Fifth Sunday of Easter (B) — Acts 8:26–40
Sometimes, the readings for Sunday worship have words that are difficult to pronounce. I’m not saying this because of our reader today; she did a great job. But this Sunday, three years ago, I was preaching in a congregation in New Jersey.
The pastor’s chair was WAY too close to the lectern, so when the reader came forward, I had to move to a folding chair behind the organ console, where the congregation couldn’t see me. And thank God for that. The reader began:
Then an angel of the Lord said to Flippy, “Get up and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza…” So he got up and went. Now there was an Ethuppan Enooch, a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethuppians, in charge of her entire treasury.
At least I managed to burst into hysterics quietly. But the story of “Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch” had turned into “Flippy and the Ethuppan Enooch,” and there was no way to fix it. Each time she said it, it felt sillier. Why did they let this woman read, I wondered. She’s a lovely person, but there must be some other ministry that God had for her in this congregation. This clearly wasn’t it.
I thanked God I had chosen to preach on a different passage that week, because if a reader gets an important word wrong, I usually try to say it the way they did in my sermon. I dodged a big one there, and only because of the Holy Spirit’s intervention, I think. Because when I started writing my sermon, I’d planned to use the reading from Acts. It’s long been one of my favorites.
The Apostle Philip (that’s his real name) also had a surprise intervention from the Holy Spirit, telling him to head south, to the highway that leads toward northern Africa. When he got there, he heard someone in a chariot, reading the words of the prophet Isaiah. “Do you know what all that means,” he asks. And soon, they’re deep in a conversation, exploring how Jesus is reflected in the words of that old prophet, and the man sitting next to Philip is amazed by what God has done.
Jesus, the lamb led silently to the slaughter, is the victim of the worst injustice: Arrested without reason, given a sham trial, executed painfully. The wonderful poetry of Isaiah 53 points, for the first Christians and today, to the suffering of Jesus—and through it, the salvation of all.
This Jewish man from Ethiopia traveled far to worship at the Temple. His love for God was great before he left home. Now, he has learned about this new thing God has done, and he rejoices even more. He begs Phillip: Look, here is some water. I want part of this Jesus. What is to prevent me from being baptized?
And Phillip’s blood runs cold for a moment. Because the answer is obvious—to both these faithful students of the scriptures. God’s law says it clearly in Leviticus 21: No man who has any defect may come near: no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed; with a crippled foot or hand, or a hunchback or a dwarf, or who has any eye defect, or festering or running sores, or damaged genitals.
It’s not a word we use often today, so just in case you need the definition: A eunuch is a castrated man. They were in demand as palace treasurers in the ancient world, since they would be less likely to steal, since they had no children to inherit the wealth. The Law clearly says that this man sitting next to Phillip, asking to be baptized, cannot be connected to God. He is deformed; he is not whole.
If we are honest, neither are any of us. We like to put on a good face, look like everything is going well in our lives, but it’s never true. Sometimes things do line up, but only for a moment. We hurt each other. We hurt our world. We hurt ourselves. We are broken in ways that are our own fault. And we are broken in ways that we did not cause, that were done to us intentionally or accidentally or just by living in the happenstance of the real world. We are not whole.
And God, well, God is perfect, whole, wonderful in every way. We’re nothing like that. The Law makes sense. Broken things don’t belong with perfect things. We don’t belong with God.
But Philip must have been listening when Jesus was teaching. He knows what First John has to tell us today: God is about love. And real love? Real love is not that we loved God. It’s that he loved us. It’s that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Which is to say, if God gave laws to humankind, those laws must finally be about love, because that is what God is. Law has to serve love. The love is bigger.
This man loves God so much that he traveled from his home and his work in the court of the Candace of Ethiopia, all the way north to Jerusalem, over a thousand miles, to celebrate the Passover. When he arrived, he visited the temple and stood outside, peering in through door and the crowd, trying to see the thing his heart chased after, the worship of the Most Holy God. Rejoicing to catch the tiniest glimpse, he went on his way back home, never daring to try to get closer, not allowed in the temple because he was a eunuch.
And God was so in love with him, that he brought the temple to him instead. On the way home, he heard about the incarnation of God, the miracle of the divine Word become flesh. And then he stopped his chariot, and he and Phillip stepped toward the waters, and in baptism, this man who was supposedly not whole actually became the temple of the Holy Spirit, became the one thing that he thought was denied to him, and his joy was complete. Just because God is love.
After worship, that Sunday in Jersey, the reader met me by the door. “I just love that story,” she said. “I worked hard on it. There were some hard words, though.” I agreed. “It looked like Philip,” she said, “But I got it wrong a different Sunday, so I knew this time it was Flippy.” Her eagerness, her excitement, her love for God’s story of salvation… I knew why they let her read. If I were her permanent pastor, I’d have begged her to read—though I might have worked with her on pronunciation. In any case, the words might have been wrong, but the love was so, so right. In that, like the Apostle Flippy, she spoke to me about Jesus, and like the Ethuppan Enooch, I went on my way rejoicing too.
Doubtless as he continued home, the Ethiopian kept reading Isaiah. Just three chapters later, he encountered these words: Let no foreigner who is bound to the Lord say, “The Lord will surely exclude me from his people.” And let no eunuch complain, “I am only a dry tree.” For this is what the Lord says:
“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant—to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will endure forever.
God has indeed given us a name. That name is Jesus. That name is Love. Amen.