Life on Mars

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
04.27.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Acts 17:22-31
We really, really, wanted there to be life on Mars. It’s our next door neighbor here in the solar system, and the hope in the heady early days of astronomy was that it would prove to be the home to intelligent life. From the observations of early skywatchers, and through the lenses of the first telescopes, those first scientists saw...or thought they saw...evidence that Mars was not all that different from our own home planet.

One hundred years ago, in fact, a book was published by famed early American astronomer Percival Lowell. In 1908 he published a book compiled from a series of lectures, which was entitled “Mars as the Abode of Life.” From observations using the at that point in time, Lowell was convinced that Mars was crisscrossed with a series of canals, which were being used by the sentient beings who lived on Mars to water their increasingly dry desert world. The possibility of a whole new world, a new fantastic point of view from a strange and wonderful new set of non-human friends, well, it sparked the imaginations of a generation.

Of course, all of our hopes of making friends with our little green neighbors were quickly dashed. We soon learned that Mars had an incredibly thin atmosphere with essentially no oxygen. Early probes to Mars found a desolate place, just dust and bone-numbing cold and intense and human-cooking radiation. The only things moving under their own power on the Martian surface are our own amazingly resilient Mars Rovers, who continue to pluckily noodle around as part of their now multi-year mission.

Next month, NASA’s Phoenix robotic lander will arrive on Mars after a long cruise through interplanetary space. When that craft settles down and begins digging deep into the permafrost near the Martian poles, there’s still the hope we might find something, some evidence of there having been life on that harsh little world. If we find it, it’s likely to be bacterial or viral, some hardy little single-celled bug that you couldn’t kill with a stick.

But the odds are against it. It seems to be a dead world.

And maybe, maybe, that’s for the best. How would we even communicate with an alien species? For all of the many ways that we human beings have learned to talk and share with one another, we’re unbelievably bad at making ourselves understood, and at understanding others. Human history is chock full of the wreckage of society after society that simply couldn’t bring themselves to see other human beings as human beings. Mostly, our first reaction when we encounter someone who is unlike us is to try to figure out if we can kill ‘em before they kill us.

Even in the same country, speaking more or less the same language and sharing many of the same experiences, we human beings often have trouble really understanding one another. We’re not willing to see another point of view, or to have enough empathy or imagination to figure out what another person thinks or believes. Given our track record dealing with one another, it’s probably a good thing that Mars proved not to be brimming over with intelligent life. Communicating with other cultures...other species...other peoples...well, that’s just not our specialty.

Which brings us, strangely enough, to the Apostle Paul. This morning, we find Paul in Athens, a strange and distant land for a Jew from Tarsus. Athens was the philosophical and cultural center of the Greek-speaking world, a place seemingly far, far distant from the backwaters of Judea. In that city, Paul found himself in a largely alien culture, filled with the gods of a hundred cultures and ancient philosophies. Those who heard about what he’d been saying in the synagogue came and challenged him to speak about this Christ he was proclaiming. These weren’t the Jews in Athens, but the philosophers, the Stoics and the Epicureans, the ones who would have debated and discussed the meaning and life and existence. They want to hear more, to talk, to exchange ideas, and to try to understand and debate what Paul was telling them.

They brought him to the place where all strange and new things were discussed and debated, up to a great rock promontory in Athens, a hill known as the Areopagus. “Pagus” just means “hill,” and according the ancient storytelling of the Greek people, this was the hill on which the war god Ares was born. Ares, of course, is the same god the Romans called Mars.

So atop Mars Hill, Paul stood and defended his message about Jesus.

But how? How is Paul going to tell these people about Christ, who he believed was the Messiah? Even the word Messiah meant nothing to them. Could he quote to them from the Bible? Well, that would have been hard, for two reasons. First, the New Testament didn’t exist yet. Second, the Bible didn’t mean anything to these philosophers. You can’t just say, “Well, it’s in the Bible” to someone who doesn’t believe that the Bible is the Word of God.

So what did Paul do? Among the many gifts that Paul had been given was the gift of communication, of telling people who Jesus was in ways that they could understand. What Paul did was to explain Jesus using language that Stoic and Epicurean philosophers would have understood. Epicureans rejected the idea that temples or statues were magic or places of power, and Paul pointed out to them that the Christ he proclaimed didn’t have anything to do with temples or idols made of gold. Stoics believed in the creative power of the universe, which made all things but could not be easily understood by human beings, and so Paul told them about God as creator. In verse 28, Paul quotes two philosopher poets. We’re not sure where the first one comes from. But the second quote, “for we too are his offspring,” is a quote from the Stoic philosopher Aratus, who wrote three hundred years before Christ.

Paul connects with them, on their terms. He understands them, on their terms. He speaks to them, on their terms. What he doesn’t do is beat them over the head and shoulders with language that they can’t understand, like an American tourist who thinks that the best way to get you to understand English is just to speak louder. He has a sense for who they are, and how they need to hear the good news. Not all of his listeners agree. But some are willing to listen and hear more.

It’s a pity that the church often doesn’t approach people in the way that Paul did. Too often, churches expect everyone who is not part of church to think the same way and act the same way as they do. They go out into the world, out beyond the life and language of their community, and they expect it to be just like church. So they go out, and speaking the language of church and describing Jesus in churchy ways, and are amazed when people who live in a culture that is, increasingly, like another world, doesn’t respond.

A well meaning person who read about me on the web sent me a packet of tracts the other week, little pamphlets to hand out to share about Jesus. Every one of those tracts went like this: “The Bible says this.” “The Bible says that.” And there wasn’t a word there that I personally disagreed with. But if you’re handing that to a person who doesn’t yet personally know the grace and love and justice of Christ, you might as well be giving them a tract written in Martian.

Each of us is called to witness, called to proclaim the Gospel, and like Paul on Mars Hill, we’ve got to be sure to do so in a way that others can understand. That means we have to listen, to be aware, to have both compassion and understanding for those who may at first seem alien and different to us.

It’s important, because we’re still hoping that there might be life...real life in Christ...on this spiritually desolate and God-starved world.