Sometimes It Is What You DON’T Say

Acts8:26-40

May 3, 2015

First and Harmony Presbyterian Churches

The Reverend Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

                 

Before we get into this text from Acts, I have to make one observation.

                  Sometimes the bible doesn’t make sense.

                  I don’t mean the confusion that plagues our modern minds when we read about demons and angels or the challenge to our scientific logic when we read about miracles or even the persistently puzzling narrative of the resurrection. 

                  Those are theological and textual issues and they train you in seminary to work with those.

                  What I am talking about is the little stuff.  Those little moments when an important plot element just makes no sense whatsoever. 

                  Like this text today.

                  It makes perfect sense that a eunuch would be the treasurer to the Queen.  Eunuchs were court officials and were presumed to be more trustworthy since they were free from other distractions.

                  It makes sense that he was on the road back to Ethiopia because there was thriving trade between the empires and the only way to easily get from the heart of Rome to Ethiopia was to travel around the edge of the Mediterranean and Jerusalem was a major stopover on the route. 

                  It even makes sense that Phillip would speak to the man since this was at the height of the early church movement and the spread of the gospel.

                  What doesn’t make sense is the essential plot element that gives Phillip the reason to go and speak to the man in the first place.

                  Where did he get a copy of Isaiah??

                  It isn’t like he went by the used Torah store and picked up a copy of the Holy Scriptures.  It was extremely rare for a scroll to be outside of a synagogue, and even rarer still for it to be in the hands of a non-Jew. 

                  John Calvin explains away this little plot issue by chalking it up to divine providence.  God needed this story to happen in a certain way and so it did.  And I suppose that there is something to that.  My Presbyterian ears are pretty sympathetic to “it was providence” being the answer to a question like this. 

                  Then again, maybe it was a coincidence.  Maybe Phillip just got lucky and happened upon the one person whose conversion would be a story for generations.  Who knows?  The bottom line is that this Ethiopian fellow was by the side of the road reading Isaiah when along came Phillip; it happened.  However it happened to happen, that is what happened. 

                  So, here we are finally out of Jerusalem where the last few weeks have kept us as we began this journey with the apostles into the days, weeks, and months after Jesus leaves them with the charge to build the community of faith. 

                  Although the book of Acts is not an historical account like a history textbook, it does help give us a sense of the general direction of the early church both theologically and geographically.  You see, the writer of Acts is the same person who wrote the gospel of Luke.  In fact, Acts is in many ways a sequel to Luke picking up the story where the gospel left off. 

                  Taken together Luke and Acts paint a vivid theological picture of the history of the church.  In Luke, the action in the story generally moves in one direction geographically- toward Jerusalem.  It also moves theologically toward the narrative of the death and resurrection of Jesus.  In fact, Jerusalem and the events of the resurrection are at the heart of the Luke-Acts story. 

                  Acts, picking up where Luke leaves off, takes the story from its geographic and theological location in Jerusalem out into the world.  The gospel is too big to contain in one geographic place or even one community.   As we see throughout Luke’s gospel, Jesus is the Jewish messiah but he is the savior of all human kind- Jew and Gentile alike.  And the story of Acts reflects that.  If Luke brings the story to a concentrated focus in the Jewish holy city, Acts takes it out again demonstrating the vast reach of the gospel and the sweeping up of the entire world in the promises of God.

                  Perhaps nothing demonstrates that far-reaching nature of the gospel than the encounter with this Ethiopian eunuch.  In terms of being a foreigner from far off lands, he was the first century equivalent of the man on the moon.  That the gospel could reach him was a profound miracle and demonstrates just how powerful the message of resurrection is and how far we are called to share it.

                  When Phillip encounters the man, the eunuch is reading from Isaiah.  And not just any part of Isaiah, but the passage that speaks of the messiah and his suffering. 

Talk about coincidence!  (Err, I mean providence.)

Phillip meets the man, explains the Isaiah passage to him, travels with him for a while, and, when the man sees a pool of water, baptizes him. 

The short prose of the story gives the whole thing a sense of urgency and action.  The great preacher Frederick Beuchner said that the Ethiopian’s excitement sounds like the babbling of a brook over pebbles.  I think it sounds more like the water crashing over Niagra Falls!  This man has been transformed and he knows it; he feels it; he cannot hold the joy back and even though words escape him, the joy of the moment sounds like a thunder clap echoing around them. 

It is no wonder this is one of the most cherished stories of the New Testament outside of the gospel narratives.  It is short but, wow, is it ever powerful!

I remember growing up and being taught in Sunday school that this story is important because it reminds us that we are called to share the gospel with everyone we meet and when we do we might just help them find their way to the Christian path and the life of the people of God. 

That was true in second grade and I still think it is true today.  We are in fact called to share the gospel in word and deed with the whole world.

Now, do you remember what I asked you to keep in mind about this story? 

At the heart of this story of testimony and conversion is a very unlikely meeting; and apostle of Jesus and a foreign eunuch.

As a devout Jew, Phillip would have known, and as a man who was able to read and chose to read the Hebrew scriptures, the eunuch likely would have known, the passage from Deuteronomy 23 that makes clear that no one whose “testicles are cut off or whose penis is cut off may enter the assembly of the Lord.” 

In other words, anyone who has had these irreversible things done, can never-ever- stand righteous before the Lord because they are ritually and irreversibly unclean. 

You can recover from a lot of things;

a Gentile can follow the law;

a sinner can repent;

an unclean person can become ritually clean again;

but a eunuch is irreversibly unclean. 

He is beyond the limits of redemption according to the law.

Whatever sympathy anyone might have felt for the man, there was nothing anyone could do.

That is who Phillip stops to speak with, read with, teach, and, finally, baptize.

He is a man from the ends of the earth AND a man so distinctively separated from righteousness before God that only the name of Jesus Christ can redeem him.  Whether because it was happenstance that Phillip found that man that day or the providence of God that their paths crossed in that moment, the fact remains that in this story we have a demonstration of the reach of the gospel in the world and in our lives.   It is providence working overtime to be sure!

Phillip stops to speak with, read with, teach, and, finally, baptize an Ethiopian Eunuch into the household of Jesus Christ.  There is real power there and true witness to the power of the work of the Holy Spirit in those discrete moments in our lives.

I think that is not the only place where we see the hand of providence- the guiding of the hand of the holy spirit- in this story.  Yes, the fact that he is Ethiopian helps the narrative along geographically by showing the gospel being proclaimed to a man who comes from the ends of the earth and, yes, it helps it along theologically by showing that even someone who is irredeemable under the law is still redeemed by the resurrection of Jesus, those are vital parts of the story and we mustn’t forget them.

 But perhaps the most important lesson to us here today, the other deeper less evident thing providence is urging us toward in this unlikely encounter, is found not in the power of Phillip’s words or the visible acts of the Spirit in the Ethiopian’s soul, but instead in what doesn’t happen. 

Phillip, recognizing what the man was, knowing what that meant, and being fully aware of the man’s status as unclean, proceeds to not say a single word about it.

He does not say one word about the man’s physical appearance or ritual uncleanliness.

Never does Phillip point out to the man that he is unclean.

Never does Phillip say that the man is bad or wrong or sinful or anything else.  He starts by telling the man the good news of Jesus Christ.

Never does he make the ludicrous theological claim that it is possible to hate the sin but love the sinner.  If sin is transgression of the law, the sin is part of this sinner’s very presence in the world.  To hate what makes him sinful is to hate him and Phillip knows the gospel well enough to know that the best way to silence good news on your lips is to harbor hate or prejudice in your heart. 

He knows what he sees when he sees the man.  He sees someone that society, the religious community, and perhaps even some of his fellow Christians would call unclean, unworthy, and beyond redemption.  If God hates anyone it is this guy right here.

He knows that is who is sitting in the cart reading from Isaiah, but rather than walk up and snatch away the holy text from the hands of a sinner, Phillip walks up and takes a seat next to a potential brother in Christ and begins to talk about the Good News. 

How often do we look at the world outside of the walls of our carefully constructed theological homes and see not sinners in need of chastising or converting but children of God deserving of the good news?  How often do we really see through the eyes of Phillip? 

Or put another way, who are the Ethiopian eunuchs of our world? 

Who are the people that social convention and theological inertia and our own judgmentalism have convinced us are simply too far gone to be saved or too unclean to be associated with? 

Who are the people who just don’t deserve to hear the message of the gospel?

Whose story is so frightening; so nontraditional; so downright sinful that it would be better to steer clear of them to avoid being seen as guilty by association?

Perhaps those are the very people providence is trying to get us to notice.

Perhaps, just perhaps, those are the very people the Spirit is urging us to seek out not to demonstrate their distance from the holiness of God but to proclaim to them the overwhelming closeness of the love of God to all of God’s children. 

Our generous traditional reading of this text has Phillip eagerly walking up to that Ethiopian and sharing the gospel, but I have to admit I imagine that there was at least a little internal hesitation; a moment when he hesitated, looked up to the heavens, and said, “seriously?  You can give me a sign to stop anytime now.”

Of course no sign came because this is exactly where God wanted him to be in that moment and exactly who God wanted him to encounter.

However he got there, the point is that by the middle of the story he is sitting next to this hideously unclean person and by the end he is welcoming him as a brother in Christ. 

The text doesn’t say it, but I think that there might have been two conversions on the road that day.  To be sure, the text is clear that the Ethiopian embraces the gospel and is baptized and filled with joy.  But I would wager to say that Phillip, when he was swept up by the Spirit of the Lord and whisked away to his next destination, was never the same again! 

                  And if we can muster the courage of Phillip to take providence’s queue and share the Good News with whomever God puts in our paths, neither, I think, will we. 

                  Amen.