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A Sermon for DaySpring Baptist Church
By Eric Howell
“Welcome Misfits”
Acts 8:26-40
May 3, 2015
The story of Phillip and the Ethiopian eunuch may feel particularly familiar in the
days of final exams. Students with their noses in books hear the question, “Do you
understand what you are reading?” Their plaintive reply: “How can I unless
someone explains it to me?”
Students can likely relate to this exchange in these days. Not just students. The
story echoes down through the ages to anyone asking big questions of the gospel.
The questions this story raises about gospel and church are not just strategic and
administrative. It’s not just that the early church here is trying to figure out how to
live together as church, how to share the good news with others, and how to
organize for the worldwide mission of Jesus Christ. The question isn’t how you do
church.
The questions are about the gospel itself. In the light of the death and resurrection
of Jesus, in the light of the Holy Spirit’s guidance and the apostle’s authority, in the
light of the Old Testament scriptures they did have, and their experiences, what is
the gospel? What is the church? Who is it for and how? They couldn’t just
download a pdf rule of life or a creed out of thin air to guide them. They didn’t even
have the New Testament. They were living the New Testament.
An early follower of Jesus and leader of the church, Phillip, is prompted by the Spirit
to a rendezvous with a strange man. Phillip shares good news with him about Jesus
and he is baptized. Then everyone goes their own way: Phillip somehow teleported
to another place, the man on this way back home, where he went rejoicing.
It’s a little confusing, but Phillip here isn’t the apostle Phillip who we see a few times
in the gospel of John. That’s a different Phillip. This Phillip we meet in Acts 6 when
a group of seven men are selected to ‘serve tables.’ The apostles, the original
disciples, including the first Phillip, said, “It is not right that we should give up
preaching the word of God to serve tables.” And so they appointed these seven men,
Stephen, Phillip, and others to this work. What’s more than a little ironic is that the
next two chapters of Acts are devoted to stories about how these table-servers were
some of the most extraordinary and powerful evangelists and preachers the church
has ever known.
So that’s Phillip, the server of tables. The man he meets is from Ethiopia, way down
there somewhere in Africa. That’s about the extent of what they knew about
Ethiopian geography. It was down there somewhere, more or less somewhere near
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the ends of the world. There were people from all over the world gathered in
Jerusalem at Pentecost, but there wasn’t anyone from anywhere like Ethiopia. But
the gospel is for them too.
So the gospel is for the whole world. The gospel is for the ends of the world. The
gospel is for everyone. Got the point of this story yet? Not yet. That’s not the whole
force of this story. The story isn’t that an early Jewish disciple of Jesus met a
foreigner and figured out that he could be a Christian too. There’s actually a really
good story like that in Acts 10 when Peter meets the powerful Roman Cornelius.
This story feels a little different; a little edgier.
This story seems not to let you get too far away from seeing that the church is for
misfits. And not just delightful nonconformists who give variety to our school
hallways by dressing a little different or coloring their hair or something. It means,
apparently, here, people who don’t fit . . .into categories . . .into relationships . . .into
identities. You don’t have to read too far into the story to imagine that there’s pain
here. It’s for people who are on the fringes of even their own selves. That’s who the
church is for.
Well, surely this is a lot of weight to put on one story and particularly on one strange
man who only appears in this one story in scripture. Yet it’s there . . .alongside the
chariot of an Ethiopian. He’s an Ethiopian, not Jew, not really Gentile either. He’s
something other. Exotic. Black skinned in a brown skinned, olive complexion
world. Ethiopia was exotic and perhaps fascinating. It was a powerful kingdom way
down there, so powerful that Alexander the Great stopped at the border before
invading and changed his mind. It may be fascinating. It may also be something to
be feared. Usually first encounters with the ‘other’ draw up both reactions:
fascination and fear.
He’s a court official of the Candace, Ethiopian’s Queen Leader, in charge of her
treasury. So he’s in a high position of responsibility and power. To get there he was
probably drawn from the lower classes, from a family too poor to provide for him,
and given over as a boy to the service of the court. Rising through the ranks,
possibly by his natural ability, he found himself in charge of the treasury of the
queen.
Politically, he’s really neither powerful nor exactly powerless.
Economically, he’s not really poor, not exactly rich.
Geographically, He’s somewhere between Timbuktu and Jerusalem.
Racially, He’s not Jew nor Gentile, but something other.
Intellectually, he can read, so he is literate, but he cannot interpret what he’s
reading.
Religiously, he’s come to Jerusalem to worship, but why? What drew him there? We
aren’t told anything about it except that going home from worship he has more
questions than answers, and more curiosity than conclusions.
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Here’s someone whose whole picture is something other from anything else. He’s
not quite one thing, not quite another. Misfit.
And there’s one more thing about him. Somewhere along the way in his life journey
he was made a eunuch. Oh yes, we shouldn’t forget that piece. An Ethiopian eunuch.
This will become his identity in the story, ‘the eunuch.’
He’s a eunuch, among those people in those days trusted but despised, valuable but
expendable. They were something other than the others. Undergoing castration,
they were misfits to society, neither fully male though certainly not female. Their
gender was ambiguous; their identity a question to others. Who knows what they
thought of themselves? They didn’t fit. According to Deuteronomy, people with this
kind of mutilation weren’t allowed to come into the Temple.
The experience of eunuchs brought into the court, especially in charge of the money,
was that they were despised by the rich and powerful for their background; they
were despised by the poor for being in league with the powerful. They didn’t fit
where they were. They didn’t fit where they’d come from.
It’s the full picture now of someone who doesn’t fit anywhere—among the haves,
among the have-nots; among the insiders, among the outsiders; among the boys,
among the girls. It’s the image of a loner. How do you feel about him? Do you
already despise him? Feel sorry for him? Do you identify with him?
This is not just about someone who doesn’t fit in who just needs to find his group.
There is no group. This is a misfit travelling a lonely path. Even his location in the
story speaks of isolation: on a wilderness road. It was there, in that unlikely place,
that the good news met the misfit. And the church’s arms were discovered to be
spread wider than anyone would have probably thought possible.
Returning from worshipping in Jerusalem where, remember, he couldn’t go inside
the Temple, now he’s reading a biblical prophet but can’t get inside the meaning.
Isaiah 53: “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?”
No wonder he gravitated to that forlorn passage. He may not have been able to
interpret or understand it but he must have identified with its description of
someone who has suffered from the unfairness of life, the lack of a life, a future, a
family. Like a lamb undergoing the knife, silent, like a sheep slaughtered. The
resonance is too obvious to miss. But what does it mean?
He must have seen himself in the description and wondered who this was about?
Who is this whose sad life experience so closely resembles his own? For a person
who had no one to identify with him, here’s someone he might be able to identify
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with. But who is it that like a sheep was led to the slaughter, who suffered
humiliation, to whom justice was denied?
Can you imagine the power of reading this passage in scripture from that
perspective? Not being able to make total sense of it, but seeing yourself in it
enough to be unable to roll the scroll and put it away.
He wasn’t just interested in studying the passage. He already felt it. He already
inhabited it. He is reading Isaiah like some of us read him and say, “You know, that’s
me. It’s not exactly me, but it’s close enough. I see myself in that scripture. I may
not understand everything about it, all the Greek syntax and cultural context, but I
know enough to know how that feels.
That’s one of the joys of reading scripture—finding identification with people and
stories otherwise so far removed from our daily life:
Someone here knows what it’s like to be David facing a Goliath.
And someone here knows what it’s like to be David facing Bathsheba.
And somewhere here know what it’s like to be Bathsheba being taken by David.
For someone else,
There’s Paul dramatically changed on the road to Damascus;
Or the woman at the well, alone, given living water to drink by the Lord;
Or there’s rich Zaccheus who finds new joy in loosening his hold on his money
and making right what was gained by wrong;
Or it’s Peter who failed at the moment of truth, but is forgiven and restored;
Or the psalmist who prays “my God why have you forsaken me?”
Or the psalmist who meditates, “The Lord is my shepherd;”
Or the psalmist who confesses, “O Lord you have searched me and known me.”
For this one, inhabiting a body he didn’t ask for, in a chariot that didn’t belong to
him, returning from a temple he couldn’t enter, going home to a life he didn’t come
from, asking questions he thought might never be answered, it was this unnamed
sufferer, man of sorrows in the prophet Isaiah. “Who is this?” he asked. Is he talking
about himself or someone else? I know he’s talking about me.
There in the wilderness, the church in the person of Phillip showed up. It’s hard to
imagine which one of them would have been more surprised by this. It probably
says something that in the telling of this story in Acts the only quotes from either
side are questions.
As Phillip began with this scripture and told him about Jesus, the man in the chariot
found his place, his family, his true self in his identity with the one about whom the
prophet was speaking. The gospel is good news indeed.
“What is to prevent me from being baptized?” he asked. Remember who is asking
the question. Phillip is so smooth, so unlike Peter, who later with the gentile
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Cornelius has to be dramatic about these sorts of things. He has to have a dream in a
trance, and an interpretation, and call a church leadership assembly to discuss the
problem. Peter can be such a drama queen. Phillip just goes with the flow.
What is to prevent me from being baptized?
Apparently . . . nothing, but a little water and a church with arms open wide enough
to embrace misfits.
I wonder if St. John had this story in mind when he wrote those haunting words: We
love because He first loved us. Those who say, “I love God” and hate their brothers
or sisters are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have
seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.”
I wonder if St. Paul remembered this story when he wrote those hopeful words,
“neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come,
nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to
separate us from the Love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
I wonder if they thought a lot about this misfit who fit no where and among no
people, a person who from every other angle was not acceptable, but to whom the
Holy Spirit sent the church out to human wilderness, to roads less travelled, and to
seekers no matter their background.
I wonder if later they, and how many others . . . all looked at the story of Phillip and
said: I see a whole lot of Jesus in that story.
Copyright by Eric Howell, 2015