Posted 469 days ago

God's Expansive Tent: An Easter Sermon on Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch

by Nadia Bolz-Weber, House of All Sinners and Saints

Acts 8:26-40 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.) So he got up and went. Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah. Then the Spirit said to Philip, ”Go over to this chariot and join it.” So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, ”Do you understand what you are reading?” He replied, ”How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him. 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.
In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.”

The eunuch asked Philip, ”About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus. 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?” He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him. 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. 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.

Last week Seth and I attended the Rocky Mountain Synod Assembly, the legislative body for this region of the Lutheran Church. For more than ten years my denomination has been talking about human sexuality. Much like the early church who were convinced that Gentiles could only become Christians if they became Jews first (which, for the record, involved a rather unpleasant process), there is a segment of the church today that thinks if we extend the roof of the tent to include “the gays” then the whole thing will come crashing down around us. We must “evangelize” them, namely, change them into us before they will fit, or else the roof can’t hold. Meanwhile the other side of the church is all about inclusion to extend the tent to include the marginalized, the less fortunate the minorities.

But then we have this story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch—a text which I have always heard as being about evangelism. “The Conversion of the Ethiopian Eunuch,” it was called. I was always told that the message of this text was that we should tell everyone we meet about Jesus because in doing so we might save them. We might convert them. We might change them into being us.

But today I’m not so sure. Because if the Eunuch was reading Isaiah as he returned from Jerusalem having gone there to worship, I would bet he was also familiar with Deuteronomy, specifically 23:1, which states, “No one whose testicles are cut off or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord.” Anyone have that one as a memory verse growing up?

This law strictly forbids a Eunuch from entering the assembly of the Lord. Their transgression of gender binaries and the inability to fit into proper categories made them profane by nature. They do not fit in the tent. But the Eunuch went to Jerusalem to worship despite the fact that in all likelihood he would be turned away by the religious establishment. The Eunuch sought God anyway.

When the Spirit guided Philip to that road in the desert, I like to think she guided him to his own conversion. As he approached the chariot, he may have been thinking, “OK, I’ll just beat him with the scripture stick until he becomes what I am comfortable with.” But when Philip joined this person who sought to worship God despite his exclusion from the tent, maybe it was Philip himself who was converted to the faith. It was perhaps even a mutual conversion. Maybe because they simply asked each other questions in the desert. The only imperatives came from the Holy Spirit. Philip and the Eunuch only asked each other questions. The only commands came from God and the command was go and join. Go and join the other. What we don’t know is if the Spirit also gave the Eunuch a command to invite: “Invite this nice Jewish boy, representative of all that clings to the law and rejects you from God’s house, to sit by you.” Go, join, invite, ask questions. Perhaps Philip in his encounter with this gender transgressive foreigner learned what seeking the Lord looks like.

A couple weeks ago Stuart showed up to liturgy wearing slacks and button-down shirt rather than his Grease Monkey jacket and jeans. Earlier that day He had stood as godfather and baptismal sponsor for the child of his friends, a straight couple who have known Stuart for a number of years. Apparently after the baptism, there was a little reception back at this couple’s house. To Stuart’s surprise his friends got all of their guests attention so they could say a few words about why they had chosen Stuart as their child’s godparent. “We chose you Stuart,” they said, “because for most of your life you have pursued Christ and Christ’s church even though as a gay man all you’ve heard from the church is that ‘there is no love for you here’.” I heard that story as his friends saying to him, “You, Stuart, convert us again and again to this faith.”

Many of you have only heard that the tent is simply not big enough unless you change to fit in it. Change your sexuality, your personality, your doubting. Change your addictive patterns, your story, your brokenness. And if you can’t, then just pretend. Yet here you are, converting me once again to this faith. How can I know what it means to follow Christ unless I learn it from someone who has done so despite every obstacle possible? That’s why I am so in awe of those in our community who have heard again and again, “There is no love for you here ,” not just the queers either, but also those who have the wrong personality or the wrong socioeconomic status or the wrong gender or the wrong immigration status or the wrong politics to fit under the tent.

I think that we can’t actually know what this Jesus following thing is about unless we too have the stranger show us. This is far more than “inclusion.” Inclusion isn’t the right word at all because it sounds like in our niceness and virtue we are allowing “them” to join us, like we are judging another group of people worthy to be a part of this thing. Inclusion seems like a small thing—a charity, a mercy. But the truth is that we need the equivalent of our Ethiopian eunuch to show us the faith. We continually need the stranger, the foreigner, the “other” to show us water in the desert. We need to hear, “Here is water in the desert, so what is to keep me, the eunuch, from being baptized?” Or “me, the queer” or “me, the inter-sexed” or “me, the illiterate” or “me, the neurotic” or “me, the over-educated” or “me, the founder of Focus on the Family.” Until we face the difficulty of that question and come up as Philip did with no answer, we just look at the seemingly limited space under the tent and think it’s our job to either change people so they fit, or extend the roof so that they fit. Either way, it’s misguided because it’s not our tent. It’s God’s tent. The wideness of the tent of the Lord should concern us only insofar as it points to the gracious nature of a loving God who became flesh and entered into our humanity. The wideness of the tent should only concern us insofar as it points to the great mercy and love of a God who welcomes us all as friends.

The bigness of God’s tent is why we have an open communion table. When we come to the table we all come as Christ’s guests to his feast. And as much as we’d like to be, we are not the makers of the guest list. We come to the table with those who accept us and those who reject us. We come to the table with those we love and those we distrust. We come whether or not we feel worthy because it is God who has made us worthy in the invitation. It is God who has torn the curtain of the temple so that there is no longer Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, gay nor straight, liberal nor conservative.

So maybe here in this story of the conversion of Philip and the eunuch is some hope for the church. Under God’s really big tent, we might ask questions, invite those who represent the establishment to come and sit by us, stay in the scriptures, be converted anew by the strange and the stranger, see where there is water in the desert, enter fully into the waters of God’s mercy with the foreigners, with the “not us,” go on our way rejoicing, having converted each other to this beautiful, dangerous, expansive life of faith.

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