we work towards those answers while already knowing the ultimate Answer. We live our lives already having received the Truth about life. We pray for our daily bread having been fed with Living Bread. We know where it’s heading. We do not worship an unknown God anymore.
And if you forgot that, as it is so easy to do, let me introduce him to you. His name is Jesus. And he wants to share his Spirit of love and life and peace with you.
It’s true, we cannot reach those past versions of ourselves, but God can reach us here and now to tell us what will become of us. And in Jesus, that is exactly what God does.
In Jesus, we are given a message from that glorious future God has prepared for all the world, where justice rules and where love is the last word and where all those sweet, sad, awkward, partial snapshots of our lives have been gathered together into one big story, one Big Life, one diverse Kingdom.
So whenever you are feeling overwhelmed by the future; when you don’t quite know what to do next; when there are questions which seem to have no answers—first, lean on the people around you in this place. That is what we’re here for.
And second, think back to all those previous versions of yourself. Pull out a few old photos if it helps. And remember that you—that all of us—are still becoming all that God would have us be.
So try to bless this present version of yourself, and love it, and forgive it, just as God has always done.
(Except for some of those fashion choices of mine. Maybe some of those were unforgivable.) But all the rest of it, absolutely.
So I think the Athenians were half-right. We are always brushing up against the great mystery of existence.
But the good news is this: ours is not an altar to an unknown God. Because God is known. He has come, and lived, and died, and risen, so that we can finally know him.
And in case it’s been a while, let me introduce him to you.
His name is Jesus.
By Another Road 