Introduction

Sigmund Freud said that God is an illusion. We take the idea of a loving father, he said, project it upon the universe, and call it God. Today's text from Acts bears witness to this process of creating gods by means of personification and projection. (A humorous way of criticizing our tendency to create God or gods in our image goes like this: "God created mankind in his image, and mankind returned the compliment!")

I'm afraid we have to confess that all of us - not just the people in Lystra - have a well-demonstrated ability to picture God the way we would like God to be. One glaring example of this is the tendency to insist that God is male, in spite of the numerous biblical indications that God is beyond gender distinctions. The Greeks made no bones about that fact that their…