Dare to Dance Again: Guide My Steps
Acts 8:26-40
May 2, 2021
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Image: Painting by Wensces Cortez, inside the Migrant Outreach Center, Nogales, Sonora, Mexico
The figures in the mural are all migrants who passed through the dining room at some point.
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/bTV9-B3OxUY
I have to wonder what part of Philip’s life experience prepared him for that day on the deserted road. Was it his time as a deacon at First Church in Jerusalem? That was when he had to deal with people in conflict, making sure that the widows’ needs were met fairly without preferential treatment because of ethnic background. Was it his identity as a Hellenist – one of those Jewish people who had relocated to Israel after living somewhere else in the Empire? His accent and his tendency to speak Greek, his first language, always gave him away among the Jewish people who spoke Aramaic, those who had been born and raised in Palestine.
Maybe it was that he was part of a growing, but still young, religious movement. He was used to being in the minority in some other ways; maybe being pushed to the edges of social respectability because of his faith didn’t distress him too much. But he had been distressed by the persecution that broke out in Jerusalem, enough that he had fled that city, along with many others. He ended up in Samaria.
In Samaria, he had risen to the kind of responsibility held by the apostles in Jerusalem. In Samaria, he was an evangelist, a bold preacher and a healer. Maybe, by this time, he was less surprised by the promptings of the Holy Spirit. Maybe he was so in the habit of relying on God’s guidance that the appearance of an angel telling him to take the road out of town seemed like an ordinary thing.
I also have to wonder what part of the Ethiopian’s life experience prepared him for that day on the deserted road. He was not an immigrant like Phillip, but a foreign visitor. He might have been Jewish, one of those who lived far from Israel or he might have been a God-fearing Gentile. Luke, the author of Acts, does not really make that clear. He was from Ethiopia, which is the part of the world now known as Sudan. One common stereotype against his people at the time was that they had a dog as a king. Another was that some regions bred human monstrosities – people without noses or tongues.[1] He was travelling through a country where the inhabitants held those kinds of racist ideas about his people. I have to wonder how he felt about that and what role that played in his encounter with Philip that day.
The Ethiopian is also a eunuch. In contemporary language, he is gender non-conforming. For not measuring up to the Roman ideals of masculinity and strength, for being something other than the gender assigned at birth, he would have faced scorn and derision and abuse.
What prepared him for that day on the deserted road? Luke calls it a wilderness road, but that road didn’t go through a literal desert at that point. Maybe Luke wants to remind us that important spiritual events happen in wilderness and this is such a place. Or maybe because it is deserted, off the beaten path, the two men are able to come together in a way that they wouldn’t have on a busy highway.
The Ethiopian has travelled hundreds of miles, many through actual wilderness, on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, earnestly seeking God. He is on his way home from that. Whatever happened there is surely in the background of this encounter.
We don’t know the details of his time in Jerusalem. Deuteronomy 23:1 says “no one whose testicles are crushed shall be admitted into the congregation of the Lord.” This prohibition clearly applies to the Ethiopian eunuch. But there was a Court of Gentiles in the Temple which had not existed at the time that Deuteronomy was written, so perhaps he might have been admitted that far. The Court of the Gentiles was the noisy place where the money changers and the temple vendors were. It was further out than the court of women. A place that was in, but not fully in. A marginal place. A place we might call “welcoming, but not affirming.”
What is he feeling now, on his way home? Does he feel closer to God, after being excluded or maybe just grudgingly tolerated by the religious community? Or is he in theological crisis?
He seems to be still earnestly seeking a way to know God.
He is reading from Isaiah 53. It is a description of God’s servant who suffers humiliation and injustice and death. It is a passage that Philip would have connected with Jesus. The Ethiopian does not understand it, but it seems to resonate. “Perhaps it calls to him because it reflects some of the complexities of his own life, his own religious, sexual and racial differences, his own vulnerability.”[2]
The Scripture speaks to him. It finds him where he is, and on this occasion, God has also provided Philip to act as interpreter and guide. I have to wonder about their conversation. I have to wonder if the Ethiopian shared the details of his own experiences of suffering, perhaps even of his exclusion from the Temple. I have to wonder if Philip talked about his identity as an immigrant and the power of God he had experienced. I think about how human conversations go and how we seek common ground, and how many points of connections these two might have found quickly. I have to believe that the Spirit who brought them together moved between them in ways that were healing and transformational for both.
If the Ethiopian did experience rejection in Jerusalem, Philip might have referred back to Deuteronomy as an explanation or a defense. “Well, you know what the Bible says about people like you.”
Or he might have taken the scroll of Isaiah and rolled it forward just a little to chapter 56 where he would have read “Do not let the foreigner joined to the LORD say, “The LORD will surely separate me from his people”; and do not let the eunuch say, “I am just a dry tree.” For thus says the Lord: To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.”
Deuteronomy says eunuchs are not welcome. But Isaiah places them within God’s house, with a name better than son or daughter. Two passages of Scripture, seemingly with equal authority. But they are also contradictory. They must be read in dialogue with each other And they are by no means the only passages which conflict with each other.
So, we dance with Scripture and with the Spirit to order our steps. We listen to each other. We learn from each other – from the immigrant and the foreigner and the cultural insider, from the experiences of women and men and non-binary persons. We listen for how Scripture speaks to those who read passages for the very first time and to those who understand it in wide context. We teach and we are taught.
This story is usually understood as the Ethiopian’s conversion, but I have to wonder about the ways it transformed Philip too. The guidance of the Spirit is unmistakable in the story, after the fact. But it may not always be in the moment. I sense that Philip was able to follow the Spirit’s guidance because he had courageously started doing that some time ago. With time and discipline, he had come to trust that invisible power, those internal promptings, to put himself at God’s disposal as witness for the gospel, to take the lonely road, to speak to strangers.
Because of that, he is there to hear the Ethiopian’s poignant question – “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” This man has a history of being prevented from all kinds of things, from having children, from exercising power in his own right, from being fully accepted in many ways.
So, he asks “What is to prevent me?” “What is to prevent me from belonging to the family of God? What is to prevent me from being welcomed as Christ’s own? What is to prevent me from full participation in the risen life and community of Jesus? What is to prevent me from breaking down the entrenched barriers, fences, walls, and obstacles that have kept me at an agonizing arm’s length from the God I yearn for? What is to prevent me from becoming, not merely a hearer of the Good News, but an integral part of the Good News of resurrection?”[3]
Friends, please know that these questions have not gone away. They persist in the lives of young and old, in the hearts of those in the center and those at the margins. There are still so many who resonate with the stories of the Bible, which they may not fully understand, so many who are earnestly seeking God, in spite of the barriers and obstacles, many of which have been created by the institutional church and well-meaning Christians.
“What is to prevent me?” the Ethiopian asks. The answer is nothing, absolutely nothing.
As theologian Debie Thomas says, “In the post-resurrection world, in the world where the Spirit of God moves where and how she will, drawing all of creation to herself, in the world where the Word lives to defeat death, alienation, isolation, and fear, there is nothing to prevent a beloved image-bearer of God from entering into the fullness of Christ’s salvation. Nothing whatsoever.”[4]
Beloved ones, we are Easter people. We trust that God in Christ is reconciling the world – the broken, desperate, violent and yearning world – to God’s own self. So, then, may we find the courage to take the lonely road, to listen to strangers. May we learn and teach and offer radical welcome, again and again and again. May we join the dance, allowing scripture and the Spirit to guide our steps. Amen.
[1] [1] J. Bradley Chance, Acts: Smyth and Helwys Bible Commentary, (Macon: Smyth and Helwys, 2007), p. 136
[2] Debie Thomas in When All Are Welcome https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2995-when-all-are-welcome
[3] Debie Thomas in When All Are Welcome https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2995-when-all-are-welcome
[4] Debie Thomas in When All Are Welcome https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2995-when-all-are-welcome