Easter 6 2026
[Fr Jonathan’s final homily in this Benefice.]
Acts 17.22-31
What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.
Five years and nearly three hundred homilies later, if I have done my job adequately, it may just have escaped your notice that I really only have one sermon, one message to proclaim from the pulpits in these parish churches; or at least one theme, and with limited variation. And this morning’s missive is no exception to the rule. So here it goes, one last time.
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There is a famous speech that the American writer David Foster Wallace gave to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College, published after his death as a little book called This is Water. It is, as is true of everything Wallace wrote, about a lot of things. But towards the end, he says this, which belongs just as well in a sermon as in anything else—though I’m not sure he’d appreciate my saying that:
There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
And he goes on to consider what it might mean—and, indeed, what it might cost—to worship money and sex and power and intelligence; and Wallace finds all of these wanting. That section ends in a profoundly Christian way, though again I’m not sure Wallace would appreciate my saying that. He says:
The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
I have never read Infinite Jest, his thousand-page masterpiece: but whenever I re-read this commencement speech, I think maybe I should.
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Everybody worships. And there are two senses in which we, like the Athenians at the Areopagus, don’t know what we worship. Our unknown gods are the gods that in countless unacknowledged ways govern our daily lives, the mundane decisions that we make when we interact with one another in the world. The way we think about ourselves and our relationships with our families and friends and neighbours and strangers and foreigners and enemies. The way we think about our bodies, our minds, our talents, our wealth, our time. The way we act upon these thoughts in our speaking and buying and voting, and all the rest of it. The way we live reveals the gods we worship, the things we put first, high up on a pedestal; the things for which we are willing to make sacrifices of money, time, effort, and all too commonly, other people. Every day, we sacrifice other people on the altars of our unidentified gods. Directly and indirectly, we hurt them or neglect them, as a means to some end, which is our god.
But also, many of us, perhaps most of us, perhaps even all of us, possess this deep and unutterable intuition that there is something wrong with the unspoken religion of the modern age; something wrong with selfish ambition and desire, which seeks wealth and fame, power and pleasure. We know, as Wallace did too, that they are idols, which do not deserve the devotion we pay to them. And yet, we continue to build altars to them; altars that we call strategies or careers or political systems or economic ones. The edifices of modern life are exactly those: temples in steel and glass, paper and silicon.
We know that these are all idols, and we know also that there is something more worthy of our worship than the things we, as individuals and societies, have sacrificed ourselves and others to achieve and obtain. But what that is remains obscure to us, remains unknown.
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The Christian message is this—and it has been said so many times, not just in this pulpit but in innumerable pulpits across many places and times, so as to seem, when spoken aloud, almost banal—[the Christian message is this], that the only true God worthy of worship is love.
Love, not as a feeling; ephemeral as feelings are, fickly swaying with fashions and fantasies; not as positive regard, turned up to eleven, but nevertheless conditioned upon some contingent qualities of the beloved. Love, not—as it is commonly understood, and propagated through popular songs and films—as a desire to possess or consume. But love as even Wallace understood it, which Christ himself shows us, which turns out to be the very essence of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit whose eternal life consists of no less than complete mutual self-giving, the emptying of themselves to fill each other and be filled by each other in perfect harmony. This love, which makes room for the beloved to live and flourish is also the love that gives birth to all things, wherein the God who needs nothing nevertheless creates space for something other than God, space for us, all of God’s creatures. It is this love that compels the eternal and omnipresent God to enter time and space to be with us, to welcome us into the divine economy of love.
And it is this love with which you are loved—each of you, peronsally—who are a microcosm of creation, loved into being no less than anything else, no less than the whole cosmos itself. You, for whom the infinite God dared to enter into finitude; you, for whom the immortal God dared even to die. It is not your wealth and power, your beauty and intelligence, your diligence and piety, even your goodness, but you in your whole youness—who are utterly and absolutely and unconditionally loved, no matter who you are or are not, what you have done or not done. It is you who are God’s beloved, with whom God is besotted.
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What you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. And I will spend my life finding better ways to do so, to say to you: you are loved.
Not just in the ways with which you are, if you are very lucky, already familiar, but more deeply than your minds can imagine, more truly than your heart can dare to hope. You are loved. Not just by your family and friends, but by Love Itself, which is God’s true name: the One who made you, and at every moment holds you in existence, and who calls you—you, each one of you, and me too—to know our own profound loveliness; and calls us also to make known the loveliness of others, who so often and so easily forget it, whosoever needs to hear this one and most important message in all the world, which is the Good News of Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end.