May 3, 2026
Indianola Presbyterian Church
"God has no address"
Sermon by Rev. Trip Porch
May 3, 2026 Based on Acts 17:16-31
I’m sure you know the situation…
Someone you know has just come back from vacation to a place like the Grand Canyon. They pull out their phone, and say: “oh, I just have to show you the pictures we took… here, look."
And the photos are stunning. Truly. The scale of it, the layers of red and orange stone carved over millions of years, the way the light changes everything depending on the hour.
The photos are a real expression of something beautiful…
But then they say something almost everyone who has been to the grand canyon says:
"you know, it really doesn't even capture it. You just have to go."
And you know exactly what they mean. Because the photo can show you the canyon, but it cannot put you at the edge of it. It cannot give you the vertigo. It cannot give you the wind, or the silence underneath the wind, or that particular feeling of being very small in a way that is somehow not frightening but freeing. The photo is evidence of a real thing.
It is just not the thing.
I’ve heard The Northern Lights are the same. People chase them across continents… Iceland, across Norway, across the Yukon. They photograph them obsessively, and the photos are beautiful, these ribbons of green and violet draped across a dark sky. But people who have stood underneath them all say the same thing every time:
The photos make them look still and a little dull. But when you’re there… they move. They breathe. Some people swear they make a sound. You can show someone a photo of the Northern Lights and they'll say "wow." But that wow is a completely different thing from standing underneath them with your neck craned back, feeling something in your chest you don't have a word for.
We don't love the photos less because they fall short. We still print them and frame them. We still share them on our socials. We still pull them out years later and say: look, I was there, this is what I saw.
The photo matters.
It's just not the same thing it's pointing at.
We are creatures who long to capture things. To hold them still so we can revisit them.
To put them in a frame, or we build a building for it, or we give it a name.
There is nothing wrong with that longing. The problem is when we forget that the photo is not the thing.
The problem becomes when we start to believe the photo of the canyon is the same thing as the canyon.
Which brings us to Paul. Paul arrives in Athens and the first thing he notices is that it’s a city of temples and altars… These ornate buildings humans have made to their Gods are everywhere. He remarks about it is as though it’s a whole city of Photo Frames for the holy… images that are beautiful but can never fully capture what they are trying to describe…
Then on one of the altars he finds an inscription…
“Dedicated to an unknown God”
He sees this and realizes… the Athenians are hedging their bets, they’re building temples to every God they can think of, and just to be safe… they’ve even built a temple to the God’s they don’t know… an acknowledgment that there might be something their temples and their philosophy and their careful religious architecture has not yet named.
Paul sees something authentically human in this altar… something relatable to him as an outsider to Athens… A longing for something beyond us. And he jumps on this… he has found his teachable moment.
So he gathers the Athenians together to start teaching…
The heart of what he says is this: you have been building houses for God. But the God I know cannot be housed.
"The God who made the world and everything in it, who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands."
This is a stunning claim to make in Athens, a city whose identity is built around its shrines. He's not saying the Athenians are wrong. He's saying they have made the same mistake humans always make. We take our longing for the infinite and we pour it into something we can see, something we can visit, something we can control. We give God an address.
And Paul says: God doesn't have an address.
In fact, he says something even bigger than that.
He says God is the one "in whom we live and move and have our being." He's quoting a Greek poet here, one of their own, not scripture.
He's saying: you already know this. Your own poets have told you about the God I know.
The God I'm describing isn't a stranger to you. This God is the water you've been swimming in your whole life without knowing it had a name.
Not a God contained in marble.
Not a God accessible only through the right rituals in the right building.
I’m talking about the God who is the ground of our being. God who is at the core of everything.
The air in every room. Present before you arrive and present after you leave. A God you cannot visit because you never stop being inside of.
That is a completely different kind of God than a temple God. A god who is contained by structures made by human hands.
And here's where Paul's words stop being history and start being a mirror to the church today…
Because we do just what the Athenians do. The Christian church, broadly, has been building temples to God for a very long time.
We’ve built beautiful sanctuaries because we’ve wanted to locate places where heaven could feel closer. We developed denominations because we wanted to put structure around something true. We created institutions, budgets, programs, buildings, because we wanted the faith to last, to have weight, to mean something in the world.
All of this has come from real love. And it’s an instinct I get, because God may be infinite and everywhere… but we are not. God may have no address.. but we do, we inhabit places. We live in the physical world, we need structure.
However, the issue Paul is preaching about to the Athenians rings just as true to modern Christians…
The issue is at some point, for many of us, the buildings became the faith. The institution became the mission.
The denomination became the boundary of God's presence. We started to believe, without quite saying it out loud, that God lives here, in this particular structure, in this particular tradition, in this particular way of doing things. That God is more available at our address than anywhere else.
We experienced an awe-inspiring God, and then we took pictures of it to try to capture the experience,
We built our altars to a God who can’t be contained And then we forgot they were altars.
I think Paul might walk into a lot of our churches and feel that same stirring he felt in Athens. Not because we are misguided. But because he would recognize the pattern. The longing poured into something too small to hold it. The experience of a photo is mistaken for magnitude of the canyon.
I think he might remind us that idols in this world are not always golden calves. Sometimes it can be a stained-glass window. Sometimes it can be a budget line. Sometimes it can be a style of worship we grew up with and cannot imagine God existing outside of. Sometimes it can be the institution itself, its survival, its brand, its relevance, that can become the thing we're actually serving.
I think Paul might remind us who the church is actually called to serve… The God who made the world and everything in it, who is Lord of heaven and earth, the one who does not live in shrines made by human hands. The God in whom we live, the God in whom we move, the God in whom we have our being.
So what would it mean to take Paul seriously? To actually devote ourselves to the God he's describing?
I think it might mean accepting that God is not any more present in a sanctuary on Iuka than in a parking lot on the other side of campus. That God is not more available on Sunday morning than on a Tuesday afternoon in a grocery store. That God is not more real inside Christianity than outside it.
The God Paul describes in Athens is the God the Athenian poets already knew. The God already present in the longing of people who have never set foot in a church and may never want to. That is a bigger God than most of us have ever been handed. The God Paul is describing is wild and free. The God Paul is describing cannot be pinned down by anything we make. And this goes against our human instincts… because A bigger God is harder to live with than a temple God. A temple God is manageable. You know the building you are supposed to go to find a temple God. You know the hours. You know the rituals. You know where to go when you need something.
But a God who is the ground of all existence asks something different of you. Not just attendance. Not just ritual. But a life lived in orientation to the God who is everywhere. A constant turning toward the presence that has never been, nor will ever be absent.
Here is what that bigger God makes possible. If God is not contained in things made by human hands, then losing our altars to God is not losing God.
Like the Athenians We may have built ornate gorgeous structures to point to God, but when those structures start to decay and crumble… The God we worship can never decay and never crumble.
If God is not contained in our institutions, then an institution changing or shrinking or ending is not the end of God's story.
If God is not contained in our tradition, then the tradition can evolve, it can be questioned, it can be held loosely, It can be nimble and adapt without the whole faith collapsing.
The photo is not the same thing as the canyon. The altar is not the same thing as the God. The temple is not the same thing as divine presence. And that divine presence, Paul says, is already everywhere you are going. Already in the places you haven't been yet. Already in the people you haven't met. Already in the future you cannot see and are maybe afraid of. You don't have to go anywhere to find God. You are already living inside of God. That's not a smaller faith. That's the biggest faith there is.
I think back to all the sanctuaries I’ve worshipped in and why I love them. Why they were special. I think back to all the traditions of my faith, the hymns I've loved, the rituals, the particular presbyterian ways of gathering.
It’s not arbitrary that I love them. It's because somewhere in those things, I caught a glimpse. Something happened. The light came through the window at a certain angle and for a moment I felt it. The music landed in my chest, and I knew, I just knew, that I was not alone in the universe. Someone said exactly the right words at exactly the right moment and something in me cracked open.
It’s because the altars we build point to something real. The photo is taken of a real canyon. The problem is never that we loved those things. The problem is when we stopped saying what every person says when they show you their Grand Canyon photos: ...You know, this photo really could never capture it.
What if that was the truest thing the church could say? What if our buildings and our traditions and our institutions were most faithful precisely when they pointed past themselves? When they said: we built this because we caught a glimpse of something so vast, so alive, so present, that we had to do something with our hands. We had to make something. But don't mistake what we made for what we saw.
The church is not the canyon. The church is not the lights dancing across the sky. The church is the photo that could never fully capture the immensity of the God we worship.
No building, no tradition, no institution, no religion holds the whole thing. They are altars pointing at the God who needs no altar.
They are photos that limit what they are trying to capture.
And we cannot let them become idols to limit God’s action in the world.
The God we worship has no address.
I think Paul said it best: “The God who made the world and everything in it, who is Lord of heaven and earth, the God in whom we live, in whom we move, in whom we have our beings does not live in shrines made by human hands…”
Friends, may we realize this is the God we worship. This is the God to whom our altars have always been reaching. This is the God the poets knew before they had a name for it. This is the God the Athenians were hedging toward with their just-in-case inscription. This is the God who has been present in every sanctuary you have ever loved, not because the building contained God, but because God was already there before the foundation was poured.
And friends this is the God who you will continue to dwell inside wherever you may go next.
We will always take photos. We will always frame them and place them on the wall. We will always love them because they remind us of an experience that lies beyond them.
But may we never let the photo of the thing replace the unfathomable experience of the thing itself.
Amen.
WE GATHER IN AWE AND PRAISE
PRELUDE “We Gather Together” arr. John A. Stallsmit
INTROIT "Christ Has Arisen, Alleluia!" Tanzanian Melody
WELCOME Rev. Trip Porch
One: This is the day that the Lord has made
All: Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
*CALL TO WORSHIP
One: We come looking for God in the places we have always looked.
Many: In our songs, in our gathering, in the familiar and the beloved.
One: And God is here. But God is also everywhere we have not yet looked.
All: In the stranger, in the unknown, in the life we are still becoming.
Let us worship the God who lives in no building and yet fills every room.
*HYMN 18 “Hallelujah! Sing Praise to Your Creator” NYANYIKANLAH NYANYIAN BARO
*PRAYER OF CONFESSION Mark Phlegar
God of every place and no particular place, we confess that we have confined you and made you too small. We have drawn borders around your presence, built walls to contain you, and called those walls sacred. We have loved our traditions more than the truth they were built to carry. We have feared change because we confused the frame with what it holds. Forgive us for the altars we have clung to, and free us to worship you as you actually are: boundless, uncontained, already present in every corner of the life we have been afraid to enter. Amen.
*ASSURANCE OF PARDON
*RESPONSE OF PRAISE 240 “Alleluia! Alleluia Give Thanks” ALLELUIA NO. 1
*PASSING OF THE PEACE
One: The peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all,
All: And also with you.
WE LISTEN FOR GOD’S WORD
ANTHEM “O Love” Elaine Hagenberg
Sophia Haws – Guest Conductor
CHILDREN’S MESSAGE Robin Murray
PRAYER OF ILLUMINATION
SCRIPTURE Acts 17:16-31 CEB
“While Paul waited for them in Athens, he was deeply distressed to find that the city was flooded with idols. He began to interact with the Jews and Gentile God-worshippers in the synagogue. He also addressed whoever happened to be in the marketplace each day. Certain Epicurean and Stoic philosophers engaged him in discussion too. Some said, “What an amateur! What’s he trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign gods.” (They said this because he was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection.) They took him into custody and brought him to the council on Mars Hill. “What is this new teaching? Can we learn what you are talking about? You’ve told us some strange things, and we want to know what they mean.” ( They said this because all Athenians as well as the foreigners who live in Athens used to spend their time doing nothing but talking about or listening to the newest thing.)
Paul stood up in the middle of the council on Mars Hill and said, “People of Athens, I see that you are very religious in every way. As I was walking through town and carefully observing your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: ‘To an unknown God.’ What you worship as unknown, I now proclaim to you. God, who made the world and everything in it, is Lord of heaven and earth. He doesn’t live in temples made with human hands. Nor is God served by human hands, as though he needed something, since he is the one who gives life, breath, and everything else. From one person God created every human nation to live on the whole earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their lands. God made the nations so they would seek him, perhaps even reach out to him, and find him. In fact, God isn’t far away from any of us. In God we live, move, and exist. As some of your own poets said, ‘We are his offspring.’
“Therefore, as God’s offspring, we have no need to imagine that the divine being is like a gold, silver, or stone image made by human skill and thought. God overlooks ignorance of these things in times past but now directs everyone everywhere to change their hearts and lives. This is because God has set a day when he intends to judge the world justly by a man he has appointed. God has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.””
SERMON Rev. Trip Porch
WE RESPOND TO GOD’S WORD
*HYMN INSERT “Cast Down, O God, The Idols” RUTHERFORD
TIME OF OFFERING online giving is available at www. indianolapres.org/give
OFFERTORY “Holy, Holy, Holy” arr. Lily Topolski
Communion
INVITATION TO THE TABLE
GREAT PRAYER OF THANKSGIVING
SHARING OF BREAD AND CUP 527 “Eat this Bread” BERTHIER
PRAYER AFTER COMMUNION
We have tasted and seen, O God, and still we know this table is only a glimpse. Every cup, every broken loaf, every gathering in this place points past itself toward the feast we cannot build or schedule or contain. We are grateful for the frames you have given us, for the moments when the ordinary cracked open and we felt you near. Send us now into the world you have never left, to live and move and have our being in you, in every place, in every person, in every moment still to come. Amen.
*HYMN 526 “Let us Talents and Tongues Employ” LINSTEAD
TIME OF COMMUNITY SHARING
CHARGE & BENEDICTION
CHORAL RESPONSE “Amen” K. Lee Scott
POSTLUDE “Let Us Talents and Tongues Employ” arr. Philip Keveren
Acknowledgments: Unless otherwise indicated, all texts and music are printed and broadcast under OneLicense.net license #A-702452