One of the things I’m noticing is that a fresh reading of Acts is changing how I see what the church is meant to be. Over these last few weeks we’ve been looking at Acts and following three separate themes:
· The miraculous origins of the church.
· The meaning and experience of God’s presence in
the world.
· The call on us as the church in the 21st
century.
Luke is telling the story here—it begins in his gospel
and continues in the book of Acts. So it’s no surprise that the first thing he
shows Jesus doing is talking about the Kingdom of God. Just to review: The
Kingdom is not a place or a realm, with limits or boundaries. The Kingdom as
Jesus talks about it is the experience of God’s reign—God’s values and ethics
and authority over all things and all places and all people. Jesus comes back
from the dead and talks about the Kingdom for 40 straight days—40 days of
teaching the disciples and the early believers about that Kingdom of God.
As we come to our text this morning, the church is growing
by the thousands each week. The first persecution is beginning to take shape,
and Stephen has been martyred under the watchful eye of a Pharisee named Saul.
Stay tuned: he’s going to be important very soon.
Acts 8:26-40
26 Now an angel
of the Lord said to Philip, "Go south to the road--the
desert road--that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza." 27 So he started out, and on his way he met an
Ethiopian eunuch, an important
official in charge of all the treasury of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians.
This man had gone to Jerusalem to worship, 28
and on his way home was sitting in his chariot reading the book of Isaiah the
prophet. 29 The Spirit told Philip,
"Go to that chariot and stay near it." 30
Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet.
"Do you understand what you are reading?" Philip asked. 31 "How can I," he said, "unless someone
explains it to me?" So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.
32 The eunuch was reading this passage of
Scripture: "He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before
the shearer is silent, so he did not open his mouth. 33
In his humiliation he was deprived of justice. Who can speak of his
descendants? For his life was taken from the earth." 34 The eunuch asked Philip, "Tell
me, please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?" 35 Then Philip began with that very
passage of Scripture and told him the good news
about Jesus.
36 As they traveled along the road, they came
to some water and the eunuch said, "Look, here is water. Why shouldn't I
be baptized?" 38
And he gave orders to stop the chariot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went
down into the water and Philip baptized him. 39
When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip
away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way
rejoicing. 40 Philip, however, appeared at Azotus
and traveled about, preaching the gospel in all the towns until
he reached Caesarea.
So where are we in this text? The early church is under persecution.
Stephen has been murdered. A Pharisee named Saul is chasing the leaders of the
church all over the region
Philip, one of the men chosen to manage the distribution
of food, is on the run. He’s traveling on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza, a
road that passes by the city of Hebron, and the graves of Abraham and Sarah. He
meets a eunuch. Eunuchs were men whose sexual parts were removed so they could
be trusted to guard harems and run government offices. This guy was a treasury
official in Ethiopia—he was a powerful man who was trusted to oversee the
treasury of the queen. But there’s more for us to know here.
In the OT eunuchs are listed as permanently unclean and
restricted from the Temple. Deut. 23:1 says: “No one who has
been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the Lord.” Eunuchs were not permitted to the community of faith. Now we know
there were all kinds of restrictions on people who were temporarily unclean for
a whole range of reasons: touching various animals or bodily fluids, menstrual
cycles, and a range of other natural conditions. All of these could be
restored. People who had made themselves unclean somehow could ritually cleanse
themselves and be back in the Temple the next day. Eunuchs were different. They
were permanently, irrevocably barred from worshipping God in the assembly of
the faithful.
One writer described it this way: “The
law strictly forbids a eunuch from entering the temple. Their transgression of
gender binaries and inability to fit into proper categories made them profane.
They did not fit in the tent.”
But notice that the eunuch is on his way back from
worshiping in Jerusalem, where in all likelihood he was turned away and
prevented from worshiping. When Philip finds him he’s reading a scroll of
Isaiah 53. Think about how hard it must have been for him to get his hands on
that scroll. There was no Barnes & Noble or Waterstone’s down the
street—there were no Kindles with Bibles loaded into them. This man had spent a
small fortune on a hand-copied scroll of the book of Isaiah, and he read it as
a way to help him follow God.
Philip greets the man and hears him reading out loud from
Isaiah. Riding in his chariot. Out in the desert. Still feeling rejected after
his visit to Jerusalem. Reading out loud from the Scriptures. Philip asks him
if he understands what he’s reading, and the man is a little exasperated, maybe
from just being turned away at the Temple: “How can I understand it unless
someone explains it to me?”
Turns out the eunuch is reading a passage we read every
Advent season, from the heart of Isaiah 53, where the suffering Messiah is
promised to us. How perfect is that? How perfect is it that his question is
about who this prophet might be? The Ethiopian is watching and waiting for Advent,
and Philip gets to tell him that it’s already here.
Philip takes the question and hits it out of the park,
and this Ethiopian gender outsider becomes the very first non-Jewish convert to
the Christian faith. They see a little pond or oasis or whatever kind of water
you find on a desert road, and this Ethiopian government official says: Is
there any good reason why I can’t be baptized?
Think about that question. There are a lot of things
Philip could have said at this moment. He could have quoted that Deuteronomy
passage and left him there. He could have said that his sexual identity meant
that even if he believed, he could never be a part of the church. Of course
that’s not what happened. Philip is a product of the miraculous work of the
Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Philip is a new creation. Philip listened to the
risen Jesus talk about the Kingdom of God for 40 straight days, and in this
story it’s clear that he understood what it meant.
In one of those unexplainable moments, Philip is taken
out of the story. What’s funny is that the Ethiopian guy doesn’t even notice.
All of his prayer and study and longing to understand God has led him to this
encounter with someone who had the answers. He rides back to Africa singing
songs.
This is a great story about being ready to share the
faith. About being sensitive to the questions and searching of people around
us. But here’s another thing in this story that we should remember:
We should never
ignore the significance of the fact that the first Gentile convert in the Bible
was a black sexual outcast.
This is Palestine in the first century, under the control
of the Roman Empire. There were no diversity programs or sensitivities then.
And yet the first recorded Gentile to accept the message of the gospel of Jesus
Christ was a black sexual outcast.
When you think about the miracles of the New Testament,
never forget this one. Never forget how Philip the apostle lived the message of
the gospel of Jesus Christ when he ran into an Ethiopian eunuch.
What do we make of this? It’s crucial to notice here that
after Pentecost, after the gift of the Holy Spirit, the trajectory of the
church of Jesus Christ is one of radical inclusion. Jews from outside the Holy
Land; Gentiles from anywhere and everywhere; even those whose gender identities
and lifestyles were outside the mainstream.
After Pentecost,
after the gift of the Holy Spirit, the trajectory of the church of Jesus Christ
is one of radical inclusion.
So what the heck happened? What happened to that
inclusive trajectory? What happened to the church being a place that was always
trying to outdo itself in welcoming the stranger, the outcast, the ones no one
else would accept?
The truth is that it’s not long before the church became
so deeply connected to the culture, that it came to reflect the culture’s
biases and taboos and hatreds. There are all kinds of examples.
Women in leadership in the 1st century were
edged out as the church gave in to the patriarchy of the surrounding culture.
The sharing and communal living of the early church is
obliterated by individualism and the rise of private property and unrestricted
capitalism.
Closer to home in American history: Slaveowners in the
American South could celebrate passages that seemed to condone slavery as a
perpetual norm—as something that would always be OK, while at the very same
time their slaves could be reading the same Bible and longing for release from
bondage to the Promised Land.
Maybe Ann Lamott puts it best when she says: “You know
you’ve created God in your own image when he hates all the same people you do.”
But that’s not the way it was supposed to be. That’s not
the way Christian culture was meant to speak in a prophetic voice to whatever
host culture it finds itself in.
The church of
Jesus Christ, powered by the Holy Spirit, is meant to be a place of radical
inclusion—a place where we compete to see how lavishly we can share the love of
God with each other and with our neighbors.
If we’re going to get this one wrong, then it should be
on the side of being too generous—too open—too loving, and not the other way
around. That’s what Luke is showing us in the stories of the Acts of the
Apostles. That’s what this church can be when we allow the reign of God to
cover this place.
What can we take away from this text this morning? Three
crucial things to remember.
First, God is already working in the hearts of people all
around us, even on the margins. Maybe especially on the margins. That Ethiopian
was searching for God on his own, desperately waiting for someone to share the
Good News with him. He didn’t get any help from the religious establishment of
the day. People all around us are searching for God on the own. Our job is to
enter into those conversations with our own stories.
Second, the gift of the Holy Spirit trumps
everything—even the limits God himself placed on the life of faith in the Old
Testament. This is the hardest one for us. My own denomination is tearing
itself apart because it’s forgotten who it was called to be—not a keeper of
rules, but a demonstration of grace.
And finally, because of that, we’re called to remember
that everybody is welcome here. We’re called to be agents of that open,
flexible, grace-filled love that Philip showed the Ethiopian. No matter where
they’re from, or who or how they love. If they’re willing to seek the God of
the Bible through the ministry of Jesus Christ, then we should be looking for
the nearest puddle to baptize them in.
Acts is getting interesting, isn’t it?
Just remember this: The church of Jesus Christ, powered
by the Holy Spirit, is meant to be a place of radical inclusion—a place where
we compete to see how lavishly we can share the love of God with each other and
with our neighbors.
May that be true in this place, and in every place that
claims the name of Jesus Christ.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
Holy Spirit. Amen.
