June 29, 2025 Open and Affirming Sunday First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield MA
Gal 3:28-29 There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.
Acts 8:26-39 Common English Bible 26 An angel from the Lord spoke to Philip, “At noon, take the road that leads from Jerusalem to Gaza.” (This is a desert road.) 27 So he did. Meanwhile, an Ethiopian man was on his way home from Jerusalem, where he had come to worship. He was a eunuch and an official responsible for the entire treasury of Candace. (Candace is the title given to the Ethiopian queen.) 28 He was reading the prophet Isaiah while sitting in his carriage. 29 The Spirit told Philip, “Approach this carriage and stay with it.”
30 Running up to the carriage, Philip heard the man reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, “Do you really understand what you are reading?”
31 The man replied, “Without someone to guide me, how could I?” Then he invited Philip to climb up and sit with him. 32 This was the passage of scripture he was reading:
Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter and like a lamb before its shearer is silent so he didn’t open his mouth. 33 In his humiliation justice was taken away from him. Who can tell the story of his descendants because his life was taken from the earth?
34 The eunuch asked Philip, “Tell me, about whom does the prophet say this? Is he talking about himself or someone else?” 35 Starting with that passage, Philip proclaimed the good news about Jesus to him. 36 As they went down the road, they came to some water.
The eunuch said, “Look! Water! What would keep me from being baptized?” 38 He ordered that the carriage halt. Both Philip and the eunuch went down to the water, where Philip baptized him. 39 When they came up out of the water, the Lord’s Spirit suddenly took Philip away. The eunuch never saw him again but went on his way rejoicing.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
The Apostle Philip headed down the road from Jerusalem to Gaza and on the way he met a man who wanted to know about God. But the man was a foreigner, an alien, even though he was important in his home, he was not quite acceptable in Philip’s land. It wasn’t so much that he was Black but that he was a eunuch, a man who had been castrated.
In that time, in that world, it was not uncommon for the parents of younger sons of a family to have this done to their sons because it made them more employable, gave them a better future, and hopefully would make them more able to help their siblings. But it was a great sin in the Jewish world view; an “incomplete” man was not able to worship God. So this man, who belonged to a group which followed the Jewish religion, had found that he was not welcome in the Temple when he came to Jerusalem.
Philip joined him, helped him understand the scroll of Isaiah that he was reading, and then told him about Jesus. The man was convinced, but he wasn’t sure his worship would be welcome, and so he asked “what would keep me from being baptized?” In this new world, Philip said there was nothing to keep that from happening, and so the man was baptized. One of the very first baptisms recorded in the New Testament is the baptism of a Black man who was ritually unacceptable.
He was welcomed by God, welcomed into the church. If this early in the story conversion is important… then what does it mean to us?
It makes us ask…
Who’s welcome in our church?
Who’s welcome at the baptismal font?
Who’s welcome at God’s table?
Everyone, that’s who.
That’s what it means to be an open and affirming church. That’s who we are. And it’s the special gift we bring to our world. We welcome everyone.
Do we really mean everyone? Yes – with one important exception. The only people who are not welcome here are those who come to hurt us, or who do hurt members. Physical, mental, spiritual safety matter. But other than that, everyone is welcome.
Tall? Short? Fat? Thin?
Struggling to stay sober? Holding on to your sanity with a clenched hand?
Can’t see? Can’t hear? Can’t make it up the stairs?
We’ve got your back.
And especially, we say, we welcome those who are not welcome elsewhere. We welcome lesbians here. We welcome gay men. We welcome trans- people. We welcome little boys who wear tutus and old women who wear overalls and plaid shirts. We welcome every variety, every shade of difference along the spectrum – LGBTQIA+ There’s a great article on Wikipedia about what all those initials stand for – read it and rejoice in the amazing diversity of human beings God has created.
Why do we do this? Because we believe God has told us to do so.
In the letter to the Galatians, the Apostle Paul states the Christian view on inclusivity and diversity just about as clearly as it can be said: “There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
Now the first thing to understand about what Paul wrote is that he uses a way of writing that, by naming the two ends of a spectrum, included every variation possible in between.
It’s as if he’s written “I love cookies, from Oreos to snickerdoodles”… we wouldn’t hear that as saying the only two kinds of cookies Paul liked were Oreos and snickerdoodles, but rather that he really liked all kinds of cookies.
In the same way, when he says God welcomes Jews and Greeks, he’s also including Africans and Scots, Asians and every other variety of human reality we can think of. And when he says “male and female”, he’s also including everything in between.
This is really important because a lot of people try to say that there’s only two ways to be human. Not just that there are only men and only women, but that those men and those women each have one right way to be: either you’re a man or you’re a woman. And if you’re a man, then you must want to love women, and if a woman, you must want to love a man. And everyone must want to get married and have children. Men must love suits and ties, women must love dresses and high heels.
I spent last week in a camp on a height of land above one of the northern reaches of Casco Bay in Maine. Every day I watched the boats go out and come in… small boats, large boats, boats with open sterns, boats with closed sterns, boats hauling a full-sized dory, boats hauling a skiff, lobster boats, fishing boats, pleasure boats, motor boats, sail boats. I learned that the set ups of the lobster boats differs according to where they come from…every harbor has a slightly different way of setting things up.
We’re not all that different from boats in this one way – just as there are many different kinds of boats, so are there many different ways to be human. That’s how God made us, God loves as we are made, and so we, here in this church, have accepted the responsibility to be a place of love, acceptance, safety and sanity for people who don’t fit that old-fashioned, only two ways to be, understanding of human existence.
We’re an Open and Affirming Congregation. It’s a daring position; it means we’re willing to run the risk of being taunted as a “gay church”. And it’s particularly brave in today’s world, where it is less and less safe to be “different”, to be gay and out, or clearly, openly trans.
Today many of the institutions we thought accepted the reality of many different ways of being are backing off their commitments, sometimes to save their business or school, sometimes because they’ve changed their mind, or because it looks like it’s bad for business. Today, people who understood themselves to be trans- people, folks whose reality, sense of self differs from their physical appearance, those folks are being discriminated against, kicked out of the military despite their excellent service, only because their way of living differs from the gender on their birth certificate. Today our witness that God loves everyone and we welcome everybody can literally save lives.
We don’t proclaim God’s love for everyone because it’s good for business, or in order to win a popularity contest. We stand here witnessing to God’s radical inclusivity because God teaches us to love everyone.
God loves everyone and so do we.
Amen.
©2025, Virginia H. Child
To Believe is to Care. . . To Care is to Do 