Almost every conversation about church seems to begin with a confession. People want to come clean that they aren’t theologically certain, that they’re not as sure as everyone else seems to be. You might recognize yourself in that quiet apology, the worry that everyone else has it figured out, and you’re somehow falling behind.
But what if the truth is that most of us, maybe all of us, are walking around with the same questions? What if the burden you’ve been carrying alone was never meant to be yours alone in the first place?
Travel back with this sermon to the Aropagus, the open-air hilltop in ancient Athens, where Paul preached to the philosophers. The story is often told as a triumph, religion arriving to enlighten the ignorant. But look closer, and you see something different.
Paul does not swagger in with answers. He arrives with curiosity. He quotes a Greek philosopher and a Greek poet, both writing about Zeus, and weaves their words into his own faith. That move has a name. Holy envy, a phrase coined by the late Lutheran bishop Krister Stendahl, is not appropriation.
It is the practice of recognizing beauty in someone else’s tradition and letting it shape you. It is the humility to admit that truth takes many forms and that God speaks to us through each other.
“We are all God’s children. And in God, we live and move and have our being. And we move in God together. We live together within God’s presence. We encounter each other with the curiosity God gave us. And because God has sent us to each other, in God we can never be alone.”
This is what community is for. Maybe you cannot believe every line of the creed. Maybe nobody in the room can believe all of it. But together, faith goes around. Together, the certainty you lack is held by someone beside you, and the certainty they lack is held by you.
First Plymouth was never meant to be a place where everyone arrives with the same answers. It is a community where curiosity is sacred, where questions are welcome, and where you are never asked to journey alone.
