The Rev’d Ivica Gregurec, at St. Peters, Pakuranga

Easter 6. Sunday, 10 May 2026.

Readings: Acts 17:22–31; 1 Peter 3:13–22; John 14:15–21

Dear sisters and brothers,

Paul is standing in one of the great intellectual centres of the ancient world. The Areopagus, the hill of Ares, the ancient court of Athens, is not a place you address timidly. Philosophers of every school pass through it. There are stoics who believe the universe is governed by divine reason, epicureans who believe the gods are far too remote to trouble themselves with human affairs, sceptics who collect foreign ideas the way others collect coins. These are sharp, restless people, they have heard every argument and they will not be easily impressed.

Paul, to his enormous credit, does not walk in quoting scripture at them; he walks in quoting their own poets. He has done his homework. He has walked through the city, looked at the altars, read the inscriptions, and found, tucked among dedications to Zeus and Athena and a dozen others, one small altar with an unusual inscription: ‘To an unknown God.’ It is his opening. It is, in fact, one of the most elegant and generous opening moves in the history of preaching.

What he says to them is essentially this: the God you sense is there but cannot quite name, the one you have hedged your bets on with that anonymous altar, the one your own poets gesture toward when they write that ‘in him we live and move and have our being’: that God is not unknown to us. That God has a name, a history, a face, and that God has acted, recently and decisively, in a way that changes everything.

We are six Sundays into Easter. The resurrection has been proclaimed, celebrated, sung. The alleluias are still in the air, if a little less breathlessly than on Easter morning. And the readings set before us today are not, I think, primarily about consolidating the faith of the already convinced. They are about the perennial question that Easter raises for everyone who has not yet made up their mind: what do we do with a God who seems, so much of the time, unknown?
It is worth sitting with that question rather than rushing past it. In our own cultural moment, we live among enormous numbers of people who would recognise themselves in Paul’s Athenian audience. They are not, most of them, hostile to the idea of God. They are genuinely uncertain. They sense something: in music, in beauty, in the sunrise and beauty of nature, in the birth of a child, in the persistence of conscience, in those moments of inexplicable gratitude that have no obvious object; they sense something, but they cannot name it. They have, in their own way, built an altar to an unknown God.

The Anglican tradition has always believed that this is not a problem to be solved but a starting point to be honoured. Paul does not tell the Athenians they are wrong to sense what they sense. He tells them they are right and that there is more. He begins where they are and takes their intuition seriously. He finds the grain of truth in their groping, and he follows it toward the light.

This has profound implications for how we engage with the secular, pluralist, religiously mixed world most of us actually inhabit. The instinct of much religious communication is to begin with what people lack: what they have got wrong, what they urgently need to correct. Paul’s instinct at the Areopagus is almost the opposite. He begins with what they already know, or half-know, or dimly suspect. He takes seriously the altar they have already built. There is a wonderful image in the writing of St Clement of Alexandria, that great second-century theologian who was himself formed in the intellectual culture of the Hellenistic world:
‘There is one river of truth, but many streams fall into it on this side and on that’ (Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, I.v)

That image of one river and many streams captures something essential about the theological vision at work in our today’s reading from the Acts. It does not flatten all human searching into equivalence, or pretend that all paths are identical. Paul is quite clear that he has something specific to say, and he says it with confidence. But he begins by acknowledging that the water of divine truth runs in more places than any single tradition owns. This is not theological vagueness. It is theological generosity and there is a big difference.

If we turn from Athens to the letter of Peter, the contrast in circumstance is arresting. Peter is not addressing philosophers in a famous court. He is addressing people who are suffering, a small Christian communities scattered across Asia Minor, living as minorities in a society that regards them with suspicion, sometimes with contempt, occasionally with something harder than that. His advice to them is neither to fight back nor to retreat into bitterness and self-pity, but to be ready always to give an account of the hope that is in them ‘with gentleness and reverence’.

Gentleness and reverence. It is not apology, not aggression, not the brittle defensiveness of a community that has forgotten what it actually believes, or the assertiveness of one that has forgotten how to listen. Peter is asking something that is, in every age, very difficult: to hold conviction and humility at the same time. To know what you believe deeply enough that you can be asked about it, and to offer it openly enough that the asking feels like an invitation rather than a confrontation.

This is as urgent a call in our own moment as it was in first-century Pontus. We inhabit a culture of aggressive assertion, where opinions are thrown like projectiles and the goal of most public discourse seems to be the humiliation of the opponent rather than the persuasion of a friend. The Christian community is not immune to this disease. We have our own entrenched positions, our own rhetorical weapons, our own ways of signalling tribal belonging by the vigour with which we denounce those outside. Peter’s quiet word cuts across all of it: gentleness and reverence. Speak your hope, but speak it as a gift, freely offered, and not as a demand, or a verdict.

And what precisely is the hope we are speaking? Here John’s gospel draws us to the very heart of it. On the night before he dies, Jesus makes a promise to his frightened friends. He will not leave them orphaned. He will ask the Father, and another Advocate will come: the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees nor knows him. But you will know him, Jesus says, because he abides with you, and will be in you. And then the sentence that carries the whole weight of Easter: ‘I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you’.
That word ‘orphaned’ is worth pausing over. It is an unusually vulnerable word for a theological text. It does not speak of abandonment in abstract terms. It speaks of the particular, devastating aloneness of a child who has lost the person upon whom everything depended. And Jesus uses it deliberately. He knows what his death is going to feel like to those he leaves behind. He knows the Saturday of grief that is coming, the hollow morning of disbelief, the slow and difficult weeks of reassembling a world that has been shattered.

Into that specific human experience of desolation, he speaks a specific promise: I am coming to you. Not merely ‘the Spirit will come’, though that will happen too. It is I the presence that will come in the Spirit is not a consolation prize for the absence of Jesus. It is a new and deeper mode of the same presence. The Advocate, the Paraclete, the one called alongside, is the form the risen Christ takes in the ongoing life of the community and of each person within it.

This is resurrection faith translated into the texture of ordinary days. Easter is not only a historical claim about a tomb that was found empty on a Sunday morning outside Jerusalem, though it is certainly that. It is also a present-tense claim: a presence that has not withdrawn, a love that has not expired, an aliveness that keeps finding its way into the ordinary fabric of life, into the conversation that unexpectedly opens something up, into the beauty that stops you in your tracks, into the clarity that arrives after prayer when you were not sure prayer was reaching anywhere at all.

Paul found traces of this aliveness in an Athenian inscription, scratched on an altar by people who knew there was something more but could not yet say what. Peter’s scattered communities found it in their ability to hold hope and gentleness under conditions that called for neither. The disciples in John’s upper room found it in the promise that they would not be left as orphans, that the one who had shown them the face of God would remain with them, within them, beyond all that was about to happen.

And we find it, or rather, it finds us, in all of these places still: in the honest question asked by someone who senses the unknown God but cannot yet name him; in the community that speaks its hope with enough gentleness that the speaking feels like welcome; in the prayer that persists even when it feels unanswered, trusting the promise of the one who said: ‘I will not leave you orphaned’.

These six weeks of Easter have been, in the end, a sustained invitation into that trust. Not a naive trust that papers over difficulty, not a triumphalist trust that has never sat with doubt, but the trust of people who have looked at the empty tomb and the broken bread and the friend restored and have decided, with everything they are, to stake their lives on the possibility that love is, after all, the last word.

Go gently into the week. Go with the hope that is in you. And when someone asks you what it is, as they will, sooner or later, because hope is visible, tell them. With gentleness, with reverence and without fear. Amen.