Easter 5 (NL4) John B. Valentine
Acts 17:16-31 May 3, 2026

“HE’S GOT THE WHOLE WORLD IN HIS HANDS”

Who among us remembers “American Top Forty?”

• Casey Kasem ....

• Saturday mornings from 9 to Noon ....

• “In the next three hours, we'll count down the 40 most popular hits in the United States this week, hot off the record charts of Billboard magazine. At Number 32 in the countdown, a song that's been a hit 4 different times in 19 years! And we're just one tune away from the singer with the $10,000 gold hubcaps on his car! Now, on with the countdown!”

But did you know that there was only gospel song that ever reached No. 1 on the U.S. pop singles chart???

• Not Elvis Presley singing “How Great Thou Art” ...

• Not “God Bless the USA” by Lee Greenwood ...

• Not even “Put Your Hand in the Hand” ....

No .... the ONLY gospel song to ever make it to Number One was that song we just sang as our “Song of the Day” ...

“He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” ...

Which climbed to the top of the pop charts and actually stayed there for four weeks ... when a fourteen year-old English kid named Laurie London covered that American gospel tune back in 1958.

Truth be told ... if you know that song ... if you know those words ... you already know the thought that is at the heart of this morning’s Scripture lesson!

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You see ... this morning’s Bible lesson ... from Acts 17 ... finds Paul ... Saint Paul ... in the city of Athens ... waiting for his sidekicks Silas and Timothy to join him.

And ... since he is biding his time and waiting ... he decides to play the tourist ... and go visit all the tourist spots in Athens for which it was justly famous ... even back then.

As early as Paul’s day ... two-thousandish years ago ... Athens was already a famous tourist town ...

• Famous as the birthplace of politics ...
• Famous as the birthplace of education ... and
• Particularly famous as the birthplace of philosophy.

In fact ... Athenians ... back in the day ... were seemingly as passionate about philosophy as we are about sports!

“Going to Athens” was the philosopher’s equivalent of getting to play golf at Augusta National or tennis at Wimbledon ....

And rumor has it that philosophers in Athens even had fan clubs ...

And that listening to peddlers of new-fangled philosophical positions engage in debates with grand philosophical masters was many Athenians’ idea of a really good time.

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Anyhow ... Paul is wandering through town ... and he can’t help but notice how full of idols and worship spaces the city is.

• There’s obviously the Parthenon ... that famous temple to Athena ... that huge temple that stills stands on top of the Acropolis ...

• There’s countless other temples and idols scattered throughout the city center ... because if you didn’t have a worship space for your particular religion or a school for your philosophy in Athens ... you somehow weren’t legit.

• And then there’s this place called the Areopagus ... Mars Hill ... the debating ground ... where philosophical jousting matches were held.

And so it comes to pass that Paul ends up at Mars Hill ... telling a curious crowd about the good news of God made real in Jesus the resurrected one.

And Paul’s message is really as simple as this:

• One ... God is near you ...

• Two ... You are not alone ... and

• Three ... He’s got the whole world in His hands!

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How does he put it??

“It’s plain as day that you Athenians take your religion seriously. When I arrived here the other day, I was fascinated with all the shrines I came across. And then I found one inscribed with this curious inscription .... “To the God Nobody Knows.” And I’m here to introduce you to this God so you can worship intelligently ... and know who you’re dealing with.”

“You see ... this God ... the God who made the world and everything in it ... this Master of sky and land ... doesn't live in shrines ... be they little grottoes like the ones scattered throughout this city ... or the big one there on that top of that hill. Nor does that God need the human race to run errands for him ... as if he couldn't take care of himself! This God makes the creatures; the creatures don't make him.”

“After all ... starting from scratch ... this God made the entire human race and made the earth hospitable .... with plenty of time and space for living so we could seek after God, and not just grope around in the dark but actually find him.

“And here’s the shocking thing. This God .... THIS God .... is near you — You are not alone — He’s got the whole world in His hands!"

And ... in a certain way ... Paul’s message reveals both the promise and the problem with Christianity even since.

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The PROMISE part? That’s easy.

• The promise of Christianity is that God is near and God is here.

• The promise of Christianity is that the divine ... the spiritual ... the metaphysical ... IS accessible.

• The promise of Christianity is that “God is has the whole world in His hands!”

Now ... to our ears ... that may seem like a “no-brainer” ... that we believe in a God who actually cares about us ...

But that only sounds reasonable to us because we’ve had it drilled into a brains by the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of Western Civilization for the last who-knows-how-many years.

In fact ... all three of the books which our Academic Bible Study folks have tackled this year have gone out of their way to highlight that people in the Roman Empire in the first century would have had a hard time imagining that God or “the gods” actually cared.

You see ...

• To those folks ... gods ... “the gods” were entities which didn’t naturally ... normally ... care!

• To those folks ... gods were entities which needed to be placated ... or maybe bought off.

• To those folks ... gods were capricious and selfish and demanding.

And Paul’s message that the Creator of all that is actually cared “about you” would have been a message from ... well ... Mars!

In a certain way ... you could say that the promise of Christianity is that:

▸ all of our religious exercises and enterprises ...
▸ all of our shrine building ...
▸ all of our vows and our sacrifices ...
▸ all of our desperate prayers and pleas ...

All of it ... ALL of it ... is swallowed up in the victory of the resurrected and very-present Christ.

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But that promise is also the problem ... or at least the problematic part ... because:

Sure ... WE think it’s great that God is near and God is here.

Sure ... WE think it’s great that the divine ... the spiritual ... the metaphysical ... IS accessible.

But what’s NOT great ... at least what’s problematic ... is that it seems way too easy!

After all ...

We still want our religious exercises and enterprises to mean something ...

We still want our shrine building to mean something ...

We still want our vows and sacrifices to mean something ...

We still want our desperate prayers and pleas to matter.

We don’t want it to be quite so easy for us ...

And we CERTAINLY don’t want it to be so easy for anybody else!

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Did any of you ever spend much time playing ‘Hide-n-Seek’??

• I LOVED to play ‘Hide-n-Seek’ as a kid ...
• I LOVED the pronouncement that it was time to run and hide ...
• I LOVED finding a spot wherein ‘It’ wouldn’t be able to find me ...
• I LOVED the countdown to “Ready or Not ... Here I Come” ...

When it came to a good game of ‘Hide-n-Seek’ ... I was deeply invested.

But what was the best way to ruin a perfectly good game of ‘Hide-n-Seek’?

Ruin it for someone who LOVED the game like I did .....

Was it not those simple silly words ... “Ollie ollie oxen free” ... or “All-Ye All-Ye In Come Free” ... or “Alle, alle, auch sind frei” ... or whatever words the kids in your neighborhood used to announce that the game was up and the outs were in for free???

I didn’t want grace ... I didn’t want freedom ... I wanted the challenge ... I wanted “the game”.

And I’d always get mighty perturbed when some opted to olly-olly-oxall ... because ... well what was the challenge in that???

But ... in a certain way ... you might say that Athens was built upon the assumption that life was one big ‘Hide-n-Seek’ game ...

• From the temples and the grottoes ...
• To the debate arenas to the marketplace ...
• To the philosophical schools and all ...

They loved “searching for the truth” ... “seeking the truth” ... investing the whole of the lives into answer-finding.

But when Paul arrives bearing the message of Good News of God in Christ ... they don’t much like it ... BECAUSE IT IS TOO EASY!

And some of them figured out pretty quickly that Paul’s talk about the grace and goodness of God being made real in the resurrection of Jesus ... this message of a God who cares enough to have the whole world in his hands ... it amounts to a cosmic olly-olly-ox-all ... and ruins the very game that it at the heart of their city’s existence!

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You see ... to borrow some words from a fellow named Robert Capon:

“Christianity is not a religion; it’s the proclamation of the end of religion. Religion is a human activity dedicated to the job of reconciling God to humanity and humanity to itself.

The Gospel, however – the Good News of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ – is the astonishing announcement that God has done the whole work of reconciliation without a scrap of human assistance. It is the bizarre proclamation that religion is over, period.

“All the efforts of the human race to straighten up the mess of history by plausible religious devices – all the chicken sacrifices, all the fasts, all the mysticism, all the moral exhortations, all the threats – have been canceled by God for lack of saving interest.

More astonishingly still, their purpose has been fulfilled, once for all and free for nothing, by the totally non-religious death and resurrection of a Galilean nobody.

“Admittedly, Christians may use the forms of religion – but only because the church is the sign to the world of God’s accomplishment of what religion tried (and failed) to do, not because any of the church’s devices can actually get the job done.”

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This God IS near you ... and you are NOT alone ...

In fact ... He's got the whole world in his hands!