Saugatuck Congregational Church, UCC
©Rev. Alison J. Buttrick Patton
May 3, 2015
Scripture: Acts 8:26-39
The photo on this morning’s bulletin cover makes me smile every time I look at it. I see grace in that photo – and joy – and warmth between two people who might be strangers or friends – or strangers-just-becoming-friends. It’s hard to know who reached out first: the man on the bench, or the person just outside the frame of the picture. Is the man with the tousled white hair greeting someone, or being greeted? Receiving assistance, or offering encouragement? Does it matter? Either way, the exchange clearly gives the man pleasure. His face lights up, as the two of them grasp hands, closing the distance between them. I can only imagine that the person on the other side of that hand is smiling, too.
I envision that same spark between Philip and the eunuch, as the eunuch invited Philip to join him in his chariot, as he reached out to Philip (who was jogging alongside the moving chariot) clasped his hand and helped him to swing aboard. Can you picture the two of them sitting side by side, heads close together, pouring over the Isaiah scroll as it rested on their knees, until at some point Philip’s story took over, and the scroll lay temporarily forgotten as the two gave each other their rapt attention? The eunuch had questions, so many questions for Philip, beginning with this one:
Who was the prophet talking about in that text? Himself, or someone else?
It was no idle curiosity that stirred the eunuch to ask this particular question of his guest. Of all the texts he might have owned, he had purchased this one, which means that the Isaiah text, in particular, had caught his eye.
To understand why, we need to consider a few details about the eunuch. We know, just from these few verses that he was: well-positioned, wealthy, educated, and outcast. How do we know?
- He had a chariot: He was a member of the queen’s court, a royal insider.
- He had a scroll: which means he had money. Most folks couldn’t afford to purchase their very own scroll.
- He could read Greek: Which means he’d been educated.
- He could NOT have a family: He was a eunuch. That is: he’d been castrated prior to reaching adolescence, in order to make him a suitable servant to the queen. Ironically, even though eunuchs surely did not volunteer to undergo castration, they were regarded by many as somehow sexually deviant, even immoral. So even though he was a royal insider, the eunuch was also an outsider.
All this we can deduce – and Philip could, too: that the man in the chariot was well-positioned, wealthy, educated, and outcast. All that, and one thing more: that the eunuch was a seeker after faith, Jewish, or longing to be Jewish. Thus the trip to Jerusalem; thus the Isaiah scroll; thus the appeal that someone help him to understand. The eunuch felt called to faith, faith in the God of Abraham and Sara, God of the prophets…
But he’d run into a problem: Given that he was a eunuch, a scarred man, Philip’s host would not have been permitted to enter the temple in Jerusalem. It said so right in the book of Deuteronomy: no eunuchs allowed. There he was, longing to delve more deeply into this faith that spoke to him, and he could not fully participate – at least, not according to the laws of Torah.
The prophets, on the other hand, told another story altogether. The verses he was reading out loud, as Philip happened by, come from one of the Servant Songs in the book of Isaiah, poems that described the future arrival of one who would restore God’s chosen people after their time of suffering and exile. The Servant described by Isaiah is neither a great warrior nor a powerful King, but one who confronted injustice, suffered persecution, and experienced the indignity of ‘being shorn like a sheep.’
The eunuch knew what it was like to be ‘shorn,’ to be humiliated. So he wanted to know whether the text applied to him, too; whether God could regard him with compassion. And there’s more. Keep reading Isaiah, and just a little further on you will come to these verses in chapter 56:4-5:
For thus says the LORD: To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.”
Do you see it now? No wonder the eunuch chose this scroll off the shelf, out of all the others – this scroll which offered hope in the face of exclusion, proclaimed this most extravagant assurance: You who have no family will become MY family, says God: better than sons and daughters…
So which is it, the eunuch must have wondered? Is it Deuteronomy or Isaiah? Am I in or am I out? How can I understand, without someone to show me?
That’s when the angel snagged Philip and said, “See that Ethiopian official over there? Go talk to him; see what happens…”
Philip went, and told the Ethiopian official about Jesus, how he had also suffered, and died, like the Suffering Servant in the Isaiah; how he had somehow transformed death so that any who followed him might also be transformed. Philip introduced the eunuch to the Christ he had come to know, the one who extends an expansive welcome – that same welcome promised by the Jewish prophets. There, somewhere on the road between Jerusalem and Gaza, the eunuch asked whether he might be included within the scope of God’s love and grace, and Philip answered with a resounding ‘Yes!’
Read this scene with that Isaiah text in the background and you can practically feel the eunuch’s wonder and excitement. AND you can understand why he asks his next question: What is to prevent me from being baptized? He really wants to know: Is there anything? Anything else, anything at all to keep me from being fully included? Philip answers THAT question with a resounding ‘No!’
So they climbed back down out of the chariot, and here’s the best part: they went down in the water together. This, I believe, is the crux of the matter: not that Philip somehow opened the eunuch’s eyes, but that they discovered in and with each other a truth they could not have ferretted out on their own.
The angel anticipated this, I suspect. That’s why she matched them up: because she knew that between them, something holy might just ignite – a little bit of Church, a whole lot of grace.
Most Sunday mornings, you hear me say, at the start of worship: “This gathering is closer to complete because you are here.” Closer. Closer: because each of you brings urgent questions, and life-shifting insights. Closer: because each of you has something to give, and something to gain. Here, we reach out to each other, like so many travelers on the road, offering a hand up – or receiving one.
We are closer to complete because you are here – but we’re not finished yet. We are only, always becoming church…
We are becoming church our own restored sanctuary, Yes: Here, where we thank God, explore faith, welcome neighbors. But I suspect it’s also the case that Church with a capital ‘C’ takes shape beyond these walls: out there on the road, in the in-between places: between Jerusalem and Gaza; between Kenya and Nepal; between Bolivia and Tibet; between Westport and Baltimore … out where God’s angels are busily introducing us to our neighbors.
Those neighbors are asking questions with as much urgency as the eunuch: “Am I in or am I out? Is this violence I suffer condoned by God or condemned? When the earth shakes and the walls fall down around my ears? When my hands turn raw from digging through the rubble to find family members that were swallowed when the earth opened up … am I to believe that God had a hand in that destruction, or does God weep?”
“Am I in or am I out? When the news reaches my ears that one more black man has been robbed of life; and this time the man is my son; when I learn that he’s not coming home, and my heart tears in two… When the neighborhood seethes with anger, because this is not the first but the umpteenth time that a young black man has been apprehended for ‘looking suspicious’ … Will justice and mercy be served? Will God hear my cries?”
“Am I in or am I out? When I fail to fit into the cultural norms, when my family doesn’t look like the ‘average’ family, or my body doesn’t look like the ‘average’ body, or I am a woman in love with a woman, or a man in love with a man; or I find myself at the margins of society, because someone else has decided that I do not belong: Does God understand my longing? Does God long to welcome me? Am I in or am I out?”
We become church when we open up space for these most urgent questions; when we reach out our hands and welcome each other; and more than that: when we grab hold, hold on, agree to journey together; when we accept the angel’s invitation to travel the bumpy road side by side; when we give one another our rapt attention; when we share the task of searching God’s Word for hope and healing; when we realize how much we have to learn from one another…
It is in the course of journeying side-by-side that we discover how our lives are bound up together: That your urgent questions are also mine, that the grief of a mother is also my grief; that the fear of a child is also our fear; that the rage of a neighborhood is also our rage; that the longing for justice and mercy, love and belonging is also OUR longing. So we go down in the water together, down into the waters of baptism, down into the roiling, blessed, life-renewing waters of baptism: knowing that we when we surface, we will ALL be transformed.
Then, surely, we will go on our way rejoicing!
Scripture
Acts 8:26-39 – New Revised Standard Version
26Then an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Get up and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” (This is a wilderness road.) 27So he got up and went. Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship 28and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah. 29Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over to this chariot and join it.” 30So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” 31He replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him. 32Now the passage of the scripture that he was reading was this:
“Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. 33In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.”
34The eunuch asked Philip, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” 35Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus. 36As they were going along the road, they came to some water; and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” 38He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him. 39When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing.