What is to Prevent Me? May 1, 2021; Pastor Rebecca Ellenson; Acts 8: 26-40;
In Acts chapter 8 it was still early days for the Christians. Peter was preaching. The Holy Spirit had filled the people at Pentecost. There had been imprisonments and releases. Conversions were happening left and right. The believers were being baptized and they were pooling their resources to live communally, sharing as each had need. Leaders were being designated. Stephen had just been martyred. Saul was persecuting the church.
One day Philip was led by the Spirit to a wilderness road. There he encountered a man of position, an Ethiopian eunuch, a member of Queen Candace’s court and entrusted with charge of all her treasury. When Philip approached the man’s chariot he heard the man reading from the prophet Isaiah, indicating not only the wealth of the man but also his higher learning. The eunuch invites Philip to sit beside him and begins to explain the passage:
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 this generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.
He asks, “About whom does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?”
The Ethiopian is an outsider in many ways, even with all his power and wealth. As a eunuch this man was not allowed to participate in the religious life of the Jewish people. Debie Thomas puts it this way,
He is a man interested enough in Israel’s God to make a pilgrimage from Ethiopia to Jerusalem, but according to Hebrew law, he is not free to practice his faith in the Temple (Deuteronomy 23:1). It’s possible that he is a Jew, but in Philip’s eyes, he is a foreigner, a Black man from Africa. He is a man of rank and privilege, a royal official in charge of his queen’s treasury, but he is also a powerless outsider — a queer man who doesn’t fit into the social and sexual paradigms of his time and place. He is wealthy enough to possess a scroll of Isaiah, and literate enough to read it, but he lacks the knowledge, context, and experience to understand what he’s reading.
In other words, the unnamed eunuch occupies an in-between space, a liminal space, a space of reversal and surprise that stubbornly resists our tidy categories of belonging and non-belonging. What kind of person, after all, earnestly seeks after a God whose laws prohibit his bodily presence in the Temple? What kind of wealthy, high-ranking official humbly asks a stranger on the road for help with his spiritual life? What kind of long-rejected religious outcast sees a body of water and stops in his tracks because he recognizes first — before Philip, the supposed Christian “expert” — that God is issuing him a gorgeous, unconditional, and irresistible invitation?
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Philip finds the eunuch reading Isaiah’s description of a silent, suffering lamb. The Word, after all, finds us where we are. It resonates in the deepest, most authentic, and most tender places in our lives. The eunuch lingers over the story of a sheep who is led to slaughter, a lamb who is silent before its shearer, a creature who is humiliated and denied justice as “his life is taken away from the earth.” Perhaps this story calls to him precisely because it describes something of the complexities of his own life, his own religious, sexual, and racial difference, his own vulnerability. What I respect most about Philip in this moment is not that he “evangelizes” the eunuch in some programmatic way — it is that he meets the eunuch exactly where he is, and gently, with the guidance of the Spirit, shows him how his story of silence and resilience, suffering and rejection, belongs squarely within the Story of Jesus. https://www.journeywithjesus.net/lectionary-essays/current-essay?id=2995
Until I read Debie’s column this week, I had seen Philip as the key actor in this story and the Ethiopian eunuch as the target of his proselytizing. But after careful examination it seems that both Philip and the Ethiopian man are changed in this story. The man is active in his search for God. It is he, after all, who suggests the baptism that takes place.
“’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.”
Again from Debie Thomas’ blog, Journey with Jesus:
Yes, the Ethiopian eunuch hears the good news of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, and decides to become a follower of Christ. That is true and it is wonderful. But consider for a moment the amazing question he asks Philip in return: “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” Sit with this for a while as a real question — as a zinger of a question. Ponder it as a dilemma Philip must grapple with as strenuously and as seriously as the eunuch grapples with the life-altering implications of the Gospel.
“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?
I love the resounding silence that follows the eunuch’s question. Because the silence speaks what words cannot. The silence is thundering, and gorgeous, and seismic, and right. Because the answer to the question is silence. The answer — the only answer — is “nothing.” 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.
Jesus welcomed all, without partiality. The early church was radical in its inclusiveness. In fact, much of the book of Acts has to do with how the early believers had to struggle with the social and class and race distinctions of their day. The response of the religious establishment was critical of their open boundaries.
Hymn 641 in the Evangelical Lutheran Worship Hymnal proclaims it beautifully:
Let us build a house where love can dwell and all can safely live, a place where saints and children tell how hearts learn to forgive. Built of hopes and dreams and visions, rock of faith and vault of grace; here the love of Christ shall end divisions: All are welcome, all are welcome, all are welcome in this place.
Let us build a house where all are named, their songs and visions heard and loved and treasured, taught and claimed as words within the Word. Built of tears and cries and laughter, prayers of faith and songs of grace, let this house proclaim from floor to rafter: All are welcome, all are welcome, all are welcome in this place.
May it be so!