Not One Good Reason
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| Sharing a meal with our PCUSA mission co-workers in Juba, South Sudan |
NOTE: Sermons are aural events; they are meant to be heard, not read. The text below -- which was not delivered exactly as written -- may include errors not limited to spelling, grammar and punctuation of which the listener might be unaware and with which the preacher is unconcerned.
Then 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.) So 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 and was returning home; seated in
his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah. Then the Spirit said to Philip,
“Go over to this chariot and join it.” So Philip ran up to it and heard him
reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?”
He replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to get
in and sit beside him. Now 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. In his humiliation justice was
denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from
the earth.” The eunuch asked Philip, “About whom, may I ask you, does the
prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” Then Philip began to
speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news
about Jesus. As 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?” He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the
eunuch, went down into 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.
Maybe you remember about 5 or 6 years
ago, when an organization called, “City Reachers,” raised over $600,000 to
print and distribute 250,000 copies of the New Testament to subscribers of the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Do you
remember that? Copies of the full
color, glossy New Testament with scenes of Pittsburgh on the cover was given
out to pretty much everyone in the Pittsburgh region.
I remember at the time being vaguely
uncomfortable with the fact that the organizers chose to only distribute the
New Testament, effectively leaving out half of the Bible. I also wondered how effective it is to
merely put a Bible into someone’s hands without a community of faith attached
to it.
In our story from the book of Acts
today, someone has gotten Scripture into the hands of the Ethiopian
eunuch. The text tells us the man
had gone to Jerusalem to worship.
And we can safely assume that his attempt to worship had probably not
gone especially well. The text
doesn’t say it, but we know from the book of Deuteronomy (23:1) that a eunuch
would most likely have been barred from entering the synagogue due to Jewish
purity codes. And as a Gentile, he
would probably not have gotten beyond the court of the Gentiles.[1]
But despite all that would have
prevented him from worshipping in the synagogue, this outsider is reading a
scroll of the prophet Isaiah.
The eunuch is probably a tad
confused. On the one hand, he just
experienced outright rejection from the gatekeepers of religion, who considered
him an impure and unacceptable outsider.
On the other hand he probably keeps running into verses like this in the
prophet Isaiah:
On that day the Lord will extend his hand yet a second time to
recover the remnant that is left of his people, from Assyria, from Egypt, from
Pathros, from Ethiopia,* from
Elam, from Shinar, from Hamath, and from the coastlands of the sea (Is. 11:11)
Or this one:
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. (Is. 56:4-5)
What he reads in Isaiah doesn’t quite
line up with what the eunuch experienced in Jerusalem. So what is going on? Is the eunuch invited to God’s party or
not? Is he in or out of God’s
household? With only the words on
a page to guide the eunuch, it’s impossible to know. Is what he’s reading only about Isaiah and his
situation? Or does Isaiah have
something to say to the eunuch as well?
People spend a lot of time debating
what is the “authority” of Scripture.
But it seems that Luke, the writer of Acts, is less interested in the
literal authority of Scripture and more interested in the authority of those
who interpret and read Scripture in light of the good news of Jesus. Like all of those people in Pittsburgh
who received a New Testament with their Sunday paper, the eunuch has got a
Bible. He also has life
experiences. What he needs is someone to read the Bible with him, engage him
exactly where he is, and help him to see how God is present and active in his
life.
In this case, that encounter is not
going to happen in a synagogue or a church or any other divine place. It’s going to happen out in the middle
of nowhere. On a wilderness
road. The Holy Spirit is about to
blow and what happens next is amazing.
As many of you know, I grew up in the
church and spend my entire childhood deeply involved in all sorts of church-y
stuff. I went to Sunday school,
youth group, sang in the choir, went to three different vacation bible schools
every summer, and played on the church basketball team. By any measure, I was a well-churched
child.
But here’s the truth. I didn’t know much about the
Bible. I think, like the eunuch, I
wanted to know more about God, I wanted to understand Scripture, but I couldn’t
find the key to making it relevant beyond a rule book of do’s and don’ts and
how to be a good girl. I had the
book in my hand, and I could read all the words, but none of it shaped my heart
or my mind or anything in my life.
And once I went to college, I left my Bible on a bookcase in my old room
with my basketball trophies.
It wasn’t until much later that the
Bible began to open up to me in a real way. I came to love Scripture because I love literature; as a
passionate reader, I was slowly drawn back to Scripture because so many of my
favorite authors framed their stories by referencing Bible stories. It was in conversation with those
authors that I began a life-changing relationship with Scripture. The Holy Spirit was at work, I have no
doubt. Soon, my curiosity
about these stories led me to a weekly lectionary study group. There I encountered a really wonderful
teaching elder and a group of people as curious as I was about what was up with
this Bible that most of us had heard about all our lives but still understood
so little.
At some point, I said to myself, with
great fear and trembling, “What’s to prevent me from going to seminary and
maybe, maybe spending the rest of my life living into and talking about and
thinking about these stories?”
Eventually, I couldn’t keep that question inside my own head anymore and
I began asking it out loud. And it was that little group of fellow travelers
and my trusted teacher in that lectionary study group who said, “Why there’s no
reason at all you shouldn’t go to seminary.” No good reason at all.
In our text today, Philip has been
sent away from the action in Jerusalem and out to a wilderness road. We shouldn’t be too surprised that all
of this action happens out in the middle of nowhere, because that seems to be
where the Holy Spirit does most of its best work in most of the Bible
stories.
And as Philip is traveling on this
wilderness road, he runs into the eunuch who is reading scripture and, as was
the custom back then, he’s probably reading it out loud. There would be no reason on earth for
Philip to approach this man of an entirely different race and ethnic group. Philip is a second string player for an
upstart religious movement, and the eunuch is a royal court official riding in
a really nice chariot. Yet the
Holy Spirit sees the possibilities.
What might happen if two very different men of very different
backgrounds have a
conversation? So the Holy Spirit
sends Philip over to the chariot.
“Do you understand what you’re
reading?” says Philip.
“How can I, unless someone guides me?” says the eunuch.
And although we are not told all of
the details of the conversation that occurs between Philip and the eunuch, we
can tell that something important happens in that chariot. That in the conversation of the two
men, side by side, reading the text together, the eunuch learns that God’s
story of redemption, resurrection and love was not just a story for the
religious folks back in Jerusalem.
Through his conversation with Philip the eunuch began to another
possibility. He reads the text of
Isaiah with Philip and sees the connection between himself and Jesus. This outsider to the temple discovers
that the story of the suffering servant who was rejected, despised and
humiliated is his story as well.
The words on the scroll came to life in a way the eunuch could not have
discovered all by himself. He
needs Philip to help him see that God’s story is his story as well.
But I am pretty sure something also
happens to Philip in the conversation.
New Testament scholar Mitzi Smith notes that in the book of Acts, the
Holy Spirit continually brings the new church into contact with unlikely
people. Philip was snatched up by
the Holy Spirit doing as it pleases and not boxed in by human expectations or
limitations.[2] And soon, Philip finds himself bending
and moving with the Holy Spirit in ways he wouldn’t have imagined before his
encounter with the eunuch.
“What is to prevent me from being
baptized?” says the eunuch, eager to enter into a new life and new
understanding. Philip could
probably have come up with at least three good reasons to not baptize the
eunuch – Gentile, foreigner, impure.
Philip could have used any one of these reasons to exclude the eunuch
from the household of God.
But in the end, the Holy Spirit
drives both men into the water.
Because as far as Philip could tell, the good news of Jesus meant he had
no good reason at all to not baptize the eunuch.
Before the two men studied the words
of Isaiah together, the text was a bunch of words on a page. But the words come to life as the two
men leap into the baptismal pool.
A joyful, crazy, unlikely but entirely splashy and visible sign of an
always present, always active, often quiet and invisible grace.
So we can send all the Bibles into
the world – into hotel rooms and on front porches and over vast oceans. We can drown the
world in Bibles, stacked on top of one another, circling the globe. Again and
again.
But until we send our bodies into the
world and climb into unfamiliar chariots and encounter the story of God’s grace
for ourselves, the Word of God stays dusty and dry, ink on a page, signifying
nothing.
We can read the Bible night and day,
safe in our churches and our living rooms. We can quote scripture chapter and verse.
But until we send our bodies into the
world, none of our personal piety will make one bit of difference in another
person’s life or in our own. Our understanding
of God will stay very, very small.
The Word of God will remain locked in a small box, tucked up on a shelf,
gathering dust while eunuchs and inner city kids and frightened police officers
wonder it is that God seems so far away from them.
For too long, the church has been
locked up, unavailable for comment, and primarily concerned for its own purity
and safety and image. Too afraid
to change its mind and scared to death of being sullied by the muck of everyday
life. But if we look at Jesus, we
know that’s not the path we’ve been called to follow.
How many chariots do we walk by,
every day, preferring the safety of our own space? How can we learn to tell the difference between an
accidental encounter with a stranger and a holy opportunity created by the
winsome and wildly unpredictable Holy Spirit?
How many opportunities do we miss
everyday to have our understanding of God enlivened by the dozens and dozens of
Philips that God sends to us. How
often do we prefer to hold on to our own understanding of how God works instead
of allowing someone else to tell us how they see God at work in us?
I had the deep privilege of meeting
the head of PCUSA World Missions this week. Rev. Hunter Farrell was in Pittsburgh on Monday and Tuesday,
fresh from a meeting in Louisville in which it was announced that World Mission
will have a funding gap of a little less that $1 million dollars in 2016, which
means we will lose nine mission co-workers. In 2017, the gap will be $4.5 million dollars, which will
result in the loss of 40 missionaries.
Right now we only have 165 mission co-workers. Only 165 people to cover the entire globe.
What is at work in the PCUSA, I
think, is not a literal poverty, but a poverty of spirit. If we prioritize our own buildings, our
own property, our own theologies, our own way of being in the world, and do not
fund the sending of missionaries equipped to help heal a world in deep need,
then why are we here? Why does the
church – any church – exist at all?
Because there are days in which I do
not have the good sense to keep my mouth shut, I told Hunter and others
gathered at the meeting that the PCUSA does not have a money problem despite
all evidence to the contrary. We
have a spiritual problem. A
enormous spiritual problem. We
give lip service to resurrection and the power of the Holy Spirit when the
truth is we are too worried about our own survival. We are too freaked out by our convictions about who is pure
and who is not and what heresy someone is committing to see our own heresy in
not doing what Jesus told us to do.
I believe the North American church
will only be saved by relationships with people who are not like us, just as
Philip and the eunuch were saved by one another. We write off the need for mission in our cities and in the
world at our own peril.
If we keep going as we’re going, we
will indeed lose the message of the Gospel entirely and be nothing more than a
nice group of people in a rapidly shrinking social club who will not be missed
by anyone when we finally disappear for good.
Like I said. There are days when I cannot keep my
mouth shut.
The prophet Isaiah says, “On that day
the Lord will extend his hand yet a second time to recover the remnant that is
left of his people, from Assyria, from Egypt, from Pathros, from Ethiopia,* from Elam, from Shinar, from
Hamath, and from the coastlands of the sea.”(Is. 11:11)
From Assyria to Egypt to Pathros. From Emsworth to Homewood to Baltimore to South Sudan to Nepal. What in the world are we doing here this morning, brothers and sister? What in the world are we doing?
If the church can’t answer the
question, I can’t think of a reason for us to be here. Not one good reason.
But maybe we’ll begin to find an answer
at this table. Because that’s
where the Living Lord, Jesus Christ, meets us. In our unknowing.
In our confusion. In our
sorrow. In our fear. And Jesus greets us joyfully, knowing
us fully, and loving us deeply.
“The new reality the whole church
faces is difficult. But we are
Easter people, and just like Jesus’ disciples after the resurrection, there was
doubt, there was fear, there was a struggle as to what should be done next. But through it all, it was the power
and presence of the Spirit of the risen Christ which gave them hope to be
witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the outmost parts of the world.”[3]
May it be so for us. Thanks be to God. Amen.
[1] Paul
Walaskay, Feasting on the Word, page 457
[2] Mitzi Smith,
https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1235
[3] Statement
from former General Assembly moderators on funding crisis of mission
co-workers. “Presbyterian Outlook” April 28, 2015. http://pres-outlook.org/2015/04/statement-from-former-general-assembly-moderators-on-funding-crisis-of-mission-co-workers/
