May 2, 2021: What Prevents Me?

Acts 8:26-30
Rev. Rhonda Blevins

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.) So he got up and went. Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading 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. He asked, “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 the scripture that he was reading was this:

“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.”

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, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus.  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. When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing. But Philip found himself at Azotus, and as he was passing through the region, he proclaimed the good news to all the towns until he came to Caesarea.

______ 

May you be happy.

May you be healthy.

May you be safe.

May you live with ease.

If you couldn’t worship with us last week, that prayer is called the prayer of “loving-kindness” or the “loving-kindness meditation.” There have been some studies that show that people who regularly practice a longer form of this prayer grow in empathy and compassion (even towards themselves), and they enjoy some significant physiological benefits like lessening anxiety and mitigation of chronic pain and even migraines.

The prayer resonated with some of you, others weren’t sure what to think about being led in a prayer practice in the middle of the sermon. But know that, if you choose to practice this prayer, you can substitute your own phrases and place the phrases in any order that works for you.

The reason I taught you this prayer was to offer you a practical, tangible way to grow in your capacity to love one another, to grow in the way of compassion. This is the path of discipleship for Christ-followers. It’s a life-long journey. I know I have a long way to go to reach the point where my ability to love is perfected and my compassion is complete. (Like, a LONG way to go.) But we’re all on a journey, right?

In the scripture lesson from the book of Acts, we encounter a person on a journey, both spiritually and literally.

We never learn the person’s name, only some descriptors:

1.      He was Ethiopian. This tells us several things:

a.       He was far from home. Ethiopia is well over 2,000 miles from Jerusalem on the ground.

b.      He was surely a Gentile (not Jewish).

c.       He was probably dark skinned.

2.      He was a eunuch. This also tells us a couple of things:

a.       He had been castrated. Some ancient empires would force castration upon a certain class of boys who might one day present a threat to power. The castration usually involved the removal of testes before puberty, decreasing testosterone levels so that male characteristics like facial hair and a lower voice would never develop. It created a class of people who could serve the monarch with a fierce loyalty, because the demise of the monarch would mean certain death for the eunuchs in the monarch’s service.

b.      Having been castrated, he wasn’t fully male, nor was he female. A contemporary word for that is “non-binary.”

c.       The other thing we can infer from the person, being a eunuch, is that he wouldn’t exactly “fit in” everywhere. More about that in a bit.

3.      He was a court official, the treasurer for the Queen of Ethiopia. In other words, this was a highly respected, intelligent, powerful person in Ethiopia.

4.      He came to Jerusalem to worship and was returning home to Ethiopia. So think about what this means. He came to the Temple in Jerusalem to worship. You probably remember that there were “levels of access” in the Temple.

a.       There was the “Holy of Holies” in the middle of the Temple, where God was thought to dwell. Only one person, the high priest, was ever able to enter, and only one time per year.

b.      Then there was the court of priests.

c.       Then the Israelite’s court for male Jews.

d.      Then there was the court of women for female Jews.

e.       Then there was the court of Gentiles. This is as far as our Ethiopian eunuch friend could have gotten for two reasons: 1) he was a foreigner, and 2) not to be crass, but only males with their scrotums intact were permitted in the court of Israelites. (Yes, seriously.)

5.      He was seated in his chariot. Not everybody in antiquity had their own chariot. Dude was wealthy. 

6.      He was reading. Not everybody (in fact very few) people in antiquity could read. Dude was educated.

7.      He was reading the book of Isaiah. What this probably means is that on his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he purchased a papyrus scroll. This would have been an expensive souvenir.

OK, so that’s a lot of information we have about this person whose name we never learn. What I want to consider, just a bit more, is how this high-ranking Ethiopian official must have felt when he was denied entry into the inner sanctum of the Temple. Was he told explicitly that he wasn’t welcome? Were there signs posted? Were there bouncers at the door? Was he tempted to say, “Don’t you know who I am?” Thousands of miles he traveled to worship at the Temple, and they wouldn’t even let him all the way in. Can you imagine how disappointing that must have been? That would have been enough to drive a lot of people away from the faith entirely.

The rejection this eunuch met at the Temple is something each of us knows all too well. Maybe we’ve never been rejected at a temple, but each of us, in our own way, has known rejection:

• Maybe you didn’t get the girl or the guy

• Maybe you didn’t make the team

• Maybe you couldn’t do enough to earn a parent’s affection

• Maybe you couldn’t get the loan

• Maybe you didn’t get the job

• Or harder still, maybe you lost the job

Walt Disney is a name every Floridian knows. Disney knew his share of rejection. Get this: as a young man Walt Disney took a job with a newspaper, the Kansas City Star. At the age of 22, his editor fired him for having no good ideas and a “lack of imagination.” Walt Disney! You know what an empire Walt Disney went on to build with his “lack of imagination.” But you may not know this twist of fate: the Disney company purchased ABC in 1996. The Kansas City Star was part of ABC at that time—the very paper that fired Mr. Disney.

Had Walt Disney accepted the rejection he received from that paper—had Disney believed his boss’s criticism that he lacked imagination and had no good ideas—we would have never heard his name—we would have never gone to Disney World.

And had the Ethiopian eunuch internalized the rejection he found at the Temple to heart, he wouldn’t have purchased that scroll, he wouldn’t have been reading it, he wouldn’t have been trying to comprehend its meaning, and he wouldn’t have met Philip.

Philip, led by the Spirit, found the Ethiopian eunuch reading the scroll, confused by what he was reading. “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. Philip began to unpack the scriptures, and then he introduced him to Jesus. He must have made a compelling case!

The eunuch asked Philip, “What prevents me from being baptized?” Given his backstory, I don’t think this is a rhetorical question. He legitimately wonders if he will be permitted to be baptized:

• Will he be prevented from baptism because he is a foreigner?

• Will he be prevented from baptism because he is black?

• Will he be prevented from baptism because he is gender non-binary?

Apparently, none of these potential disqualifiers is cause for Philip to reject his request for baptism. The chariot stops, and the two men enter the water together. Philip baptizes the Ethiopian eunuch.

What prevented him from being baptized? Nothing!

Now that we’ve explored this text, both text and subtext, it seems fitting to ask the question: why did Luke include this story in his history of the early church? So many stories he told, there were probably many other stories he could have shared—why include this story about the Ethiopian eunuch? A couple of possible reasons:

1.      Tradition holds that the eunuch went home and evangelized Ethiopia. Luke might have included the story to explain how the Christian movement made it to Ethiopia.

2.      Or maybe Luke told this story to make sure readers knew this important truth: that no one, no matter nationality or color or race or othergenderedness, no one is excluded from the waters of baptism. This movement is truly for all people. Period.

Which brings me to the table, the importance of the Lord’s table and what the table represents. This table is open to all people, no matter nationality or race or othergenderedness, no matter what you believe or what rejection you may have known along the way. Jesus instituted this sacrament, appropriating the commonness of a shared meal, imbuing it with transcendent meaning—that through the breaking of bread and sharing the cup—we are one, not only with Jesus, but with all people. He is the vine; we all are the branches.

What, you may ask, prevents me from the table of the Lord? Nothing. 

So may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you be safe, may you live with ease, and may you always remember that there’s a seat for everyone at the Lord’s table . . . even you, even me.