5 Easter B
Text: Acts 8:26-40
sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
May 2, 2021
What Is to Prevent Me?
It’s kind of instead of a sermon, today, that you are going to get pure, unadulterated Bible study. That’s because the Bible story is so rich and meaningful, and because what this story means for this world today and for our lives of Christian faith, is so plain that it hardly needs preacherly explication. Now, if I’m wrong about that – if we get to the end of this and you’re wondering, Bob, what does all that stuff from two thousand years ago have to do with me? – well, then, call me and I will supplement today’s Bible study with a telephone sermon. As you will see here, this is one of my favorites, and I am perfectly willing to engage you around this one for as long as you like.
From the book of Acts, we get the story of the Ethiopian eunuch. And that means that right off the bat the story comes to us charged with questions of human diversity and foreignness and race and sexuality. Just two words, “Ethiopian eunuch,” but, boy, they press just about all of our modern-day American buttons, don’t they? The guy is not given a name here, nope; all he gets is a couple of labels, and you know what that means. If it’s me, you see me at Walt’s and you tell someone later, I ran into Bob Klonowski today. You don’t say, I was at the grocery store and ran into a white, American, heterosexual. When the labels come out, that’s when you know that matters of otherness; questions of who belongs and who don’t; identity politics; who is considered normal, and who is considered other-than-normal; questions like that are all over the table.
The man at the heart of the story is fascinating in so many ways, not the least of which is that first label he’s given: Ethiopian. Writings of the ancient Mediterranean world make it clear that Ethiopia was considered by folks in the Greek and Roman world to be, oh, way out there, the very edge of the world. The disciples had been told to be witnesses “in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” That last part — the ends of the earth – in the minds of Mediterranean people, that would be Ethiopia!
The man is also fascinating because he is wealthy and powerful. Our image of Jesus’ followers is that they were poor and outcast, but not everybody. This guy is a “court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury,” and we notice that he is wealthy enough to have a personal driver for his chariot. Wait, you say: Pastor Klonowski, there is no mention here about a personal driver. Ah, but nevertheless I know there was one, for as he was traveling this man was reading that text from the prophet Isaiah. If he was reading a text there must have been someone else in the driver’s seat of that chariot, for you know there’s no texting while driving.
He is fascinating because he is a devout man. This wealthy and powerful official of a Gentile nation had been up to Jerusalem for worship, we are told, and then on the ride home he is spending his time in Bible study. What is it motivates a man of such worldly success to such faithful devotion? In the chariot he reads Isaiah 53, the Song of the Suffering Servant: “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.”
He is fascinating, finally and most importantly, because he is a eunuch. That little bit is so important that the word eunuch is used no fewer than five times here. To understand, you have to know a little about the ancient practice of castration for high court service. The reasons they did that in the ancient world are probably obvious: you can’t have virile men padding around on their bureaucratic errands in the same palace with the royal harem, and certainly not in the court of a queen. And then, a eunuch was able to work so much harder on all that official business, without that one significant distraction. The ancients didn’t know Freud, but apparently they did know sublimation.
You have to know a little about how they did it. They picked out from among the children of their slaves the young boys who were unusually bright, creative, intellectually promising. The castration was done before puberty, age ten or eleven, to assure no memory of the sexual identity that would be missing. And then the boys were educated for their courtly duties, raised up to be perfect functionaries, trained – trained like horses, or trained like you would train your dog – to serve their master’s need. Perfect, smooth-working pieces in the efficient machine of the royal government, and the only price to pay was the sacrifice of their lives as free human beings.
It is one of these, then, that rides in the chariot, reading Isaiah 53. “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter …. In his humiliation justice was denied him. … For his life is taken away ….” When Philip then miraculously appears, offering to explain the Scripture, the Ethiopian man fairly grabs Philip by the collar and pulls him into the chariot. He wants to know: “About whom? About whom does the prophet say this? Tell me!,” he says to Philip, and I submit his interest is so sharp and so desperate because he has already recognized, really, whom the scripture is about. The scripture is about him: humiliation, justice denied, life taken away; who else does he recognize here but himself?
And he is right about that, you know: this scripture is about him. This scripture is about him, and it’s about anyone who inhabits the edges of the world, anyone who is pushed out to the margins by those who dominate the center. You know how this works:
• it can happen because you are diseased – that’ll make a pariah outta you.
• It can happen because you are poor.
• It can happen because you have committed some sin that makes you wonder if you can ever be restored to community again.
• Or maybe life is taken away because, like the Ethiopian eunuch, you are reduced to a deadened piece of the official commercial machinery – all in all you’re just another brick in the wall.
Or – or! – maybe humiliation is offered and justice denied because, like the Ethiopian eunuch, your sexual circumstance is not what they call norm-al. Maybe something different from what this world considers “the norm.” Did you know that this devout man, this man reading his scripture on his way home from Jerusalem, this man would never have been permitted in the Temple? The Bible forbids it! And how many times have we heard those words – the Bible forbids it! – as we in faith communities, we people of faith of all kinds of sexual orientations and identities, have wrestled with whether we really mean it, when we piously sing that “All are welcome, in this place”?
Deuteronomy 23 says it: No eunuch “shall be admitted to the assembly of the LORD.” We are told this man was returning home from worship in Jerusalem. Who knows what experience he had there, if he tried to enter the assembly? And then he reads Isaiah, reads about humiliation, justice denied, and life taken away. About whom, indeed, does the prophet say this?
“Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus.” See, says Philip, the prophet says this about you, sir; and the prophet says this about me; but finally the prophet says this about one called Jesus, who was the only Son of God but came down and took flesh by the virgin Mary, came to be like you, and to be like me. He came to be like all who live out at the edges of common life. He came to be like all those who were barred from the assembly of the Lord by the Bible, like the tax collectors and the prostitutes and the lepers, and like the criminals who are commonly crucified – in the end, he turned out to be exactly like them, didn’t he? And, yeah, He came to be like the eunuchs and like anyone else whose sexuality and whose gender-identity is not, shall we say, along the commonly-beaten path. Jesus came to be just like that; just like you and me. And so it was that, just like you and like me, he came to know humiliation and justice denied. And then, to those like us from whom life had been taken away, he came and offered new life. Jesus came, and offered people like us new life.
Castration had prevented this Ethiopian eunuch, from ever knowing life as a sexual human being. Subjection to his masters and the exigencies of the state had prevented him from a life of freedom. The law and the Bible had prevented him from entering the Temple. Now, hearing the good news about Jesus, he asks, “If this is true, what you say about Jesus, that a new life is possible; if this is true, that this Jesus is the kind of God who will invite the kind of people like me to be restored to community, then … What is to prevent me then from being baptized?”
Philip answers not a word. We are told simply that both of them, he and Philip, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him.