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There was a moment in the history of this city that reflects something true about the human soul… and maybe even gives us some insight into how to respond to the economic and political turmoil that spins around Seattle today.
It was the late 1980s. Boeing had just laid off thousands of workers. Suddenly, the economic certainty of an entire generation seemed to vanish. The words on a billboard near Sea-Tac captured the sentiment: “Will the last person leaving Seattle turn out the lights.”
This was a city in pain. There was a longing with nowhere to land. And out of that, kids picked up their guitars and something unexpected emerged. Not a protest. Not a policy. Music.
Young people, many of them children of laid-off workers, gathered in clubs and basements and small venues and began making music that was raw and loud, and named the hurt without apologizing for it. It came to be called Grunge.
And here is what I want us to notice:
It was not just music that came into being, it was community. Pain sought people to share it with, as bodies gathered around amplifiers that screamed their ache out to the world.
Music became liturgy. Clubs became sanctuaries. And for a moment, a real genuine moment, people were not alone in what they were feeling.
That is not nothing. That is, in fact, something very human, and something very close to being holy. Because what was driving those gatherings was not merely frustration. It was longing, which reflects something true about the human soul. Longing is fundamental to our nature.
St. Augustine of Hippo said it first and maybe best: “Our heart is restless, until it rests in God.” We are made with a longing built into us: not as a flaw, not as a wound, but as a feature. It is longing at the center of who we are. It is what makes us reach beyond what we can touch or buy or build or win or elect. The grunge kids were not broken for feeling it. They were profoundly, irreducibly human.
And longing, when it has nowhere to touch down, seeks the nearest available patch of land, a stadium, a team, a political party, a protest, a needle. Longing is going to land somewhere.
Eddie Vedder, one of the poets of this grunge movement, put it simply: “All my time is spent here longing to belong.” That line captures the full-on ache of the grunge movement. And it is the same ache inscribed on the altars in Athens.
Paul recognized it immediately when he arrived in Athens, a city not unlike Seattle: sophisticated, brilliant, restless, successful, full of ideas and commerce and culture.
Paul walked its streets and sensed the longing to belong. It was on full display, billboard style, on the many altars to every god imaginable, every idol that might possibly connect to human longing.
But one stopped him short: an altar with an inscription that read: To An Unknown God.
Soon thereafter, Paul found himself in a debate with the sages of Athens at the Areopagus. He said:
“People of Athens,
I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and observed your objects of worship, I found an altar with this inscription: ‘to an unknown god.’”
It was an altar built from a longing bigger than human wants and impulses… It represented the desire to see the unseeable God, a God beyond the power of human description, to an unknown god.
Paul names this hunger, this yearning, this sense that there is something more than what philosophy can contain, more than pleasure can satisfy, more than stoic endurance can reveal.
The altar to the unknown god is not a monument to unbelief. It is a monument to longing.
And Paul says, in effect: that thing you’re reaching for? that longing you’ve named without naming it? I know what it is. I know who it is.
It is the God who created all things.
The God who made every nation, and appointed their times and places, so that people might seek and perhaps even find a place for “their hearts to rest.” A place to be. A place where they fully belong.
Yes, Paul acknowledges God is in the temples, but not only in temples, also at dinner tables, and in the earth, wind and fire, but also in a still, small voice.
This unknown god is not far from any of us; for in God we live and move and have our being.
That is the God grunge was reaching for without knowing it, upon altars they were building in basements and venues across this city. Reaching. Gathering. Longing.
Something about what they were experiencing is familiar in this city today.
There is displacement, but it is different this time… not factory floors gone quiet, but standing desks vacated, laptops shut, teams dispersed.
The tech layoffs of the last few years have challenged the promise that the right education, developing the right skills, working with intellectual rigor and discipline, will set you upon unshakable ground.
But the ground is moving. And with it a longing returning to Seattle that echoes the 1980s. A frustration. An unmooring. And underneath it the same longing. The same impulse to gather, to belong.
Grunge reached for their guitars. This generation taps their phones to engage social media platforms, scrolling ceaselessly on Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn.
But here is the difference. The grunge kids screamed together in the same room. They sweated together. They stood shoulder to shoulder in the dark. Their longing was loud and it was shared.
This time the longing is quiet. It is the longing lived alone in a room, lit by a blue screen, reaching for connection through a device that was designed not to fulfill longing, but to monetize it.
Grunge pulled people outward. The screen pushes them inward. Into the self. Into the algorithm. Into isolation disguised as belonging.
And in this pursuit, they sense that something is in the way. Something is in the way.
If you had windows open in this neighborhood in the 1980s you may have heard those same words screamed out into the darkness from Kurt Cobain’s house down the street… a fragmented antiphon that spoke to longing that couldn’t find a place to land.
He cried out: Something is in the way…
I only wish that kid had wandered into Epiphany. I only wish that he had known the insights of Paul that the God in which we live and move and have our being is found in a face, and has a name… Jesus.
Jesus who we meet in a room, this room. Known and alive through the love that is shared within this community, this neighborhood church, which is why the neighborhood church is the hope of the world.
Jesus changed everything.
The unknown God is not unknown anymore. God has a face, a history. God walked particular roads, ate particular meals, called particular people by name. And they answered by the name of Jesus.
To know Jesus is not to master a doctrine. It is to enter a relationship.
And the church is made, indeed came into being, as the place to meet Jesus. The church is a community of people who practice, week by week, what it looks like to know Jesus, and then to practice living like he would if he had my life or your life, or Eddie Vedder’s life, or even that neighborhood kid Kurt’s life.
When we follow Jesus, we locate our longing in the love of God.
That is what the grunge clubs were reaching for without knowing it. That is what the billboard near Sea-Tac was crying out for in the darkness. That is what the altars in Athens were always pointing toward. The unknown God, made known by Paul in Jesus.
True in Athens. True in Seattle today.
The church, at its best, is made for these moments of uncertainty and dislocation, even disunity.
It is not that the church has a program to counter economic anxiety, or political divisiveness. I am not saying faith makes the layoffs hurt less, or the injustice disappear, or political shenanigans cease.
What I am saying is this:
There is a God in whom we live and move and have our being, which is a foundation that does not shift when the market shifts. A God who does not disappear when we get a new mayor, or a big company leaves town, or the Seahawks don’t make the playoffs.
To know Jesus does not make everything better. It makes everything we experience smaller, right-sized, and everything about God, our loving God, more real, more present. It does not remove the longing, it gives it an address to go to.
That is what Epiphany exists to do.
We are an airstrip at night, on the darkest night any soul may ever encounter. And as the soul scans the horizon, blurry through the tears they are shedding, they see a light, two rows marking the edges of a place to land.
And those lights are held by the hands of people who call Epiphany their spiritual home, standing here shoulder to shoulder, you and me.
Those lights flash: come and sit beside me in the pews. Bring your longing. Bring your frustration, bring your rawness, bring your searching.
You are not alone. The God you have been reaching for, even without knowing it, has been reaching for you all along. His name is Jesus, and it is in him, the Christ, the second person of the Trinity, the Word through whom all creation came into being, in him the unknown God is made known.
And so, my hope is that you leave today with both inspiration to proclaim this Jesus, but also to be on the lookout for that person, that friend who sits alone in front of their blue screen seeking to find a place to land their longing.
Find them, the neighbor who can’t quite figure out what is in the way. Find that kid calling out in the middle of the night, bring them here, bring them here so they can see that their longing has someplace to land in the person of Jesus.