Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Easter, April 28, 2024
Acts 8:26-40+Psalm 22:24-30+1 John 4:7-21+John 15:1-8
If you live with someone long enough, you grow accustomed to some of the quirky behaviors and words and phrases that make them so unique and endearing, at least through your eyes. At least most of the time. One of Tim's regular sayings when he has dawdled around or not gotten moving as soon as he needed to is this: I need to get on up outta here. Just this week, I discovered that it is not original to him but was one of the regular quips of the late, great ESPN sports host Stuart Scott who used to say when someone would strike out or get ejected from a game.
You ain’t got to go home, but you got to get the heck up outta here.[1]
If you read through enough of the bible, you might just discover that we have a God of the "you got to get the heck up outta here."
Adam was the first, "sent...forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken" (Genesis 3:23). God told Noah to "get on up outta here" on a boat (Genesis 6). God sent Abraham from his home in Ur to "a land that I will show you" (Genesis 12:1). Moses is told to get on up outta Egypt by a voice in the burning bush (Exodus 3). Deborah, Samuel, Jonah, Isaiah, Jeremiah all hear some version of "get on up outta here," and, of course, Mary and Joseph have to get on up outta Nazareth to go down to Bethlehem for the census (Luke 2).
God, it seems, is forever sending people to unexpected places at unexpected times for uncertain reasons, at least to those being told to go.
This morning, that message comes to Philip.
Then an angel of the Lord said to Philip, ‘Get on up outta here and go towards the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.’ (Acts 8:26, adapted)
Philip, one of the seven deacons appointed to serve alongside the apostles a couple of chapters ago in Acts 6, has been telling the Good News to the people in Samaria. This was a region that observant Jews generally avoided because of longstanding enmity between them and the Samaritans, but Philip went and told them all about Jesus, and they believed him. They became followers of The Way. And it was while Philip was there in Samaria that the voice came to him and told him to get on up outta there.
Off Philip goes on a journey of about 100 miles to the "wilderness road."
Let's stop here for just a minute and get a mental picture of this wilderness road. There is not much there but sand and blazing sun. If I'm Philip, I'm looking around and wondering just what it is I'm supposed to do here.
And then, like some mirage crossing the desert, comes a chariot with a most unique person riding in it. The Ethiopian eunuch must have been a picture of opulence, in charge of the treasury of the Ethiopian Candace (a word meaning queen, not a name). This person was undoubtedly dressed in luxurious clothing and bedecked with jewels, all of which stood out against gleaming dark skin. What the circumstances are of their becoming a eunuch we do not know, but it was typically not by choice but a form of childhood mutilation intended to create a community of people in a high-positioned woman's household who could be no threat to sexual involvement or procreation with her. This Ethiopian official would not have been the sort of person Philip would likely ever have encountered had God not sent him on his way.
Two things to note: this person could read. That was unusual on its own. But they also had a copy of the Isaiah scroll, a precious object in those days. This was a cultured, educated, and wealthy person who, by the way, would not have been permitted in the temple precincts due to their identity (Deuteronomy 23). Where they went to worship and where they acquired this scroll, we are not told, and I can't help wondering if they didn’t see themselves in the verse that comes just before the one we are given that says
He was despised and rejected by others;
a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;
and as one from whom others hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him of no account. (Isaiah 53:3)
So Philip, standing there in the hot sun, sees this mirage and hears another voice telling him to go on over and hop on that chariot. And Philip does. He asks if the official understands what they are reading and then begins to explain about the Suffering Servant described in that part of Isaiah (Ch. 53) and about Jesus and the resurrection, and when they come upon some water, the Ethiopian asks why they might not be baptized right then and there.
That's probably the moment Philip realized why he had been sent here.
This is such an astonishing story of evangelism in the early church, and it is mind-boggling how the Church, throughout its history, has missed the salient points.
God sends us to the least likely places to be with the least likely people to share Good News. Because the Ethiopian was what we would call nonbinary - an outcast - they were not included in the household of God. Did that matter to Philip? It did not. Did Philip go and ask permission to baptize them? He did not. Had the leaders of the Jerusalem Church codified who could and could not be included? They had not. Maybe Philip understood early on that it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission, and that God's limitless love for us in Christ Jesus is the most important thing.
Like a branch grafted onto that vine, Philip knew who he was and whose he was, and as long as he stayed connected to the source of life, he was bearing the kind of fruit that lasts, that is pleasing to God.
And so, Philip baptized this stranger and was whisked away, taken on up outta there, to the next place that needed to hear the kind of Good News he had to tell. And the Ethiopian? Tradition has it that they went home, told everyone about what they had seen and heard, and that this was the beginning of what we know as the Ethiopian Church even today.
When you are feeling the nudge to serve, to act, to teach, to reach out to others, maybe that's your sign to get on up outta here and go where God sends you. Who knows what might come of it?
[1] https://thesource.com/2013/05/02/boo-yeah-stuart-scotts-10-best-calls-on-sportscenter/