Faces of Our Faith: The Ethiopian Eunuch | Acts 8:26-39 | 8.30.26

Grace and peace to you.

In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, it is a gift to be with you all today.

Thank you again to everyone who helped us have such a great rally day this morning.

Everyone who brought food.

Those who who had their lock-in last night with the youth.

Thanks to the youth for helping us set up and for making some biscuits and eggs.

Many thanks to all of uh their parents and leaders who helped make that happen.

Thanks to Lindsay and Seth and Penny, all of our folks.

Today is the final week of our Faces of Our Faith Summer series, which I think has been a really fun three months.

I'm really grateful for all of y'all for being here and being a part of that.

This summer we've been tracing a lineage of people that God meets.

And a lot of these people God meets, you'll notice, have been at the edges.

Deborah leading the people from outside the expected structures of power at the day.

She was just sort of chosen by the people to be their chief and leader.

The daughters of Zalophahad for demanding justice and for demanding their place in God's story all the way back in Leviticus and Numbers.

Anna's long widowhood that she turned into resilient witness to who Christ is.

We remember Judas's tragic humanity and the thief on the cross last breath redemption.

Today's story carries that thread even further.

The Ethiopian eunuch in Acts chapter 8 is kind of a double outsider, a foreigner and someone whose body placed him outside of the boundaries of the temple community.

Acts 8 · chapter mention

And yet it's precisely to him that the Spirit sends Philip.

And it's specifically his hunger for Scripture that becomes the occasion for one of the most spontaneous and improvisational baptisms in all of Scripture.

Like Deborah and Anna, Shifra and Pua, the eunuch's faith doesn't wait for permission from the center.

It erupts from within him.

On a chariot, on a wilderness road.

And the church that emerges from that eunuch's faithfulness is even wider and better for it and continues to this day.

But before we read that story, let's pray and ask God to bless our time in the scripture together.

Would you pray with me?

Gracious God, we do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from your mouth.

Amen.

Our scripture today comes from the eighth chapter of the book of Acts, verses 26 through 39.

Let's listen for God's word to us today.

Then 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, a deserted road.

So Philip got up and went.

Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Kendake, the queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury.

And he had come to Jerusalem to worship, and he was returning home.

Seated in his chariot, he was reading from the prophet Isaiah.

Then the spirit said to Philip, Go over to this chariot and join it.

So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah.

Philip asked him, Do you understand what you are reading?

He replied, How can I, unless someone guides me?

And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him.

Now the passage of Scripture that he was reading was this Like a sheep he was led to slaughter, 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.

The eunuch asked Philip, About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this?

About himself or about someone else?

Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus.

And as 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?

He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water.

And Philip baptized him.

And when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away.

And the eunuch saw him no more and went on his way rejoicing.

This is God's word for God's people.

Thanks be to God.

So Philip, before he appears on that wilderness road, was one of seven men chosen back in Acts chapter 6 to make sure that the church's Greek-speaking widows were not being overlooked.

Acts 6 · chapter mention

There was a struggle in the early church that some of the early church spoke Aramaic and some of them spoke Greek, some of them were Hellenized.

And Philip came from this Greek-speaking bunch.

It wasn't glamorous work, but Philip was called to the work of caring for the people at the edges of that young Jerusalem community.

But when persecution scattered the church, when people fled, Philip didn't just survive the scattering.

He allowed his new circumstance to inform his calling.

He expanded his vocation beyond the care for the vulnerable inside his community.

He also began to preach.

First, preaching in Samaria.

If you remember, Samaria was a place that faithful Jews were taught to avoid.

And now, following the Holy Spirit, he went to Samaria, preached to those people, brought a whole town the word, and then, prompted by an angel, a messenger, he sent further down a desert road, finding himself in a chariot beside an Ethiopian court official.

Scripture will later call him Philip the Evangelist.

Not one of the original twelve, but a deacon turned boundary-crossing word-bearer.

Someone whose faith kept following the Spirit's nudge beyond every line he'd been raised to respect.

Since the time of Solomon and Solomon's relationship with the Queen of Sheba, there had been a well-established trade, some back and forth between this area that becomes known as Ethiopia, not only of lumber and oil, but also of culture and even scripture.

When Sheba goes back to her country, she's sent with cultural items from Judah.

It's clear at this point that Jewish pilgrims, as we read earlier in Acts, are coming to Jerusalem from all over the known world at the time.

And this African dignitary has clearly become something of, it doesn't name it explicitly, but something of a convert.

He has journeyed to Jerusalem to worship.

He's been reading the scriptures.

I imagine that he had asked the Queen for a time away to make a pilgrimage, to visit the temple, and to further study the scriptures he'd been reading by himself, which makes it striking that Philip asks if he understands what he's reading, because he might know the text better than Philip does.

I don't know if you remember, Philip speaks Greek.

But you see, there's this tradition in Jewish study of Scripture called Havrutah.

Havrutah.

That's the way that young folks would study the scriptures together in pairs.

It was a practice of uh of getting in pairs to study and analyze and debate the sacred texts.

And that word is derived from the Aramaic word for friendship, for companionship.

The act of reading, it turns the act of reading into an active, collaborative, three-way dialogue between two people and the scripture.

Folks being brought up in the Jewish faith will often be given a text to read, but as a part of that reading, they're challenged by their teacher to pair off and to take different points, to practice uh asking probing questions and not making assumptions about what the text says.

And they engage in this sort of push and pull of the spirit as they wrestle with the scripture.

When Philip asks him if he understands what he's reading, and then the Ethiopian eunuch responds, How can I unless someone guides me?

That word guides is like the word companion.

And he invites Philip to get in and sit beside him.

And so many scholars understand this to be an invitation from the Ethiopian eunuch to engage Philip in Havruta, to read the text together, so they can understand its meaning better.

And it's no surprise, by the way, that it's Isaiah that the Ethiopian is reading.

It's also sparked the interest of this African pilgrim because you see, by the letter of the law, it's possible that this man would have been turned away at the temple gates.

Despite his long and arduous journey to get to Jerusalem, he may have gotten to the temple and been turned away.

Deuteronomy 23:1 is blunt about it.

Deuteronomy 23:1

It says, Eunuchs shall not be admitted to the assembly of the Lord.

The assembly of the Lord was sort of the inner part of the court.

So they could come around and hang out the outside, but they couldn't come in.

He may have traveled all of that way, scroll in hand, hungry to worship, and been told at the threshold that his body disqualified him.

But he was carrying more than just any scripture.

He was reading Isaiah.

And Isaiah is where the law gets overturned by the prophets.

In Isaiah chapter 56, God speaks directly to the eunuch's experience of exclusion.

Isaiah 56 · chapter mention

Isaiah writes, Do not let the eunuch say, I am just a dry tree.

God promises to give them a place in God's house, quote, better than sons and daughters.

He will give the eunuchs an everlasting name that will never be cut off, the prophet Isaiah says.

So when this eunuch sits next to Philip in his chariot with Isaiah open on his lap, he's not reading a random text.

He's reading from the scripture that holds the very promise that answers his own wound of exclusion, even before he understands yet how completely that promise is about to be fulfilled in him.

The Ethiopian's pilgrimage is only one part of the story that we need to understand.

We also need to engage with what it means that he is a eunuch.

This is sometimes tough to do with children in the room, but I'll do my best.

What a eunuch was was a person, most often a male, but also folks of undetermined gender, like intersex folks.

Some may have been born this way, but many were likely altered either through capture and enslavement or through a ritual when they accept a role close to the monarchy.

Oftentimes there was a ritual that altered their bodies.

Knowing how we might do the work of translation to understand what we do as modern readers with this concept of a eunuch can seem difficult at first.

It's hard to make direct comparisons.

But as Dr.

Wilda Gaffney has written, there have been a couple of ways that scholars and teachers have treated eunuchs in their readings in the last hundred years or so.

One option has been to treat them like a relic of the past.

This is a thing that happened.

It's not a thing we need to think about anymore.

I find that a little bit unsettling.

Like I feel like all scripture is meant to be taught, right?

And I don't think we should just throw eunuchs out as a category that doesn't exist anymore.

It's tempting to treat this as an old-world custom that has nothing to do with us, but not that many years ago.

In a small Midwestern town whose economy had been gutted, a nuclear plant reopened and started hiring again.

And they would hire women, but if you were a woman and wanted to work at the nuclear plant and you were of childbearing age, you had to agree to be sterilized first.

So that way the company could not get sued if anyone was born with birth defects.

This was not that long ago.

Some people took that deal because they really needed work.

And eventually the courts struck that down, but it did happen here, not in some ancient kingdom, that because of someone's job, their bodies were altered.

The other way, I think maybe an even better way to understand a eunuch as modern readers, is these are people who are pushed to the edges of both society and acceptable sexuality and gender.

These were someone who, because they didn't fit into a category, were given a separate place to be from everybody else.

And plenty of folks today still treat gay men, lesbians, bisexual people, transgender folks as outsiders to the family of God.

And it doesn't stop there, by the way.

There are intersex people, there are burn survivors, survivors of other accidents who've lost body parts, people who are paralyzed, couples who would love to have children but can't, for whatever reason.

There are a lot of people who, when we say there's only two kinds of people, we leave out.

There are a lot of people who, when we say, these are the kinds of people that can belong to the assembly of God, anytime we say who that is, there are people who we leave out and who end up feeling like they don't belong.

Whether that was something that happened to them in their life, or whether it was something that's been true about them from their birth.

And Jesus challenges his disciples in Matthew 19 to be more accepting of people whose bodies and stories they don't understand.

He tells them in Matthew 19, this is verse 12, that there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made so by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.

Let anyone who accept this, let anyone accept this who can, he says.

And we too often find ourselves not fitting the picture that we've been sold of what's normal or what's expected, culturally and socially.

And sadly, many of our Western churches have preached that cultural picture of what constitutes normal, uh, a mom and a dad, and 2.4 kids, and a minivan and a standalone single-family home with a picket fence.

Um, and the church has participated in what I would call a cultural idolatry of the normal.

Just because something is normal doesn't mean it's the only way to be.

For so many people, not just this Ethiopian eunuch, but for so many people whose bodies and stories don't align with the cultural norms of their time, they can be made to feel like they've done something wrong.

And they can be left on the outside looking in.

So eunuchs are people, in our in my reading of this text.

Eunuchs are people who don't fit neatly into the boxes that we have built for gender and sexuality.

Whether they were born that way or made that way.

And if that's who eunuchs are, then here's the claim that I think this text says God chose to birth the church in Africa, the faithful church that still exists to this day, through the body of someone most cultures would have tried to exclude.

Dr.

Margaret Aymer's questions aren't rhetorical.

In her commentary, she asks, Who are we reluctant to join with because of their complicated story?

Where might the spirit be sending us that would be uncomfortable for us to go?

What complicated stories do we wear in our own bodies?

What stories are we told that we go, you know, I'm not sure I fit in that?

Right?

Because if we're honest, most of us are carrying something that takes us outside of the norm.

Not just LGBTQ folks, all sorts of people, whether it's a diagnosis, a disability, uh a divorce, a failure from our past, uh, a body that doesn't work the way we wish it did, a past we wish we didn't have to explain, but we have to keep explaining.

And then at some point has made us feel like maybe we're not in.

We're not normal.

And this is what the faces of our faith we have traced together this summer keep teaching us.

Um, these are not stories of flawless heroes who are to be lauded because of everything they've ever done and or every choice they've ever made, but they are people who are finite and fallible, but who keep seeing to do the next right thing.

And who became almost by accident expanders and emissaries of God's beloved community beyond to Jerusalem, into Judea, into Samaria, and through an Ethiopian eunuch to the ends of the earth.

They don't build uh higher walls around who belongs.

They widen and they welcomed, and the church is changed, we read in Acts.

The church changes over those 30 years in Acts, and it changes because of the new relationships that are built, the new churches that are formed.

Uh it's hard for me not to think of Dolly Parton today.

Not a biblical figure, but someone who spent a career doing this kind of widening.

She never wanted to do anything that someone would feel like they couldn't be a part of.

She put books in the hands of kids across Appalachia and around the world.

She funded a children's hospital, and she never once used her platform uh to shame or exclude anybody, really, the LGBTQ plus community or or anyone else who didn't fit the mold.

There are people, uh, I saw an interview with someone from Nigeria who was a huge Dali fan, and he's from a rural place, and he had to go learn in the city, and he was like, I connected with her story.

Like she had this universal connection for people around the world.

And her songs, like scripture itself, are stories from below.

She didn't write songs from the perspective of the victors.

She wrote about single mothers and abuse survivors, wildflowers that had to strike out on their own to find a place to bloom.

She never asked whether these people deserved to have their stories told in song.

She just did it.

She said it came as naturally as breathing.

And of course they did deserve to have their stories told.

She told the truth and stayed open to learning and evolving, even as she always remained rooted to her hometown, to her upbringing, to the people who she cared about most and her and who gave her access to the life she was able to live.

And no matter what came her way, she never assumed anyone was lesser.

Except maybe one time, but I'm not sure about the veracity of that story.

She wasn't a perfect person, right?

We don't need to insanctify her.

But she didn't look down on people.

And she always found a way to go on rejoicing, even through all the hard things she experienced.

She went on her way rejoicing.

And so, as I think about that word that ends our scripture reading for today, rejoicing.

The eunuch did not go on his way relieved.

He didn't go on simply grateful.

He went on rejoicing.

The eunuch didn't ride back into Ethiopia quietly changed.

He goes back dancing in a body that had spent a lifetime being told it was incomplete or unclean or unfit for the assembly of the Lord.

And I have to believe that no one told him to tone it down.

Because the Ethiopian church is older than almost all of the churches in the world.

Their Bible has way more books in it than ours does, but there's like historical reasons for that.

But there's a very old and faithful church that connects its story to this person, and I wonder what it would mean for us to leave here rejoicing like that.

Not denying or hiding the parts of ourselves that society might tell us are unclean or uncool, but just cringing right out the door with joy and telling the truth about who we are and what we believe we're called to do in the world as God's church.

Not politely moved, but actually changed in the body the way Philip was changed, when the Spirit snatched him up and set him down somewhere new.

And the way the eunuch was changed when the water came over his body.

Because here's the thing about these faces of our faith that we've spent the summer with, uh, they didn't all stay the same after they said yes.

Faith transforms us.

And it doesn't make us an entirely new thing.

It almost makes us more who we were always supposed to be, I would suggest.

Anna didn't stay the same, Philip didn't stay the same, and neither the church will you.

If you let the Spirit run up to your chariot and ask you the same question it asked him, do you understand what you are reading?

Because I know I don't all the time.

We need each other.

We need each other in the scripture to engage in this dance of faith.

Amen.