What Is To Prevent Me From Being Baptized?

"What Is To Prevent Me From Being Baptized?"

Acts 8:26-40
May 10, 2009

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.

If there is one book in the New Testament I am not all that familiar with, or, that I have
not done a detailed study of, it is the book of Acts. I don’t quite know why, but for
whatever reason, the chances to really study this book of the Bible have been few and
far between. So, when a text like the one before us today gets put on the preaching
calendar, I tend to gravitate to it. There is something powerful about listening to the
earliest stories of the church, to see how they lived out their understanding of the
Gospel, and what instincts and experiences they brought to their lives by being so
close to the events narrated in the Gospel stories. We Protestants have generally
been what scholars called “primitivists,” that is, Christians who looked to the earliest
experiences of the church as the best, most spirit-filled encounters of the divine AND—
and this is a big AND—the way we should try to live out our Christian lives now.   Now,
to be honest, I think we certainly need to look at these texts as important and
instructive, but we always need to be careful about looking at the earliest stories of the
church and automatically thinking that we need to be THAT kind of church if we’re
going to be an authentic and faithful church. The backside of that thinking is this
mistaken belief that somehow the Spirit of God stopped working at around AD 50 or so,
and somehow the Spirit might not have anything new to say to us, which is something
all branches of the Christian faith have resoundingly rejected—if not explicitly, then
they have rejected on practical level.

So, what new word can we hear from this old text, this ancient story about a eunuch, a
castrated man, a sexual other, who is found by Philip on the side of the road, reading
from the biblical book of Isaiah? Well, first of all, let’s look to this unnamed Ethiopian
eunuch and the whole issue of what an eunuch was in the first century. In many ways,
the whole idea of castrating a man seems barbaric—and it is, in my opinion—but in the
ancient world, and in some cultures, including a handful of early Christian cultures,
there were good and valid reasons for essentially making sure a male could not and
would not impregnate and have intercourse with a female. In many ancient cultures, a
man might be castrated before he had reached puberty in order to prepare him for a
life of servitude in a household where women were present—by essentially neutering
the man, the woman, usually in a royal household of some sort, was sexually protected,
and probably more importantly for men in that patriarchal culture, there would be no
doubt about the parentage of the offspring of the woman.

Now, we don’t know for sure whether or not this Ethiopian eunuch was a Jew, or
whether he was what Jews often called a “God-fearer,” someone who was a believer,
someone who believed in Yahweh, but who had not gone so far as to be circumcised.
These folks were not quite pagan, but not quite Jews—people of non-Jewish faith who
believed as Jews, perhaps practiced as Jews, but, at least for the men, had decided
NOT to go through the painful process of adult circumcision…and, to be honest, who
can blame them, really? For us males in the room, it seems like a reasonable decision,
even for something as important as faith. And yet, the irony here is that for a Jewish
eunuch, or a God fearing eunuch, you were never quite truly accepted, because the
Jewish law forbid persons with any kind of physical defect to enter into certain parts of
the Temple. In Leviticus 21:17-21, these words are written: Speak to Aaron and say:
No one of your offspring throughout their generations who has a blemish may approach
to offer the food of his God. For no one who has a blemish shall draw near, one who is
blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or a limb too long, or one who has a
broken foot or a broken hand, or a hunchback, or a dwarf, or a man with a blemish in
his eyes or an itching disease or scabs or crushed testicles. No descendant of Aaron
the priest who has a blemish shall come near to offer the Lord’s offerings by fire; since
he has a blemish, he shall not come near to offer the food of his God. Perfection was
demanded for entrance into some parts of the Temple, and yet this Ethiopian eunuch
remained faithful, so faithful as to make the trip from his home country in Africa to
Jerusalem, where he came to worship Yahweh with others.

Still, one must be careful to give context to this particular situation—the reality is that
this man had done quite well for himself, as the man in charge of the Ethiopian queen’s
treasury. And in reality, we don’t know if folks in ancient Israel actually practiced the
law as it was spelled out—in fact, in some instances, we have evidence that there were
not as strict as the text told them to be—again, going back to what I said at the
beginning: we mustn’t assume that the Spirit will only speak once and for all and that
the Spirit will always speak the same word to us. It’s important not to assume that the
Jews were as exclusionary as the Leviticus text seems to command them to be—and it’s
also important not to set up Christians and Jews up against each other, since Jesus
himself was a faithful Jew.    Still, it must have gnawed at him, this eunuch, to be a part
of faith that seemed to exclude him, even with his imperfection, imperfection not of his
doing, so much so that as he is leaving Jerusalem, he begins to search the Scriptures,
which is really quite amazing for two reasons: it shows you how educated he was, and
how wealthy he was, since he actually owned a personal copy of the Jewish Scriptures,
in a time when everything had to be handwritten, and actually owning a copy was
beyond the reach of even the most faithful Jew. He is seated in his chariot, again, a
sign of his wealth, that he owns a chariot—he is seated in his chariot and he is
reading—and he is reading aloud, which is again, an ancient custom. In fact, it wasn’t
until the time of Augustine in the fourth century that people began to read silently—if
one read, one read aloud, up until the time of Augustine, and some have speculated
that the beginning of reading in silence was due to the rise of the Christian monastery,
where both silence and reading were highly prized.

So, this Ethiopian eunuch is reading aloud, on the side of the road, and this guy named
Philip shows up, propelled, the Scripture says, by the very Spirit of God. Philip came to
be known as one of seven Greek speaking Jewish Christians who were appointed by
the twelve disciples to tend to the needs of others, especially the widows who were the
most vulnerable persons in ancient society—without the financial and physical
protection of men, widows were vulnerable to poverty and all sorts of abuses. In Philip
there must have been a supremely empathetic character, someone who could
sympathize with those on the outside, the margins of a society. In this eunuch, he finds
another person who knows what it means be other, even in his own religious tradition.
The Spirit of God moves Philip to go to this man and ask him whether or not he
understands what he is reading, a passage from Isaiah 53. It is a familiar passage for
us Christians, about the sheep that was sent to the slaughter, a text we interpret as
speaking of Christ. And so Philip explains the passage, explains about the good news
of this Jesus of Nazareth, who has come to include, to include all people, even people
like him, into the kingdom of God.

And so this man is convinced, convinced because of Philip’s words, and convinced
because of the Spirit that must have flowed between them, and he asks a question, a
beautiful question: Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?
And though nothing is said in our text, I can’t imagine that the Spirit wasn’t whispering in
Philip’s ear these words: Nothing, absolutely nothing. Right there, right there, is the
heart of the Gospel—nothing to prevent us from coming home, nothing to bar our
entrance into the realm of God, nothing to stop us from being welcomed by the God
who loves us as we are, and yet who will love us into even greater than we are at this
moment. I mean, this is the radical, inclusive, welcoming faith that we’ve always hoped
Christianity was…because, as we all know, since the moment the church began we
have been arguing who’s include and how much they—and there always seems to have
to be a “they”—how much “they” are to included in the realm of God. I don’t know what
it is about our faith, our Christian faith, but we are so often a people torn apart by our
disagreements about who is and is not included in the welcoming arms of God. Instead
of hearing the Spirit speak the words, absolutely nothing at the font, at the river, at our
baptism, we somehow think the Spirit is saying to us…”well, maybe not that one, but I’m
good with this one…”   I must admit that I am not sure whether it is a particular and
peculiar Christian disease, but it is certainly a disease, the disease of judgment and
exclusion, that has infected us, almost from the beginning.

And yet, here we are, with a story about a sexual other, someone who had been
deemed imperfect, marred, scarred, and thus not welcomed amongst the “perfect”
people of God. Here is the Spirit speaking with a man whose race might have jumped
out at us at first, mostly because we moderns tend to struggle with race more than the
ancients ever did, but in fact, it is the mutilation of his body that has kept him from the
inner circle, kept him behind closed doors, kept him as “other.” Sometimes it has been
race, but more often it has been gender that has kept some separated from the “inner
circle” of God’s full welcome into the realm of God. Other times it has been “wrong”
beliefs, beliefs that were deemed heretical, “other,” “not us,” that has been the reason
given for excluding this sister or that brother from being with us, us, the righteous ones,
us, the perfect ones, the unmarred ones.   But stories like this, primitive stories like this,
stories that seep out of those earliest experiences of the Spirit, they tell us a different
story, a story of inclusion of the excluded, hope for the hopeless, and welcome to those
whom no one wishes to give a home. And yet, as I said at the beginning of this sermon,
we must be careful—what is oldest is not necessarily the best—but I can’t help but think
that somehow this story really captures the message of Jesus much better than some
stories told in Scripture before and after this momentous moment. Here it is—“is there
anything to prevent me from being baptized?” No, no, no, and never…

And as quickly as the Spirit came, the Spirit left, taking Philip with him, taking him to a
new place, to tell the good news of God including love to others. The eunuch, so
overwhelmed by the experience, didn’t even fret, and simply went away happy, joy filled
because of what had happened. It’s that simple folks, the Gospel is that simple—God’s
love include you and me, and the person next door, the ones I like and the ones I hate,
and all sorts of people in-between. And I have to say that one of the reasons I love our
particular church and the larger United Church of Christ is that we really try to tell that
good news to all, especially the folks in that “all” that have been told that the invitation
didn’t really include them. We have tried to trust the Spirit and no doubt we have failed
more often than gotten it right, but on this point, on this embrace, on this inclusion, we’
ve got it right. And thanks be to God, forever and ever, the God that includes you and
me, a God who, in our moments of self-doubt, when we are wondering whether or not
there really is something that might prevent us from being included in the realm of
God…a God whose Spirit, in response to our doubt, whispers to us, over and over
again, “no, dear one, absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing…” Amen.