Learning from strangers

Easter 5-b
May 10, 2009
Acts 8:26-40
Ps. 66:1--8
1 John 4:7-21
John 14:15-21

This Ethiopian eunuch is a man of the world. He is a well-to-do fellow, high up in the court of the queen. He’s like the secretary of the treasury, the chancellor of the exchequer, the chief financial officer of the corporation. He’s a success in the eyes of the world. But there is something missing. He’s on a religious quest. Perhaps he is seeking some ultimate meaning in his life, perhaps he wants to believe there is more than taking care of the queen’s treasury -- whatever the reason, he has come to worship with the Jews in Jerusalem.

In the world, he is a success; in Jerusalem, he is a second-class citizen. As an Ethiopian, he could never really be a Jew; plus, as a eunuch, he was castrated, unable to have children -- and for Jews, a sign of God’s blessing was children, to carry on the relationship with God, to be inheritors of God’s promise. This Ethiopian would have had to sit in the Court of the Gentiles, outside the main part of the temple; he could not worship God in the same place as the Jews could. In just about every way, the official religion of Judaism said no to this unnamed seeker, and yet he still sought the blessings that the law and the prophets held out -- a religion that, in comparison to the power, glitz and glitter of his imperial world, was marginal and second-rate.

There’s a little Star Trek technology in this passage about which we will suspend disbelief. Let it suffice that the apostle Philip gets to this Ethiopian fellow and has this conversation -- the conversation that changes both of their lives. This passage is one of the early references to the “mission to the Gentiles,” one of the proofs that God wanted Christianity to move beyond its confines within Judaism to preach the gospel in the whole known world. As a religion of really outside outsiders, Christians created an entirely alternative culture: alternative to Judaism, alternative to the cult of the Roman emperor, and certainly alternative to whatever gods the Ethiopians worshiped. The Christian community was based on love, on compassion, on service to the needy within the community, and believed that God had walked among them and had showed them how to love one another. The Christian community included all who believed, whether or not they were born to a Jewish family, circumcised or not, apparently castrated or not. Poor people were included along with rich. Women were accepted with a radical equality. People from all races, all nations, could hear the call and say, like the Ethiopian eunuch, You’re telling me something I have heard nowhere else. I want to know more. I want to be baptized.

Presumably, the Ethiopian took his faith, his baptism, his God, back to court with him, back to his work. He still had his money, his position, his worldly responsibilities, but his life would never more be the same. He had been given a sign and a promise that God loved him, all of him, even the parts that did not fit in the two cultures he embraced. The true communion and fellowship to which he now belonged both encompassed and transcended those cultures, and he, too, could show the sign and promise he had been given: he could practice the gospel of love and compassion, he could hear the Hebrew prophets call for God’s justice and mercy, he could know that his life had been brought back to life by the death and resurrection of Jesus, God who became human, like him.

Like the Ethiopian, we have only heard tell of Jesus, and we have those who told us the story to thank for our faith. Like the Ethiopian, our faith does not have to be confined to one place or time, to one culture. Like the Ethiopian we live in more than one culture at once; we have complicated loyalties to where we live, or where we work, to our countries of origin, to our communities and neighborhoods. Like the Ethiopian, sometimes those cultures we inhabit clash, sometimes they cooperate, but always, always, what God is calling us to become cannot fit in those confines.

The Ethiopian got the message from Philip, and then he went on his way. Presumably he took that experience back and began living it out in his daily life. That is where we live out our faith: here, in the middle of the complicated world we inhabit, a world of competing interests and cultures and loyalties, a world where it does not always feel so easy to be a Christian. Our faith can be, and needs to be, part of our everyday lives -- for it is in our everyday lives, as we work and play, as we live and move and have our being, that God sends messengers to tell us the good news in the words that we can understand. Pray, then, that we can be like Philip to other people around us, living in between cultures, and seeking God, nonetheless. Pray that we can tell the story to them as it was told to us, as they go back into their own world, rejoicing, strengthened, beloved and free.