In Philip’s baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch, we see our own invitation to embody God’s love, share in the redeeming of the world, and the offering of hope in the middle of nowhere. If we recognize the invitation for what it is: our everything.
an invitation to embody God’s love
Easter 5B | Acts 8:26-40, 1 John 4:7-21, John 15:1-8
About nine years ago, the earth rattled beneath my feet and inside my body. There was no observable seismic activity in any particular New England city at the time, but when it was over, I saw everything new, everything was brighter.
And yet I was the only one who could see it because this internal heartquake was just for me then. But it wouldn’t stay that way.
I was out there visiting a congregation, interviewing with a bishop, in the kind of time and place you hope God would reach out and show us the way forward. But we rarely show that kind of faith in God. There’s lots of stuff we’d rather do on our own.
And everything about the interview with the bishop felt wrong and adversarial. It wasn’t about the situation; it was my expectations for how bishops behave. I was surprised and shocked; my nerves were electrified with fear and frustration from the moment we sat down.
In my home diocese, we were in the midst of a revitalizing of the sacramental rite of confirmation, spurred on by our bishop. We were trying to make the preparation and articulation of our call to a mature ministry of faith a more serious endeavor.
So when this other bishop asked about confirmation, I shared what we were doing and why I was eager to build these new practices into our common life.
And her response tore the ground underneath me.
“If a person came to me on a Sunday morning, asking to be baptized, I’d baptize them then and there.”
I didn’t move east, but this encounter changed everything for me.
Reconsidering Baptism
We have seven sacramental rites which inform each other. You can find them in the Book of Common Prayer beginning on page 857. They are Holy Baptism, Holy Eucharist, confirmation, ordination, holy matrimony, reconciliation of a penitent, and unction.
And what this strange interview did was shake up my theology, breaking the calcification around my understanding of the sacraments. I thought I needed to protect them. Like I was ordained to be the gatekeeper, demanding these barbarians prove their worth to me before I could let them in. I thought I had to be a bouncer for the divine.
To be honest, that’s how the church usually talks about the sacraments. And of the priest’s role in relation to them. We seem to argue that for us to take them seriously, we have to have all of these rules around them. And more than anything, we have to know what’s happening to us before we do them.
But from the very beginning, my heart had always tried to show me differently. My heart longed to free the sacraments from that prison of control. And this bishop with whom I only spent about an hour, freed me. To free them.
To take the radical example of Philip and recognize that God is already doing amazing things in our midst. We’re here to share in them, to partner with God in loving the world.
Because God is already doing something here.
God is already there.
We’ve jumped forward in Acts, past the calling of Stephen and the deacons, to land in the midst of a dynamic story. The gospel is growing out from Jerusalem and powerful forces are threatening and killing followers of Jesus. The Holy Spirit calls Peter and John back from Samaria to Jerusalem. But has something else in mind for Philip.
Reformed Pastor Doug Bratt describes it this way:
“…the Spirit sends Philip even farther into the Samaritan “hinterlands.” In fact, it’s so far “out there” that Martin Marty compares the end of its highway to one of those gas stations at the edge of a desert whose sign reads: “Last gas for 150 miles …” To paraphrase an old cliché, if where the Spirit sends Philip isn’t the end of the world, you can almost see it from there.
This is where the Spirit sends Philip: to the end of the world. There’s nothing there! Or there should be nothing there, but surprisingly, there’s someone there. Well, a someone who wouldn’t be a someone to many in Jerusalem.
This nameless man is referred to as an Ethiopian eunuch. But I think this description is just too obscure and safe for us today. We don’t get the full impact of this story because it doesn’t hit us the way it hit the story’s first hearers. This man is a dark-skinned African, whose complexion would be seen as exotic and foreign to Jew and Gentile alike in Jerusalem.
And most Ethiopian officials were castrated, so this man’s gender has been taken and transformed. This alone would disqualify the man from entering the Temple.
So this is who Philip meets on the wilderness road to nowhere: a foreign, black LGBTQ person who is being called by God to believe. And the Spirit put Philip where he could find him.
Sharing Love
So Philip talks to him and shares the story, connecting Jesus, not only to the suffering servant in the book of Isaiah but to the very tradition of Isaiah and the Hebrew prophets.
And if we believe God, then it shouldn’t be a surprise that these two walking through the desert would come across a puddle of water.
As Bratt writes:
“When Isaiah talks about God’s coming kingdom, he refers to “streams in the wasteland” (Isaiah 43:19). And when the psalmist talks about God’s redeeming work, he looks forward to “streams in the Negev” (Psalm 126:4). So we can imagine that Acts’ biblically literate first audience heard something very hopeful when they heard about the desert water Philip and the Ethiopian find.”
This is God inviting them.
“What is to prevent me from being baptized?”
he asks.
Nothing!
Because baptism is our partnering with God to make real the thing God is already doing! That’s what makes it sacramental.
And that’s why we shouldn’t be surprised when the Spirit whisks Philip away and transforms the man, filling him with abundant love and willingness to share it.
Philip, the second deacon, the one listed after Stephen, is this agent of love on the wilderness road. And he has more of God’s love to share; in Azotus and the road to the Greek city of Caesarea. Philip is sharing the love of God with all the people he was taught not to.
And legend has it that the man known only as the Ethiopian eunuch returned home to Ethiopia as an evangelist, recorded by Eusebius as a follower of Jesus.
Full of Love
This story is pregnant with the love of God. As the evangelist we call John reminds us, God is love, so if we’re talking about love, we’re necessarily talking about God.
And it goes the other way. If we’re talking about God, we’re talking about love. Which means all the junk we put on God or claim is God’s doing that nobody would confuse for love? Well, that can’t be God.
Love is the substance of the wilderness encounter. God put Philip and this foreign, black LGBTQ public official in the same place, to connect and share the love given to both of them. One is facing persecution for his proclamation and acts of love and the other embodies the stripping of love. It’s the perfect example of God’s very nature! They are embodying God’s inviting love!
But God doesn’t just make the moment. God makes the invitation. That’s half of the story. The other half is that Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch take it.
Partnering with God
This love, this invitation to partner in love, is at the root of Jesus’s vine image. Without it, the pruning doesn’t make sense. Without love, it is easy to say that Jesus cuts people out of the kin-dom because they can’t hack it. But Jesus isn’t saying that.
Jesus is talking about growing love, being part of the blossoming of God’s love in the world. He’s saying that we’re the agents of God’s love, called to follow him, filled with the Holy Spirit.
This whole gospel story we call John is about love: these beautiful blooms of love. How much God loves the world, how much Jesus becomes the love that allows us to partner with God. And how the Holy Spirit inspires and provokes love throughout the world.
We are branches, brothers and sisters, evangelists, apostles, deacons, ministers of love in a world afraid to love. Afraid of the intimacy needed to love.
But our job isn’t to be afraid. Our work isn’t based on fear. That’s the enemy of faith. That’s the gatekeeper, bouncer for the divine. Fear is the author of exclusion and weapon of the wicked. Fear causes us to prune the wrong branches.
Not the people only, but the relationships, ministries, opportunities, and invitations from God to love boldly and daringly as disciples and apostles of love.
If God is love, we are children of love.
Love is our work.
And the wider church in North America has done a terrible job of teaching us this. That we don’t come here every Sunday to get a dose of love, a hit of love like addicts, so we can go home and come back a week later to get some more love.
I don’t hand out love at the communion rail like a human vending machine. I’m not a Pez dispenser—flip my top and help yourself.
We’re students, all of us learning to love from our rabbi. A teacher who gave us Philip, an Ethiopian Eunuch, and John, evangelists all of them. Proclaimers and givers of love. Sharing and partnering with God in building a kin-dom of love.
We are their inheritors. Students and teachers, builders and rebuilders, hopers, dreamers, workers, agents of love, conspiring to make this a world of love filled with love. Lovers loving each other.
And we are being invited to remember that we aren’t keepers of the gate, Jesus is. We’re not bouncers, we’re partners, evangelists for the God who is love, embodies love, shares love, gives love like a puddle in the desert, inspiration in the darkest night, hope in our chaos, heartquakes when we’ve got it all figured out.
God is inviting us to love, love, love.
Love is everything, our everything. Our partner, our papa.
So may we learn to not only love like God, but love with God. Here and everywhere, all ways and always.