Texts: Acts 8:26-40; I John 4:7-21; John 15:1-8
Of all the lectionary readings, the arrangement of these three together in the Easter season is one of my favorite. I love the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. I am convinced that the writer of First John has captured the essence of Jesus’ life and teachings in his statement: God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.
The story in Acts of Philip and the Ethiopian high court bureaucrat who was excluded from worshipping the God of Israel and Isaiah because of he had been castrated, is an illustration of this central claim of the Christian good news.
The last reading, the Gospel account of Jesus as the vine, God as the vine-dresser, and us as the branches grafted on to the vine to produce fruit, captures truths about the spiritual life—at least my own spiritual life—that I know to be profoundly true.
Let’s look at the story in Acts first. Philip is simply told by an angel to get up and go toward the south. He is to travel a wilderness road. Not too many of us hear angels. Not too many of us would get up and go some place if we thought we did, unless, that is, we get up and go get a reality check at the office of the nearest psychiatrist.
But we do know what it’s like to be on a wilderness road—to find ourselves in new and uncharted places, to feel insecure and unsure of the direction we are to go, to wonder what’s in store for us next. And it is good to be reminded that it is most often in the wilderness times of our lives that we learn the most about ourselves and make startling, even life-changing—discoveries.
During times of unemployment or illness, or the loss of someone we love; in times of spiritual wandering—going away from the center of our religious life—God’s mercy may be pruning us…to use the metaphor from the Gospel reading, or God’s mercy may be reaching us there, catching up to us just as we are trying to speed further away.
It wasn’t Philip’s idea or his church’s idea for him to get out on the road in the desert, for pity’s sake, at high noon, between Jerusalem and Gaza. It wasn’t Philip’s idea, or his church’s conviction, that sent the stranger—a dark-skinned Ethiopian, a member of the court of that nation. It wasn’t Philip’s idea or that of his church, that the first African convert would also be an eunuch. N.T. Wright, the Anglican bishop, says that the “Ethiopian eunuch was a gentile God-fearer. He couldn’t have been a proselyte [to Judaism]; as a eunuch he was disqualified anyway, and since many eunuchs were partially dismembered as well as castrated he couldn’t be circumcised.” Wright goes on to say, “You probably didn’t want to know that…but you won’t understand the story without it.” Other scholars suggest that eunuchs, because they could not impregnate a woman, were used promiscuously because of this fact. Whatever, the man carried the stigma of imperfection, and immorality.
“This black man—there was, by the way, remarkably little racial or color prejudice in the ancient world—had been to Jerusalem to worship Israel’s God, and he wouldn’t have been allowed to celebrate the festival. …He could have prayed at a distance, but that was it. And yet Israel’s God still so captivates him that he’s reading Isaiah on the way home. I suspect he knew about humiliation and justice denied.
Philip, while responding to the angel’s bidding, comes upon this man as he is heading home. He catches up to him and asks him if he understand what he is reading, and the Ethiopian responds by asking the first of three questions:
”How can I understand unless someone guides me?”
What this question points to is the truth that we do not come to faith alone. We learn from others and we pass on what we know to the next generation. It also points to the fact that you can’t just read what’s on the biblical page without some guidance in understanding it. Faith is always a team sport. We are much better at it when we pull together, when we learn from one another, when we interact with each other, when we reach out to others and experience their reaching out to us.
Philip and the Ethiopian engage in a conversation,
which is the essence of relationship. The Ethiopian asks Philip another question. He wants to know if Isaiah is talking about himself, the prophet, or about someone else.
Philip, starting where the foreign man has begun, interprets this text and others, to say that in Jesus, Israel’s God has revealed a universal welcome to all people. I thought of this story this past week when, on Thursday, the United Methodists meeting in their quadrennial General Conference once again voted to say that homosexuality is incompatible with Christian life. I wondered how many of those Methodists would deal with this passage in the book of acts, where suddenly the Ethiopian’s physical, social and religious exclusion—all based on Levitical law– are overturned. He is embraced by the God who is revealed in the crucified Jesus and welcomed gladly by the evangelist who met him where he was, and showed him a new way. The new way would not change his physical or sexual reality; it would accept him as he was, in a condition he could not change.
Then the third question naturally comes from the Ethiopian: “What is to prevent my being baptized?” He may still have worried that he would be somehow excluded. But there, in the desert, was a pool of water. And Philip and the eunuch got down out of the chariot and into the water right there, right then, and it was done.
The story says that Philip disappeared. I don’t know what to make of it, but I do know that spiritually speaking some of the best people in my life who have led me to God seem to have disappeared. I have gone on my way rejoicing that I met them, as the eunuch went on his way rejoicing.
For me this story always illustrates a reality about God more than a fact about the early church. Evangelism—bringing the good news to the world—the strange and alien world—is God’s idea before it is ours. At every turn of the road, when the Holy Spirit turned toward Gentiles, then to this race and that ethnic group, to women, to slaves—the church had to be pushed, pulled and prodded. Its stodginess and prejudice had to be pruned, to use the metaphor from the Gospel lesson. Its ugly propensity to exclude—on whatever basis—race, class, manners, clothing, age, gender, sexuality, marital status—had to be trimmed off.
First John instructs the fledging church: love one another, because love is from God. Surely, the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch illustrates this point. Yet we have failed, time and again, over the centuries, to love one another in the church. The song says “They will know we are Christians by our love.” The world certainly doesn’t know it by our schisms, our over 4400 denominations.
First John’s message, that we are called to love one another is grounded in the fact that we have first been loved. When one feels personally the possibility of being excluded from God’s love yet embraced by it, only then can one, in love, accept those who otherwise we may deeply dislike, and perhaps abhor. If God can love us, me, then God must surely also love those whom I do not like.
I struggled this week with this passage: it is one thing to love the people who are like me, people like you and I do love you, you know. It is quite another to love someone or some group, even of fellow Christians, whom one believes is doing harm, or teaching a false gospel. For example, it is very difficult for me to love the Roman Catholic Church whom I view to have doctrinal and hierarchical attitudes towards women that I find unsupportable and un-Christ-like; or this past week, to love the Methodists, who decided again to exclude gays and lesbians from full participation in their denomination which has as its motto: open doors, open minds, open hearts. Yeah, right, I want to mutter at my homophobic Methodist friends. They have as much trouble loving me with my way of interpreting the faith, thinking me heretical, too.
Nonetheless, I am not called to agree with these other Christians but to love them because God loves them, and God is and will work in their lives, and in mine, through our mutual witness to one another. As a Christian, loving them according to this teaching means that I must care enough about these other members of Christ’s church—or even perhaps the non-Christian member of some terrorist organization—to engage them in a relationship where we may struggle together to find answers to our life problems and the difficulties of the world.
You see, the sharing of the good news begins not with our inclusiveness, but in the heart of God, in God’s grand resolve to have a people, a nation gathered not as the world gathers people—by race, or gender, or class—but by the call of God. This is why the ecumenical movement, which affirms that all who follow Jesus, cannot be optional, but a Gospel imperative. It breaks my heart to see denominations unwilling to participate in, much less support financially, the efforts of Councils of Churches at local, regional, national and world levels, to address the matters that divide us as Christians and to give a unified voice to those things on which we are united.
Discipleship means becoming what God wants to make of our lives, and of our church, not what we want. So I think God will continue clipping and pruning, sending us out onto wilderness roads, until Christians repent of their racism, classism, and bigotries; until Christians of every variety are able to join together at the Lord’s table in unity of love, while celebrating our diversity and understandings of the faith; until Skid Rows are replaced by avenues of compassion and streets of hope; until child neglect is replaced by child nurture; until murder, abuse, rape, and war yield to mutual respect.
If we abide in God’s all embracing love, we can transform the world. That’s the good news for today, and every day.
