“Unhindered Grace”
Acts 8:26-38
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
5/6/18
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.
On Easter morning, Jesus isn’t all that gets raised. Questions
and concerns get raised. As the Christian community grows, hackles get raised.
The Jesus-followers not only preach and practice a message of radical welcome,
they pool their wealth and share it. Threatened by such uncensored grace, the secular
and religious powers-that-be in Jerusalem begin to persecute the new community.
Some Christians flee, and when they take the gospel with them,
we’re reminded of the parable of the sower. Scattered by persecution, followers
of Jesus are seeds carrying the germ of the gospel. While I don’t believe that
God causes or celebrates any sort of persecution, I do believe, that as
the creative and defining force within the universe, God is known through God’s
inclination to redeem even the most unholy and inhuman actions. God’s magic is
to use them for good. But positive results arise from painful events. They
come as gifts of resurrection. That’s what Easter is all about – God creating
something so unexpected and transforming out of the atrocities of Friday that
we actually remember that day as Good.
The disciple Philip has just returned to Jerusalem from
Samaria. Ministry is making him open and available to the Holy Spirit in ways
he never imagined. As Philip travels southward, into the wilderness, the Holy
Spirit, ever the opportunist, makes the disciple aware of a nearby chariot
carrying a high-ranking official in the Ethiopian government.
Things
get a little PG-13 here. But let’s face it; the Bible is not a G-rated book. This
official is a eunuch. He’s been castrated, probably at a very young age.
Widely
practiced in ancient cultures, intentional castration created a pool of male
servants who lacked the hormones that could lead to willfulness and aggression.
Eunuchs could be trusted to care for kings, and queens, and harems, and money.
In Acts, the Ethiopian eunuch is a Jewish proselyte – a convert.
He’s been to Jerusalem to worship. Think about that: The Queen of Ethiopia
allows the keeper of her country’s wealth to travel to Jerusalem to worship Yahweh.
She allows him to ride a thousand miles away to worship the one who makes
barren wombs fruitful, the one who heals the sick and the blind, the one who
resuscitates the dead. She sees no threat in allowing her emasculated servant to
engage the power of the one who makes somebodies out of nobodies.
Seeing that the man is reading Isaiah, Philip says, “Do you understand
what you are reading?”
‘I could use some help,’ says the man, and he invites Philip
to join him in the chariot.
The eunuch is reading Isaiah 53, the prophecy concerning the
Suffering Servant. “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter…like a lamb silent
before its shearer…In his humiliation justice was denied him.”
The
eunuch, who has been physically mutilated in order to be trusted, finds a scripture
that gives voice to his own humiliation and to his sense of injustice. His
involuntary sterilization not only robbed him of the possibility of a normal
life, it makes him unclean. According to the Mosaic law in Deuteronomy 23, eunuchs
are ineligible for full participation in the community.
It
begs the question, Why would he even want to become Jewish? It also
clears the way for him to receive the gospel when Philip offers it to him. The
eunuch hears the gospel as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy – and not just
the suffering servant part. As the Ethiopian continues to read Isaiah, he gets
to chapter 56. “Do not,” says the prophet, “let the foreigner joined to the
Lord say, ‘The Lord will surely separate me from his people;’ and do not let
the eunuch say, ‘I am just a dry tree.’ 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.”
Isaiah’s
next verse is a wonderful line that was Freudian long before Freud. “I will
give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.” (Is. 56:3-5)
Isaiah shaped Jesus’ own theology. So, Philip accepts the man where
he is, as he is, because that’s Jesus’ way. As the Church, though, we often
make some self-serving presumptions. We often assume that when someone hears
and receives the gospel, they will think and act like us. Homogeneity makes us
feel safe. It makes us buy into the fiction that sameness equals rightness.
It
used to be the practice that all men came to church in coats and ties, and all
women wore dresses, hats, and gloves. The “Sunday best” dress code was imposed,
and to fail to comply was to show contempt for God. Those who defied the code represented
something dark and foreign, something spiritually suspect and impotent.
Liberated
by the gospel, Philip shares the good news with one who is both a eunuch and a foreigner. And
being welcomed and affirmed, the man recognizes his own humanity, his own worth,
and his own powerful potential.
“Look!” he says, ‘There’s
some water! What’s to prevent me from getting baptized?’
The law says, Everything. People like you can’t belong.
The Gospel says, Nothing. Nothing can hinder your inclusion
in the body of Christ!
The gospel declares to the
eunuch that he has been created in God’s image. His life is bright and pregnant
with possibility.
Listen: Before the Church can be a place for all
people, we have to learn to be a place for all of ourselves – even those parts that
we have learned to deny, repress, and exile to some distant desert. Those dark
and foreign parts of us belong to God, too. They’re holy and full of promise.
Some of us may wrestle with a deep-seated urge
toward violence and control. And as harmful as that urge can be, simply to
label it sin and repress it is to
reject a potential gift. If we harness that energy and incorporate it onto a
foundation of compassion and humility, it can be resurrected into decisive and
prophetic leadership.
Conversely, to judge
oneself for feeling indecisive and non-committal may be to ignore a call to
ministries of discernment, a holy work that requires hearing and considering
many voices.
I think God wants us to
accept, to make peace with, and to assimilate even those parts of ourselves we
have tried, in effect, to castrate. God wants us to love all of ourselves as we
are loved by God. With that in mind, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself”
takes on new significance, doesn’t it?
Recognizing the power and
potential of his own life, the Ethiopian eunuch sees the sparkle of water and
asks, What is to stop me from claiming my
wholeness and my Belovedness in Christ?
And Philip’s says, Nothing. Nothing can hinder you from your full humanity in Jesus.
As we gather around the Lord’s table, God meets us
where we are, and loves us as we are. But God doesn’t seem satisfied to leave
us there, either. At this table, we don’t shamefully cast off sin nearly so
much as we gratefully take on and take in God’s redeeming grace.
And no one will be hindered
from God’s table of grace.
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