Saint Andrew's, New Paltz, NY
Br. Bernard Jean Delcourt, OHC
Easter 5 B – Sunday, May 6, 2012
Acts 8:26-40
1 John 4:7-21
John 15:1-8
Today’s Good News is that God’s salvation is on offer to all. God’s redemption and love is radically inclusive. It is inclusive to a point that can still shock even weathered Christians.
Let us seize the offer God makes to us and let’s share it as broadly as possible. In God, there is more than enough liberation and love for everybody.
I have chosen to talk to you about our reading from the Acts of the Apostles, today. The one that describes the encounter between the deacon Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch.
In this passage, Philip finds himself riding the promptings of the Holy Spirit to offer God’s salvation well beyond the boundaries of what judaic propriety would have advised.
And the Ethiopian eunuch seizes the offer; without dithering, and with joy.
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Today’s Philip is not be mistaken with Philip the Apostle, found in the Gospels. The Philip we are reading about today is one of Seven Deacons appointed by the early church to take care of hellenists who were increasingly joining the Jesus movement.
Hellenist widows were apparently too often bypassed in the distribution of food amongst the community. Seven deacons were chosen to ensure everyone in the community was fairly served. So from the beginning, Philip’s mission seems to have been to help those who were getting a raw deal.
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Philip was a great choice for deacon. He is keenly attuned to the Holy Spirit and readily responds to it when prompted. Even today, church hierarchies can find people like Philip cumbersome to deal with... but lucky congregations cherish them.
In my vocation as a Benedictine monk, we call Philip’s readiness “obedience.” We, Benedictines, understand obedience as the ability:
- to listen with the ear of our heart for what God is conveying in the texture of our life,
- and to respond to God by the being and the doing of our everyday life.
Philip is responsive to the action of the Spirit in him and in others. He is responsive to the point that he is transported by the Spirit. He is moved both literally and emotionally it seems. That movement of the spirit in each of our lives can be very real even if we can’t capture it on camera.
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Our other protagonist today is an Ethiopian eunuch of great eagerness. This man really is an outlier in terms of whom the Jews would have wanted to see join judaism. To sum it up: he is a black - foreign - servant - wannabe jew with a questionable sexual identity.
There also is a great deal we can project on that man and each of those projections are fine, as long as we allow ourselves to question our projections and stay open to hearing others’ projections too.
Is this eunuch an image of African-Americans’ rich and complicated relationship with Christianity? Does he represent non-dominant sexual identity groups (women, LGBT people, transgender folk)? Does he identify as a victim of physical and sexual abuse?
Whatever our projections may be, we can’t oversimplify either.
This eunuch is also a highly educated official. He can read the prophet Isaiah in the greek text and is one of the precious few who possess a private copy for their devotion.
This eunuch is also relatively powerful. He is traveling back home in a chariot and attended by several other servants. He has been allowed to make his own religious inquiry, and to make the journey to Jerusalem.
*****
What devotions would have been open to him is in question. According to the purity code elaborated in the book of Deuteronomy, a gentile would not have had access to the inner courtyard of the temple. And as a dark skinned African our eunuch could not have slipped under the radar as a home-grown Israelite.
And according to that same purity code, a "sexually incomplete" person would not have been allowed to enter the temple at all. The pre-puberty castration would have had substantial hormonal, emotional and identity impacts on this man and his sexual status would have been
unlikely to go unnoticed.
*****
So here he is, on the road to Gaza, reading aloud. Reading aloud would have been the normal way of most readers until the tenth century of our era. Reading was mostly a public, communal exercise and a great favor to the majority who did not own texts nor could read one themselves.
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And so it is that the Holy Spirit sends Philip to this pariah of official religion. Philip does not stop to think of all the righteous objections a self-respecting Jew could have to this suggestion. Instead, he runs to join the chariot right away.
For a modern equivalent, imagine a street preacher in Washington, DC, running to the open window of a diplomat’s limo to offer to interpret the bible that she has open in her lap.
The first exchange between the eunuch and Philip reinforces that studying scripture is best done with a community. The eunuch readily recognizes our inability to make proper sense of scripture on our own. "How can I, unless someone guides me?"
Today, despite our near universal ability to read silently, privately, and despite our access to a dizzying amount of knowledge, it is still true that scripture is best engaged in community. Beyond hearing scripture in our liturgies, how often do we get to share the bible in highly interactive manner?
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It is also worth noting what text the eunuch was engaged in reading when he met with Philip. He is reading from the prophet Isaiah. And the particular text he is reading is one of the four songs of the suffering servant. Traditional Jewish interpretation of those four poems would have identified the suffering servant as the Jewish people as a whole.
But, even before Philip joined him, I cannot help but think that the eunuch must have identified with the suffering servant himself. Listen for echoes of his life experience in the poem he was reading:
"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."
Although, the eunuch is the treasurer of an Ethiopian queen he is also first and foremost a human being of flesh and soul. How would the image of the sheep led to slaughter and the lamb led to shearing have resonated with the slave, who before his puberty, under coercion, met the knife of his castrators? There would have been deep resonance in this eunuch's heart with the plight of the suffering servant.
And then, Philip will open the eunuch’s eyes and heart to how Jesus is the suffering servant. Our own life always makes our connectedness to Jesus’ experience all the more poignant. He experienced the fullness of humanity. We have a God who is fully human and no less divine.
*****
If I have unpeeled the context of how incongruous the encounter of Philip and the eunuch would have been to their contemporaries, it is to challenge us to consider a couple of things.
First, consider how far God desires to go to meet you and engage you, no matter how conventionally unpalatable you may be to the mainstream.
Second, consider how far you are willing to run to be an agent of God’s miraculous change in the world? Who would be the out-of-the-way person you could reach out to? And how creative can you be to do that?
May the Spirit transport you exactly where you need to be for God’s Kingdom to break through.
Amen.
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