Sunday 10 May 2026

Speaking Hope

to a world searching for it

Acts 17:22–31 · Rev Andrew Irwin

Have you ever found yourself wanting to speak, but the culture and the language around you were so different you barely knew where to begin?

I remember the first time I travelled in mission and stepped off a plane in Senegal into what felt like a wall of heat. From the very first moment, every conversation, every small custom, every gesture told me I had something I wanted to say but no real means of saying it. Over a few weeks, slowly, painfully, we began to learn. How to greet someone in the local language. The importance of stopping to talk to anyone and everyone, even when in a hurry, because that was simply the way things were done. The importance of touch. The shame attached to using your left hand. We learned, in the smallest of ways, how to begin to communicate the love of God by deed in a place very different from our own.

One of the last days of that trip, I sat with someone I had only known a few days, trying through broken English, made-up sign language, and finger-drawings in the dust beneath us, to speak about the love of God. It was painful and beautiful at the same time. We found a way to ask questions and to answer them. We found a way to speak hope to someone who was searching for it.

That is the world Paul walks into in Acts 17. And the work the Holy Spirit is still calling us into in North Belfast in 2026.

One

Beginning to Speak

VERSE 22

Paul finds himself in the middle of a culture he knows very little about — the Areopagus, Mars Hill, where the elite of the ancient world gathered to debate philosophy, religion, and the meaning of life. It was the place of premier thinking in its day. And what I love about this passage is so simple I worry we miss it: Paul is there. The Holy Spirit has not moved him to the edge of the culture but right into the middle of it — into the very place where minds and hearts were being shaped.

The same God who carried Paul into Athens is still carrying ordinary believers into ordinary places today. He is moving us into the places where life around us is being formed. So I wonder, where might our Mars Hill be?

“ Ulster University. The flute bands that practise. The Order Lodge meetings. The Community Centre. The Times Bar. The Mount. The boxing club. Grove. Duncairn. Where are the places God is moving us into — not just to stand outside and pray, but to enter into, understand, and speak of his love?

Notice too how Paul speaks. "People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious." Before he says a word about Christ or the Cross, he begins by acknowledging something true and good about the culture he has been sent into.

Too often we assume speaking prophetically means taking on the stance of Jonah — speaking only against the city. There are moments for that. But Paul shows us another way: looking for the traces of God’s grace already present, the points of common ground, and using them as a doorway.

This is good — but let me tell you about something a lot better.

Two

Just Walking Through

VERSE 23

Paul does not parachute in. He walks the streets first. He looks. He listens. He pays attention to what shapes the city, what its people value, what they fear, what they worship. And among the many shrines, he sees one inscribed To an Unknown God — a hedged bet, a blank space in their religious imagination, and Paul recognises it as exactly the doorway the Spirit has prepared.

He does not preach a sermon he prepared back in Tarsus. He preaches the sermon Athens itself has half-written. The image rises up out of the streets he has been walking and praying through. The Spirit gives him the words and the image in the moment, because he was first willing to be moved into the place.

As we move out in mission this year, into the streets and spaces around us, we can trust the same Spirit to give us the same kind of moments. But only if, like Paul, we are first willing to walk and to look.

Three

Making God Known

VERSES 24–26

Being positive about the culture does not mean compromising about God. Paul affirms what he can, then lifts their eyes far higher than anything Athens had imagined. The world is not the result of cosmic conflict between rival gods. It was made by one God — the Lord of heaven and earth — who cannot be contained in temples and has no needs we could ever meet.

In a single sentence, Paul honours their religious instinct and exposes its bankruptcy. The altars are pointless because God is not there. Their whole understanding of religion is upside down because this known God has no needs.

And here the Spirit gently turns the searchlight on us. How often do we ourselves come to church and go through the week not from a place of relationship by faith, but through the lens of religion — thinking God must be approached in a certain way, that we must do certain things to please him and earn his favour?

Grace is not the means of relationship.
It is the way of life that flows from relationship.

Four

Making His Purposes Known

VERSES 27–29

Paul moves from the wonder of who God is to the wonder of why he made us. God made the world so that we might "seek after God and perhaps feel their way towards him and find him." And the search was never meant to be impossible, because "he is not far from any one of us."

Athens was searching for purpose and could not find it. Two thousand years later, so are our streets. And the answer for us is the same as it was for them: not the doing of things, not the keeping of religious form, not the right outfit or the right envelope or the right number of services attended — but Him.

“In him we live and move and exist.”

Beautifully, Paul reaches even into the words of their own poets — "For we are indeed his children" — and turns their own cultural memory into a witness to the truth they have been missing.

Five

Being Certain of Hope

VERSES 30–31

Paul finishes by answering the question hanging over every Athenian heart: if there is one almighty God, why is the world the way it is? His answer comes in three layers.

FIRST — God has shown patience in the past.
SECOND — God is now calling all people to repentance.
THIRD — God has set a day when he will judge the world with justice through the man he has appointed — proved to everyone by raising him from the dead.

The empty tomb is not a footnote. It is the proof. And the gospel never leaves people neutral. Some sneered. Some said, "We want to hear more." And some believed — among them Dionysius, Damaris, and others. Luke names them, because mission is never finally about winning arguments. It is about real people, real names, real souls, brought from searching to finding, from idols to the living God.

Some will laugh.
Some will linger.
Some will believe.

Our call is not to control the reaction.
It is to be faithful in the speaking.

From Mars Hill
to York Road

So we leave Mars Hill and return to York Road, to North Belfast, to the homes and streets and workplaces, the lodges and campuses and cafés, the community spaces and the conversations where God has placed us. The world around us is searching for hope — even when it does not yet know the name of the hope it seeks.

We do not speak that hope by hiding behind locked doors and old stone buildings. Nor do we shout it from a safe distance in a pulpit no one outside is listening to. Nor do we love the world by affirming everything in it as if all roads lead to God.

We speak hope by entering in, by walking and looking and listening, by recognising the traces of God’s grace where we find them, and then by the power of the Spirit speaking clearly of the God who made us, the Christ who died and rose for us, and the day when all things will be made right.

The church does not do mission. The church is missional — because our God has a missional heart. The same Spirit who carried Paul into Athens is still carrying ordinary believers into ordinary places, so that through broken words, simple conversations, faithful witness, and the power of the risen Christ, people like Dionysius and Damaris in our own streets may yet hear, believe, and find life in him.

Listen to the Sermon

SPEAKING HOPE

An Invitation

Come and worship with us

If something in this sermon stirred you — if you are searching, lingering, or already believing — you would be so welcome to join us this Sunday.

We gather every Sunday morning at 10:30AM at St Paul’s & St Barnabas, York Road, North Belfast. We are an ordinary Anglican parish trying to be a faithful, missional church in our city — learning to walk our streets, love our neighbours, and speak the hope of the risen Christ to a world searching for it.

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