The people at The First U.P. Church of Crafton Heights are spending much of the 2023-2024 academic yearlooking at the story of God’s people as recorded in the New Testament book of Acts. We engage in this series of messages convinced of the fact that God’s power changes apparently small and nondescript groups of people into a force that will change the world in ways that are reflective of the love and justice of Jesus. On January 7, 2024 we observed the Day of Epiphany with a service that included communion and sharing from Acts 8:26-40.
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Maybe you were surprised when you came into worship this morning and saw all the Christmas decorations still up. Maybe you wondered about why we are still singing Christmas carols when the rest of the world is trying to get you excited about the next big sales opportunities…
Today we celebrate the Day of Epiphany with the church of Jesus Christ. Traditionally, that’s the day when we remember the Magi and their visit to the Christ child. In addition to marking the formal end of the Christmas (the twelfth day of Christmas), the festival of Epiphany remembers the inclusion of these odd outsiders, the non-religious foreigners who welcome the holy child and it reminds the church that the light of Jesus is for everyone, not just insiders.
This year is the first time in a long time that I’m not reading Matthew 2 on Epiphany Sunday. Instead, we will continue in our year-long (or more!) study in the Book of Acts. It is a wonderful coincidence that today’s reading is in fact an Epiphany celebration that reflects and amplifies much of what we understand to be true in the story of the Wise Ones who visited the Christ Child.
Our story today centers on a man named Philip, whom we’ve met on several occasions in our journey through Acts, and for whom I have increasing affection. Perhaps you remember him as an affirmative-action hire that the young church made back in Acts 6. The Greek-speaking Jewish Christians were experiencing inequality, and so the leadership team addressed that by inviting seven Greek men to become the first Deacons. You may also remember that this arrangement didn’t last long, due to the untimely death of one of those Deacons, a man named Stephen who was killed before he’d had a chance to really serve as a Deacon.
Perhaps you were here last week, as we celebrated Philip’s passion and commitment. When Stephen’s death scattered the church leadership, Philip hightailed it to Samaria, where he wasted no time telling anyone who would listen all about the welcome and grace he’d found in Jesus. While in Samaria, he befriended and even baptized a local celebrity named Simon the Magician – a man who was so smitten by Philip’s love for Jesus that he “stayed constantly” with Philip.
Today’s reading raises the bar for Philip yet again. Instead of encountering some local talent like Simon the Magician, he finds himself face to face with a powerful foreign official. It takes place, not in Samaria, but on a road south of Jerusalem that leads to Gaza. As Black feminist Biblical scholar Wil Gafney points out, this is a remote area, and there is no single road leading the 50 miles from Jerusalem to Gaza that could accommodate a chariot. Philip has left the hinterlands of Samaria for the desolation of a place that is marked by a patchwork of roads that zig and zag through its hills and valleys.
Philip plants himself here, where the Holy Spirit has instructed him to go, and before long he encounters the motorcade of a high-ranking Ethiopian official. Although he’s not named in the Bible, an African tradition refers to him as Qinaqis. We are told that he is the Secretary of the Treasury to the Queen of Ethiopia – an impressive position in a kingdom that included not only what we know as Ethiopia today, but also Sudan and other parts of northeast Africa. The text tells us that this man had gone to Jerusalem in order to worship, but anyone who knew anything about worship and Jerusalem and the Bible knew that could not have been possible. After all, the Bible is clear that people like him were not welcome in worship. He’s got at least three strikes against him:
- Qinaqis is a gentile; that is, he’s not Jewish. Most of the Temple is automatically off-limits to gentiles.
- He’s a member of a sexual minority. Luke describes him as a “eunuch”, a word that was used in several ways in that era. It often referred to a male who had been surgically altered to remove his genitals. There are some reasons to believe that this word is used to describe queer people. In any case, Deuteronomy 23 and Leviticus 20, along with other parts of the Old Testament, are crystal clear that folk like this person are forbidden to worship.
- His politics are all wrong. He’s not an Israelite! He’s connected with a foreign heathen feminist.
The man we meet in Acts 8 is, in his very being, against all the rules. There’s no way he’d have been invited into worship in the Temple in Jerusalem.
And Philip’s response to all of this? He strikes up a conversation and extends a welcome. He didn’t need to do that; all of the good religious people would have encouraged Philip to keep his distance. Some, in fact, would have helpfully pointed out some of those verses that he could have chosen to trot out and use as weapons against this man. Yet Philip chose not to weaponize his faith, and instead chooses to engage with vulnerability and humility. Philip runs up alongside of the chariot, and hears the man reading from the prophet Isaiah.
And when you hear that, you think, “Wow, we just read a lot of Isaiah, too! All during Advent, we considered the prophecy.
The Baptism of the Eunuch (detail) Rembrandt van Rijn, 1626
The traveler asks Philip about the passage. It comes from what we call the “suffering servant” chapter of Isaiah 53, and it describes a person who was forced into silence, who was humiliated, and who was unable to have a family of his own. Could it be that the Ethiopian eunuch was reflecting on an experience of rejection and shame in Jerusalem and had discovered this passage in the scroll of Isaiah on the way home?
If you’d have been there when the foreigner asked the Deacon about the reading from Isaiah, you’d have probably said, “Well, let’s remember that prophecy has to make sense it its own time, even as we understand that the truth of scripture may expand into other times. In this passage, Isaiah was probably talking about the nation of Israel as the people of God who have been rejected and humiliated, but we can understand that there are applications that go far beyond that…”
Yes, Isaiah 53 does talk about this “suffering servant”, and it probably did refer initially to those who worked to do what was right but who were constantly thwarted by poor leadership and other factors. Yet I suspect that Philip, who we know was excited to tell the traveler “the good news about Jesus”, was able to help him see not only Jesus, but himself in these verses. Whatever it was exactly that Philip says, it got the Ethiopian right in the feels, and when they came upon a pool of water, the question popped out before the man had had time to really consider the implications: “What would keep me from being baptized?”
If he’d have stopped to think about it, of course, he probably could’ve come up with a laundry list of things that some people might use to keep him out… but before HE stopped to think about it, Philip was standing in the water next to this bureaucrat from Ethiopia administering the sacrament of baptism to someone who’d been excluded by religious rule keepers for far too long.
And at the end of the day, the way of Jesus is introduced to the continent of Africa long before it ever shows up in Europe or the Americas. God chose to use an excluded and marginalized individual to announce the welcome and love of Jesus to an entirely new group of people. Dr. Gafney says “when God decided to give birth to the African Church, a Church that survives into modernity without schism or reformation, and God appointed Philip as its midwife, and that… eunuch becomes God’s firstborn in this new and continuing community.”
You see? This is an Epiphany Story – the work of God is to make outsiders into insiders and strangers into family!
As we consider this text in our own time, I have a couple of thoughts as to application.
I don’t know about you, but I am someone who has been taught to use the Bible as a weapon. I mean, I’m sure that the people who gave it to me in this way were thinking that they were defending or protecting something or someone – God, or truth, or orthodoxy, or even me. But the reality is that too many of us have been conditioned to look for verses that exclude or marginalize other people, and to point to them, and to say, “See? This is the Word of God, and it says that you don’t belong!”
If you’re someone who’s been down this road, beloved, let me encourage you to please, please, please, give that a rest. If we’ve learned anything from Christmas, I hope it’s that Jesus has come, not just for a few, but for all. Didn’t we sing, “Light and life to all he brings / risen with healing in his wings!”?
Perhaps some of us can look at Philip and his way of being faithful to Jesus and living in the world and adopt for ourselves a New Year’s Resolution of seeking to make our first word in new relationships and in new conversations to be one of welcome, and not exclusion; one of embrace, and not of judgment.
And I’m sure that there are some in the room this morning who have been on the receiving end of such a weaponized Gospel. Have you been attacked, or excluded, or made to feel somehow less-than because something about you didn’t fit into a mold that was convenient for some religious people to use? Honestly: if we’ve learned anything from the history of the church it’s that too many times people who claim to be following Jesus can be knuckleheads or downright evil.
If you have been kicked out or pushed aside or left waiting because you are too much of this or not enough of that for some people, know this: the promises of God are for you. The Gospel as we see it flowing through the lives and the pages of the book of Acts is unhindered.
Look: the table is set. Receive the embrace of God through the presence of Jesus.
And may we all declare that thanks be to God who sometimes sends us into deserts on what may seem to us to be wild-goose chases. And thanks be to God who is ready to meet us in the desert roads. And thanks be to God for removing hindrances and making a way – then, and now, and in the days that lie ahead. Amen.
Cast Your Net 