Year B — 5 Easter

The Rev. Gerald W. Keucher

You are probably aware that the first reading that we hear on Sunday mornings is almost always from the Old Testament—something from the Law, the Prophets or the other writings of the Hebrew Scriptures.

The Church has always recognized its roots in the history of the people of Israel. In fact, I think the best way to sum up what God did in Jesus Christ is the way Paul put it. In Jesus God permits us Gentiles to enter the covenant relationship that God had had for hundreds of years with Israel. However badly Christians have sometimes understood the connection between the Church and Israel, we remind ourselves each week of our roots in, and our debt to, Judaism by immersing ourselves in the Hebrew Bible as well as the Christian Scriptures.

The only weeks in the year when the first lesson does not come from the Old Testament is during the Sundays of the Easter Season. The weeks of Easter are meant to bring before those who were baptized at Easter — and all of us — what it means to be baptized members of the Body of Christ. The themes of the Sundays of the Easter Season are meant to show us how our baptism shapes the way we live.

The themes of these Sundays are consistent every year: the empty tomb, St. Thomas and the importance of community to belief; how we meet Jesus and recognize Him in the breaking of bread; and Jesus' relationship to us as the Good Shepherd. Today, the Fifth Sunday of Easter, the theme is always Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

These are all baptismal themes; they have to do with how baptized people live in community. Therefore, we read each week from the Acts of the Apostles, the New Testament book that comes after the four Gospels and tells some of the very early story of the Christian communities.

The story Acts tells is a little surprising to us after so many years of Christian history. We learn that it was not immediately apparent to the early Christians that Jesus' mission was a universal one. The earliest Christian communities were, like all of Jesus' disciples, Jews who lived among Jews and centered their religious observances in the temple and the synagogue. For the earliest Christians Jesus was the fulfillment for Jews of the promises God had made to the Jews. The story of the Book of Acts is the story of how Gentiles came to be included.

The episode we heard this morning from the Book of Acts is the first time a Gentile was baptized into Christ's fellowship. Now if you thought that Jesus was for the Jews only, the Ethiopian eunuch presented a challenge. First, there was the ethnic barrier to overcome. I don't think ancient society was racist in the way our society is. In our society racism is such a corrosive issue because for us race is tied to slavery. Ancient economies were built on slavery the way ours is built on capital. Greeks, Spaniards, Germans, French, Slavs, Middle Easterners and Africans — everybody could be a slave in ancient Rome, and about one-third of the population were slaves. So slavery wasn’t tied to race, but ancient peoples were very clear about who was one of them, and who was a foreigner. In Greek the word for foreigner also means uncivilized barbarian.

Left to their own devices, people tend to restrict their circles of fellowship in narrower and narrower ways to the people they think are like themselves. That’s part of what we were talking about at the Annual Meeting last week. All of us tend to find our identity with “people like us” — people our age, people our sex, people our color, people from our part of the country. Whatever we think “people like us” are, we think they’re okay, and we’re a little suspicious of people who aren’t like us.

People have always been that way — in Jesus’ day and today. Then, as now, it takes the Spirit of God to plop us down in front of someone who looks different. It takes the Spirit God to say to Philip and to us, "Here is another of My children; here is another part of My good creation."

Besides the issue of what we would call cultural diversity, there was also the fact that the man was a eunuch. The Law of Leviticus expressly forbade eunuchs and people with certain other physical infirmities from becoming Jews.

The Ethiopian eunuch had to be aware of all this. He knew he wasn’t acceptable to the Jews. He knew he was part of a racial minority, and he knew he was part of a sexual minority. Nevertheless, he was drawn to God. He had a copy of the book of Isaiah; he had made a pilgrimage all the way from Ethiopia to Jerusalem to worship.

But he was still an outsider, and he knew it. He was an outsider because of two conditions over which he had no control. He was born Ethiopian, and I doubt that he chose to become a eunuch. Bright young men were often pressed into the service of kings and nobles and were castrated and made eunuchs. That kept them dependent and ensured that they would not rebel or have the concerns of family to distract them.

When he and Philip had traveled along for who knows how long discussing the good news of Jesus, and what it means for all people, the Ethiopian eunuch turned to Philip and said, "Here is water. What is to prevent my being baptized?"

This is no mere rhetorical question. More likely it is the kind of half-defeated question of someone who has heard the refrain of rejection in all the keys in which it can be played.

Who knows? In a different situation Philip might have repeated that refrain himself. In most circumstances Philip probably would have done what most of us still do. Sure, we say that Christ died for all, and that God loves everyone, but we still find ways to exclude. “Well, yes, Jesus died for everyone, but you still can’t be one of us.” No gentile had been brought into Christ’s fellowship before. And this is not the easiest example of Gentile to be the first one. Philip breaks a lot of rules here without checking with the others back in Jerusalem. What about the provisions of the Law? What about our customs? What about the way we've always done things?

In that moment, however, Philip couldn't think of any reason not to baptize him. The Holy Spirit's fiery breath had blown out of him all the laws and precedents that would have continued to exclude the eunuch. And with that action the die was cast. It would still take a long time and be very controversial in the early Church, but this is when the Church began to realize that there's no such thing as an outsider.

We still aren't there yet, and there are still all kinds of voices in the Church that would continue to exclude people because of who they are and what they are. In the church as well as in society, we know what it’s like to be excluded. “What is to prevent my being included,” we ask, and the answer comes back, “You’re black, you’re gay, you’re a woman, you’re too old, or you’re too young. That’s what prevents you from being included as one of us.”

We all know what that refrain of rejection and exclusion sounds like. We know what it sounds like because others have sung it at us. And we know what it sounds like because we’ve all sung it at others. And we also know something else: we know that it's not any kind of song God wants any of us to sing.

No, from now on Jesus is the way we do things, Jesus is the only truth by which we measure ourselves and our actions, Jesus is the life we were given when we were baptized into His death. We have received the Spirit that will lead us into all truth if we will but follow.

The Ethiopian eunuch does not represent only the so-called "outsiders" who become part of our fellowship, because in fact we are all outsiders, we are all Gentiles who by God's grace have been grafted against nature into the Tree that descends from Abraham to Jesus. Nobody is born a Christian. God makes us all Christians and adopts us into His universal family in the waters of baptism.

In that water we received Jesus' risen life and the Spirit of Truth. And the truth is that God did not make any outsiders; He made only people who long to be invited into the community of His people. Let’s find that longing in the people we meet, and then let’s tell them where that longing can be satisfied — right here at the Church of the Intercession.