A Sermon Preached by Jon M. Walton
May 6, 2012
Scripture: Psalm 22: 25-31; Acts 8:26-40
Philip would have been an interesting person to know. One of the original Twelve, he has only a cameo role in Matthew’s, Mark’s, and Luke’s gospels. Just a walk-on part in each.
In John’s gospel we learn much more about him than in all the others… that he is from Bethsaida, for instance, and that he is instrumental in the call of Nathaniel among the Twelve.
At the end of John’s gospel, Philip gets the memorable line, “Show us the Father and we will be satisfied.” But Jesus scolds Philip, “Have we been together this long and you still you don’t understand? To know me is to know the Father.”
Philip has only a minor role in the gospels, and in the final analysis he comes off not as the strongest or most gifted among them.
But in Luke’s second book, the Acts of the Apostles, Philip gets his break out role. In Chapter 8 we find him preaching in Samaria, and eagerly received there. Philip has evidently found his voice, emboldened by the resurrection perhaps, and the gift of the Spirit.
He baptizes a Samaritan by the name of Simon, and through that baptism we see the gospel is spreading even to the Gentiles. But no one could have predicted what would happen next.
The way Luke remembers it, an angel visits Philip and tells him to go to the Gaza road, south of Samaria. And while he is on his way, he runs into an Ethiopian dignitary, a member of the royal court, the treasurer to Queen Candace. This man is what we would call today a religious Seeker. Luke tells us that he has been worshipping in Jerusalem and that while he is riding in his chariot he is reading the prophet Isaiah.
A number of scholars argue that he could not have been a Jew even though he worshipped in Jerusalem and read the Bible. They justify that claim on the basis of the evidence. Luke tells us this Ethiopian was a eunuch. And that had certain implications for this man’s religious identity.
Now I have to warn you this is scripture at its most raw, Deuteronomy 23:1 which specifically says that, “No male whose sexual organs have been cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord.” (Actually it’s more specific than that, but I’ve cleaned it up out of modesty.) One biblical scholar, inspired by the awkwardness of such frank language, has jokingly suggested that along with John 11:35, “Jesus wept,” this verse could be “otherwise known as the very best memory verse ever.”
Parenthetically, let me say that no one in the Bible ever understood or could conceive of transgendered persons. Cross dressing was known in ancient times, but not cross gender issues. Eunuchs, like the castrato voices of the 17th and 18th Centuries, had a specific role to play. Eunuchs in ancient times were guards and chamberlains in the palaces and harems of Eastern monarchs, and clearly to Jews as an endangered community, where procreation was held to be one of the highest of values, sanctioning would have been counterintuitive, not to mention Biblically forbidden. Anyone who did not fit the fecundity measure had no place. And this negative stance toward fertility went not only against men, but also against women who could not bear children or conceive. This opens this text and the scriptures’ understanding of fertility and discrimination to a whole new level of review. But I get sidetracked.
What I want to highlight in this story to which we commonly refer as the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch is not the Deuteronomy passage, as awkward as it is, nor even to address the issue of sexual reassignment, which might be an issue that some of our members might hear in this text. But what I want to focus on this morning is the fact that Luke has remembered this story for two reasons. Partly because the Ethiopian was an Ethiopian, and therefore a Gentile. And partly because he was different, in fact a member of an outcast group, a sexual outlier which the Bible at least in Deuteronomy had castigated.
Luke remembers this story primarily to tell us about this moment when Christianity moved in an unexpected direction, and the gospel began to open to whole world as well as to the least likely.
And what is stunning about this moment is that is predicated on the spiritual neediness, the searching and readiness of this Ethiopian who had experienced something in life that was embarrassing, that set him apart, that was difficult to explain, painful to remember, a matter of controversy and misunderstanding to others. He was a religious outcast, someone, dare we say it, that the Bible had orphaned spiritually.
But Luke tells us that in spite of the discrimination against him, in spite of his marginalization, he had made his way to Jerusalem to sit in the back pew of the Temple, maybe to offer a sacrifice, maybe just to be around the people who were allowed in the Temple precincts. Maybe just to join in a verse or two of the hymns.
He had stopped in the Temple gift shop as he was leaving, and he had gotten himself a Bible, and on the way home he wasn’t reading Deuteronomy, he already knew what Deuteronomy said. He was reading Isaiah in case there was something more than Deuteronomy, and though he didn’t know it, he was about to be welcomed into the Kingdom of God.
Do you understand what I’m saying? A few selected scriptures, one in particular, and some of the people of faith were keeping him at a distance from the faith that was in him; and yet he wanted to be a part of the very community of faith that was rejecting him.
One writer on this text writes:
Th[e] law strictly forbids a Eunuch from entering the assembly of the Lord. Their transgression of gender binaries and the inability to fit in proper categories made them profane by nature. They do not fit. But despite the fact that in all likelihood he would be turned away by the religious establishment, the Ethiopian Eunuch sought God anyway. [1]
What is it like to so hunger and thirst for God that, at the risk of rejection, at the risk of vulnerability, at the risk of disappointment, you seek after God passionately anyway, even when you have been told you are not wanted?
Philip seeing the sincerity in this man’s eyes, noticing the scroll of Isaiah sitting on his lap… Philip must have decided, “Who am I to keep the good news of Jesus Christ and his loving embrace from this man?” So Philip shares the gospel with this Ethiopian eunuch. And after the Ethiopian hears what Philip has to say and understands that what is required is to be baptized, he asks the $24 question, “What is to keep me from being baptized?”
And suddenly the question rests on Philip’s shoulders. What stands in the way of this man who is not a Jew, not one of Philip’s own, this foreigner from far away, this sexually unacceptable outcast, what is to keep him from being baptized?
Maybe Philip remembered in that moment not just Deuteronomy 23:1 prohibiting eunuchs from the community of faith, but maybe he remembered Isaiah 56:1-8 which points to a time when eunuchs and foreigners will be included in the kingdom of God, and God’s house will be “a house of prayer for all peoples.”
What is happening in this passage and by this baptism is that the law is being rewritten, the outsider is coming in, the old patterns and ways are being rejected, behold the new has come. We should have known this might happen. Revelation 21:5, “And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I make all things new.” [2]
We thought this was a story of the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch, but I am beginning to wonder if this is not the story of the conversion of Philip; the story of the church doing what it did not think it could, of the gospel breaking through to do more than any of us had thought possible.
Nadia Bolz-Weber, a Lutheran Pastor at Denver’s House of all Sinners and Saints, describes how this kind of thing happens:
One Sunday a few years back, my parishioner Stuart showed up to liturgy wearing slacks and button down shirt rather than his iconic Grease Monkey jacket and jeans.
Earlier that day he had stood as godfather and baptismal sponsor for the child of his friends, a straight couple who have known Stuart for a number of years.
Apparently, after the baptism, there was a little reception back at this couple’s house. To Stuart’s surprise his friends got all of their guest’s attention so they could say a few words about why they had chosen Stuart as their child’s godparent.
“We chose you Stuart,” they said, “because for most of your life you have pursued Christ and Christ’s church even though, as a gay man, all you’ve heard from the church is that ‘there is no love for you here.” [3]
There are too many stories like that in the church, people who have been told, “There is no love for you here.” It’s more common a theme than we like to think. It’s been a few years since I have been in touch with her, but I will never forget that in another congregation there was a wonderful woman by the name of Cicely. She described to me how she came to the church. It was happenstance really, or not. Someone had actually recommended the church to her. She had come from a very strict evangelical background. When she married her husband, she remembered the pastor citing Paul’s instruction to the Ephesians, “Wives be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord.” [4]
The first few years of the marriage were okay, but then the abuse started, verbal and then physical. She could not stay in the marriage. She went to her pastor for counseling and told him that she had to separate, that she would seek a divorce.
The next Sunday the pastor had her and her husband stand before the congregation and she was shunned for abandoning her husband, for leaving the marriage that God had bound together and no one should put asunder.
“I could not go into the church for years,” she said, until I came here and it was communion Sunday. While you were saying the words of invitation, something got through to me that never had before. I realized I had not heard all of the gospel until I had heard the words Jesus said and that you repeated at the table, “Anyone who comes to me, I will never turn away.”
Last Sunday I preached at the Northport Presbyterian Church on Long Island and gave the William Rambo Spiritual Enrichment Lecture at a luncheon following worship. Bill Rambo is the now 100 year old retired executive presbyter of Long Island Presbytery.
In honor of his 100th birthday and 75th year of ordination, I spoke about the way the church has changed over the past forty years since I was ordained. And I looked at some of the discouraging statistics that tell the story of the Presbyterian Church these days.
The median age of Presbyterians nationally is 61, and the average age is well over 60. Half of our congregations are served by pastors and leaders who are 65 years of age or older. Only 4% of our clergy are under the age of 40.
We live in a complex global spiritual community in which people of a variety of faiths tweet and IM and blog each other about their spiritual questions and findings and they do so both inside the church and outside of the church. It is a Seekers time.
We can no longer assume that the neighbors in our building or the friends that are closest to us are Christian. They may be Muslim or Hindu, or, even more likely, have no religious tradition at all. Within our church I have performed marriages between couples who are Christian and Jewish, Christian and Muslim, Christian and Hindu, Christian and Buddhist. Roman Catholic and Presbyterian. The time when Ethiopian Gentiles and observant Jews could live separately is long over. We are running into each other every day and the world is not becoming less complex but more so.
The third largest religious group in America is “none,” 17%. Mainline Protestants represent only 14% of the population.
There has been a lot of numerical decline in our denomination. Presbyterian membership around the county has declined by 46% over the past forty years. And the reason many in the church give is that this decline has been the result of our divisions over the ordination of gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons.
But, I think, that is the most facile reading possible. Discrimination in the church may have been the reason why a lot of people who are GLBT have been driven away from the church, but it does not explain why everybody else has left, except out of fear and prejudice and maybe weariness of contention.
What I believe this passage from Acts teaches us is that God’s plans include a lot of people that we didn’t expect, and many whom we are not all comfortable about having in our group. Except, of course, it’s not our group, its God’s group, it’s the church, and it’s the commonwealth of God. So we don’t get to choose who is welcome and who’s not.
What I love about this old, young church that is the First Presbyterian in New York City is that our members seem to have learned a long time ago, in school and college and in the military and in travel and at work that the world is a far more diverse than homogeneous reality. There has been among you a suspicion for a long time that the mind of God is much broader and more welcoming of difference than the narrowest of us in the church.
And it all started that day that the Ethiopian eunuch, who was searching his Bible and sitting on the back pew or up in the balcony in the temple asked the question, “What is there to keep me from being baptized?”
I think our congregation is growing and stretching and there are the increasing number of adult and children’s baptisms that there are, because we are hungry like that Ethiopian to know God, and to know how to see God in the complex, confusing, diverse, amazing world in which we live. This God who delights so much in the complexity and uniqueness of each and every snowflake. This God who gives each of our fingers a designing print of its own. This God who delights in differentiation.
And those who would seek to separate the church into likeminded smallness, with rules and restrictions and overtures and amendments that set them apart in such a way that unity becomes uniformity, seem to me to be the ones out of step with the gospel, the ones who have not yet understood how the commonwealth of God is populated.
What I see is that our parents choose this church, and come this way because we are respectful of the many paths that have led us here, and the many reasons that keep us here, and the diversity of people who form us here. And that they see that that is a good thing. They have answered the question, “What then is to keep me from being baptized,” knowing that the answer to that question has meaning not just for others who are not like us, but for us as well. Because in one way or another we are all outcasts, all different, all sinners (to borrow Calvin’s and the scripture’s phrasing). We are all broken with our own problems, and sexual fears and vulnerabilities and secrets and self consciousness that we hide from one another. If truth be told, we all have our issues in sexual things, in hurts received and intimacy rejected, and disappointments left unspoken.
“What is to keep me from being baptized?” asked the Ethiopian eunuch of the Apostle Philip. And of all the things Philip might have said, “Tradition,” “Deuteronomy 23:1,” “We’ve never done it that way before,” “You’re a eunuch for heaven’s sake,” You’re not like me,” “You’re an Ethiopian,” “I’m out of my comfort zone,” “What are you doing reading Isaiah anyway!” Of all the things he might have said, in answer to the Ethiopian’s question, the answer he did give was, “There is nothing to keep you from being baptized.”
And ever since he did, in God’s economy of things, we have been welcome in the church, you, me, all of us, ever since.
© Copyright Jon M. Walton, 2012. Used by permission.
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[1] The Hardest Question, “The Conversion of the Ethiopian Eunuch” https://thehardestquestion.org/yearb/easter5nt-2/
[2] King James Version
[3] Ibid.
[4] Eph 5:22.