April 28, 2024 First Congregational Church UCC in Auburn, MA
Acts 8:26-40
26 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.) 27 So he got up and went. Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, the queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship 28 and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah. 29 Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over to this chariot and join it.” 30 So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” 31 He replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him. 32 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. 33 In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.”
34 The eunuch asked Philip, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” 35 Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus. 36 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?”,*38 He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him. 39 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. 40 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 the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Some years ago, I accompanied a colleague and her youth group when they attended the UCC’s General Synod, our national meeting that happened in those days every other year. My friend was serving the South Dakota Conference and she’d brought ten kids from the high plains to our meeting in Norfolk, Virginia.
None of the kids had ever been east of the Mississippi River before. All went well, and the kids were really invested in the meetings, spending evenings talking over the issues that were being discussed that year. Until the day we took them to Virginia Beach.
Until that day, the ocean had been some mystical invention, and they’d not been able to imagine what it would be like to see that much water at once. Nor had they anyway to imagine how different swimming in salt water would be, how different the scents, how amazing the sandy beach. Yes, they have beaches in South Dakota, but they are all for fresh-water ponds and lakes. Beautiful, but very different – much more closed in than the Atlantic Ocean. And it didn’t hurt that the Virginia Beach boardwalk is lined with great places to eat and have fun.
From that day on, all the kids wanted to do was go to the beach. Their focus had been completely changed. When the meeting ended, they got back on their plane, sandy and sunburned, and with a new perspective on the world.
Today’s scripture reading is something of an odd story…. The evangelist Philip talks with a magic angel, and keeps getting taken off to new places… the other guy in the story doesn’t even have a name. He’s just the “Ethiopian eunuch”. But maybe that’s really what matters – what he was, instead of who he was.
So, Philip finds himself on the road to Gaza, yes, the Gaza where the fighting is right now. And he meets this man we only know by his nationality and his physical state. But they, especially the latter, were more than enough to put him outside the lines of acceptability in polite society, in religious society. The rule was, you had to have all your body parts to be acceptable. All of them. If you didn’t have pair of hands, or something more important, you weren’t able to offer sacrifices in the temple. And there was always a good deal of malicious gossip about eunuchs, just to make things worse.
The Ethiopian is an unacceptable man. But the story makes it clear that he’s also a man of faith. The traditions and practices that have come together over the years have limited him to an in-between space where he’s not out, but he’s also not really in.
Philip changes all that. He explains the gospel of Jesus to the Ethiopian, whose immediate reaction is to ask for baptism. History tells us that this man continued to share the story of Jesus, and while Christianity wasn’t really established in Ethiopia for another two hundred years, this is part of the beginning of that story.
When Philip told the Ethiopian that God accepted him, as he was, it changed the direction of that man’s life. It changed his purpose and over the centuries, it changed his homeland.
Change is our theme for the day. The Search Committee is circulating our profile, and we can anticipate a new pastor. Part of my job as an interim is to give you a taste of change, so that you’ll be ready for someone who will bring with them different perspectives.
Change can be scary. It can be unsettling. It can cause us to mourn beloved traditions that are now sharing time and space with other ideas, other perspectives. Opening up to new ideas can be life-changing, invigorating. And it can be hard.
What happens when you see things from a new way? Instead of automatically turning away, assuming that the outsider/imperfect could not benefit, Philip turned towards, and assumed there could be good. How does such an idea affect us?
Some change is going to happen naturally because it in things like new decorations in the pastor’s office, or a different selection of hymns. We pastors do our best to keep singing the favorites, but sometimes it takes a while to identify them – and you’ve a great hymnal with a lot of good songs in it. But out of those changes, you’ll learn new favorites.
Some change will be more intentional. If you want different results from on-going programs, or if you want to try a new project, then there will have to be changes. Some changes, like the shelves Nathan Minor is building for his Eagle project, will be immediately useful. Some things will take time. And some of them will be failures.
When those opportunities come along, I hope you’ll remember Philip and how, when faced with something he’d been taught all his life couldn’t happen, gathered the courage to turn in a different direction, welcoming in, taking advantage of the opportunity to think about what we do, why we do it this way, and where we want to be heading.
You get to practice now with me, so that you’ll be ready for what your new pastor will bring with vigor and enthusiasm and ideas for tomorrow.
Let’s all be Philips in the days and months to come.
Amen.
© 2024, Virginia H. Child