After several weeks of reading about what happened after Peter and John healed a lame beggar in no particular order, the lectionary committee now has us jumping forward four chapters to what may be a bit of a familiar story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. Though I will say, while I’ve heard this story several times before, preparing for this sermon was the first time I really dug into it, and it’s a super interesting tale. But before we get into the story itself, let’s first introduce the characters.
You may recognize Philip as one of the disciples, but, confusingly enough, that was a different Philip. Philip, like John and Mary, was an unfortunately common name, so it can be hard to figure out whose who. I’d honestly never realized this was not the apostle Philip until this week. This Philip is deacon Philip. See, what happened was, after the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples at Pentecost, the followers of Jesus who were becoming the church kept growing and growing. You might remember a few weeks ago from chapter four, when Peter and John were in prison for healing the beggar, “but many of those who heard the word believed; and they numbered about five thousand.” The church kept growing like that, and it didn’t take long until there was too much going on for the twelve to manage. So in chapter six, the apostles told the community to choose “seven men of good standing, full of the Spirit and of wisdom,” and the community chose—and I am going to screw some of these names up, so bear with me—Stephen, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, Nicolaus, and Philip. These men were chosen to care for the community in Jerusalem, but of course the Holy Spirit had other plans. And it isn’t two chapters later that we see Philip being called by the Spirit to leave Jerusalem and travel south to Gaza along a wilderness road.
Now fun fact, which will become relevant in a minute, the road from Jerusalem to Gaza was not actually a wilderness road. We know that Luke, the writer of Acts, was not from Judea, but from Turkey, so this could just be another example of him not knowing the geography, but I think the detail about the wilderness road was more theological than geographical. Because as Philip traveled along this road; he came across an Ethiopian eunuch who was returning home after having been in to Jerusalem to worship. Now the eunuch is a complicated character. On one hand, he was a court official of the queen of Ethiopia, in charge of her entire treasury. But since he was returning from worshipping in Jerusalem, he was probably also a Jewish convert. And while as a court official in Ethiopia, he may have been powerful, in the religious community in Jerusalem as an Ethiopian foreigner and a eunuch, he would have been an outsider, forbidden from full participation in the worship life of the Temple. So instead of entering into the religious community, the eunuch returned home alone, along a wilderness road of uncertainty, exclusion, and isolation. He may not have been in the wilderness geographically, but he certainly was theologically, as the faith he thought he found seemed to have no place for him.
It’s easy for us as enlightened outsiders to judge the temple faith community for not letting the eunuch in. I mean come on, this guy was like the ideal member. Smart, well-educated, well-connected, he was in charge of the treasury of an entire kingdom! He studied scripture on his own, and he was humble about it. Sign this guy up and give him some pledge cards! But before we look to harshly at the Temple elite, we first need to think about all the ways our own faith community has drawn arbitrary lines around who can be in and who can be out of the community of believers. Luther wrote a lot of things I wish he hadn’t about Jews and Muslims. We’ve been ordaining women in the ELCA for less than fifty years, and we were way ahead of the curve. The organization that leads prayer meetings for the US Congress still forbids women leaders, because per their theology, women are not allowed to lead men. The ELCA has been ordaining members of the LGBTQ community for almost ten years, but LGBTQ candidates still face a lot of obstacles in actually finding a place to serve in the church. Two thousand years later, a dark-skinned, sexually-ambiguous person will often still find himself on the outside looking in in many religious communities.
But Philip, called by the Holy Spirit to drop the work the apostles had assigned him to and head out into the mission field, ran right up to the eunuch’s chariot, heard him reading Isaiah, and queried, “do you understand what you are reading?” This may seem at first like a conceited question, this high ranking court official was likely way better educated than Philip, who was not hired by the Jesus movement to think. But the question was not about literary understanding; it was about theological. Philip essentially asked the eunuch, do you want to be a disciple? And the eunuch’s understanding of the true question and his desire for discipleship was demonstrated in his response, “how can I, unless someone guides me?’ And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him.”
This is the incredible upside-down nature of the kingdom of God. This outsider, this foreign eunuch whom in the eyes of so many was outside of what was considered acceptable for entrance into the religious structure, was being welcomed into this new community of believers that Jesus had created and commissioned the apostles to grow through his death, resurrection, and ascension, and the sending of the Holy Spirit. In his ministry, Jesus ate with sinners and outcasts, he again and again crossed borders both real and imagined to show that the kingdom of God is for everyone. In this story, we see Philip living out this promise. The established leadership may have said this guy was out, but Philip knew threw his encounter with the risen Christ through the teachings of the apostles that in God’s community everyone was welcome, included, and invited.
But not only is the upside-down nature present in the eunuch’s inclusion, it is also present in Philip as the messenger. Because yes, the eunuch was a foreigner and an outsider, but he was also a powerful court official. You’d think the Holy Spirit should have sent a more powerful delegate of the community than the apostles’ hired hand. Certainly for a man as powerful as the head of the Ethiopian treasury, Peter, or at least John or James, ought to have been sent.
But the Spirit didn’t choose Peter, John, or James, the Spirit sent Philip. And Philip was clearly up for the task because it was not long into their conversation that the eunuch spotted some water along the road and proclaimed, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” Theologically, per the Lutheran confessions, the answer to this question is nothing. Water and word is all it takes to baptize and Philip had access to both. But I am newly enough ordained to tell you the multitude of answers I could have come up with to that question. Did Philip have the authority from the apostles to baptize? Did he know the proper liturgy for such a service? Would Peter get mad at him and take away his deaconship for such presumptuous behavior? Luckily for the eunuch and for the church, Philip was not as in his head as I can be, or at least the writer of Acts doesn’t show it, and they went down to the water and Philip baptized him. “When 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. But Philip found himself at Azotus, and as he was passing through the region, he proclaimed the good news to all the towns until he came to Caesarea.” And so the good news spread through Philip from Azotus to Caearea, and through the eunuch from Gaza and into Ethiopia, and on and on and on, not just in Jerusalem, but throughout Judea, Samaria and Galilee, and to the whole world.
What I take from this story is that all around us there are people like the eunuch. People in wilderness places; people whom for whatever reason feel cut off from the community, isolated and excluded and alone. People who desperately want to be a part of something they maybe cannot even name yet, because no one has taught them. And the Holy Spirit has called us to run out to those people. I know it’s true, because the Holy Spirit has dropped us here. And no offense you all, but the Post Addition neighborhood of Battle Creek, Michigan is not exactly the hotbed of economic and cultural power. DC, or Lansing, or even downtown this is not. And you may wonder if we have the skills do to this? After all, we don’t have the money and the resources of some of the downtown or Lakeview churches, we don’t have the education of the Bishop or Pastor Sprang, are we really equipped to do this?
We may not have the resources or the knowledge, but like Philip we are the ones the Holy Spirit has planted in this place. And like Philip, we have all the resources we need. Here is water. Here is bread and wine. Here is the word, and the gathered community of God. What is to prevent us from doing this work? Nothing. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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