Holy Trinity/Mystery/Heresy Sunday

Isaiah 6:1–8

Psalm 29

Worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness. (Ps. 29:2)

Romans 8:12–17

John 3:1–17

We’ve spent fifty days celebrating Easter, last Sunday was the festival of the coming of the Holy Spirit, and now today we take a look at the whole fullness of God. Or, rather, we look sideways through a handful of metaphors for God, most of them pointing to the bigger metaphor of there three-in-one, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, three distinct Persons yet one God. This is why it is written on your bulletin covers that today is Trinity/Mystery/Heresy Sunday. We talk about God like we know what we mean when we use that word, and today is set aside to contemplate how little we actually understand of God even while we have spent generations hashing out in committee and confrontations and conspiracies of every sort what exactly we mean when we talk about the God whom we worship and serve. It’s kind of crazy, believing in this higher power, the concept of whom has been passed on to us through centuries of campfire stories and wars and famines and great victories and translations of translations. Ideas about God come from stories handed down and from personal experiences, both positive and negative. It has been said that we know we’ve created God in our image when God hates the same people we do, but there is also truth in the story of a God who does come into the world looking just like us to reach us where we are, as God did in the person of Jesus.

Hagar, Sarah’s slave who gave birth to Abraham’s first-born son, Ishmael, has the first recorded story of giving God a name: El Roi, “The God who sees,” and there are a myriad of tribal names for God based on the surrounding countryside, from El Shaddai, “God of the Mountains,” to the unpronounceable “Yahwheh,” which means something like “I am, I will be what I will be.” What are some of your favorite names for God? There are quite a few on the bulletin cover, but maybe your favorite is missing from that image.

We as Lutherans center our understanding of and relationship with God on the cross of Jesus Christ, God incarnate for our sake, and that means every image and explanation of God comes from and reaches back to that experience of self-giving love and forgiveness. When we think about the God who made the world, the source of our hope and vision for life, the root of our being, we come back again and again to the language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but even each of those illustrations holds a diversity of expressions. Some call God “Mother” on account of particular experience, some call God “Sneaky Trickster” or “Fire-breather” or “Companion” or “Divine Lover.” 

It might be hard to talk about how we experience God, how God has met us where we are, or how we have expected one sort of faith experience and gotten another. Synod Assembly in Rochester these past few days was on the theme of “God’s Story, Our Voices” and centered on just this sort of conversation: How do we share God’s story? How do we know the love of God in our day-to-day living?

I imagine the prophet Isaiah, in today’s first reading, wrestled with the same question. “Woe is me! I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips! Yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” Moses complained of a stutter when God called him. Jeremiah said “I can’t tell about God, I’m just a teenager.” And yet all of these, and so many more, were given the words and the presence for telling God’s story. They spoke very particular things to very particular people, which still speak to us today from their central truths: We worship and serve a God who cares about justice and who brings us from slavery into freedom.

For Nicodemus, going to Jesus under cover of darkness, there had to be something more, something he could grasp and comprehend, to explain how this man, Jesus, had been healing the sick and turning water into wine. Have you ever looked for answers in the middle of the night and been only more confused? Yet Nicodemus is not a character who disappears after this encounter with Jesus. This story of God’s love for the whole world works on him, and in the Gospel of John we will see him twice again, defending Jesus to the other Pharisees, and bringing spices to care for Jesus’ body after the crucifixion. 

I wonder, then, what words Nicodemus would use to describe Jesus. What words we might use here in this place. What words and images and songs are sung across the world to speak of the many ways God reaches us right where we are? Sometimes the best words are silence, as the Quakers gather for prayer, sometimes the best words are actions, as we have been part of community meals and will be reaching out with hope for Heroin addicts in September. But whatever words we use to tell God’s story, to share the hope of the resurrection, the promise of new life, the gift of creation and the forgiveness and reconciliation which are ours to share, we worship, serve, and speak of a God who is bigger than our language can hold, so our storytelling is never done, because there is always more to the God of the universe who lives also in our hearts.

Pentecost!

Acts 2:1-21

Romans 8:22-27

John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

[Note: The Robin to whom I speak later in the sermon is getting confirmed today!]

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! Christ is Risen indeed, Alleluia!

Now technically we’re past that season of Easter, the fifty days have come to completion, and we’ve all graduated up a level from freedom to mission. That’s today. That’s Pentecost. Easter is all about freedom. It’s clear by the roots of that tree, the much older story of salvation from slavery to Pharoah, that Easter, falling as it does in the calendar on the same schedule as Passover, brings us out of bondage and into a wilderness wandering on our way to the promised land of milk and honey. From hiding away into living openly. From hating and hurting to hope and healing. From fear of death to full and engaged living.

Today we take the next step together. Or, rather, God takes us on the next step. In that wilderness wandering, set free from a slavery we’d gotten so used to that we hardly knew how to live without the chains and whips and brutality, set free from all of that weight that dragged us down into our dependable ruts, we didn’t know how to live in freedom. We’d been away from it for so long we’d forgotten what it meant to choose when to eat and when to play, when to sing and when to be silent, when to work and when to stretch our backs and look up at the sky. We’d lost that part of ourselves that lived in curiosity and wonder, that was open to love and forgiveness and the vulnerability that allows room for growth. So God gave us Ten Words on Mount Sinai. God gave us these commandments which were set about us like a playpen, an open field with a safety net, a wide-open safe place where we could stretch and run and grow and live secure in the knowledge that “I AM the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt” would be with us.

It’s this structure which has been celebrated for aeons on Pentecost. Like a weighted blanked on an autistic kid who just needs to be held when life gets unpredictable, the Law is meant to be a comfort and a guide for healthy, life-embracing relationship. So God walks with us. And we walk away. God walks with us, and we shun God. God walks with us in the person of Jesus Christ, and we know what happens to him and to his followers: when the going gets tough the Christ gets killed and the sheep are scattered. The resurrection put a bit of a hitch in the unnatural order of things, messing up the powers that be pretty badly, and kicking off a movement even larger and stronger than the first time Jesus was alive and walking around on earth.

But then Jesus left. He ascended into heaven, was seen no more, and the only witnesses of his life, death, and resurrection could only live so long to tell the stories around meals and campfires and in temples and on street corners. Somebody had to remind them of the hope and fire that had first inspired them. Somebody had to spur them on to continue the ministry Jesus had begun among them. Somebody had to testify on behalf of Jesus.

And then, boom! Like a rush of mighty wind, the flames over their heads burned in the disciples’ hearts, and in the midst of this great Pentecost party already underway, they burst forth like Jesus from the tomb and babbled all over town about the mighty works of God. Creation, and new life, and restoration, and justice, and welcome, and feeding the five thousand, and forgiving the sinner, and loving even the Roman centurion and his slave, and water into wine, and walking on water, and healing the man born blind, and restoring Lazarus to Mary and Martha, and on and on and dying with prayers and blessings on his lips and rising again to offer even more forgiveness!

What sorts of witness will you bear, Robin, once you have confirmed your faith among us here today? What stories of God’s great works? What questions will you ask to help us grow in faith? What works of justice and mercy will you support? You will welcome the children at the Mac Hayden this summer, as Jesus welcomed them and announced the kingdom of God through them. You are not a child any more in the rites of this church, but you are not any more perfect now than the rest of us, either, which can be a struggle to learn to live with. We will continue to disappoint one another and learn to forgive each other. It’s part of how we know the Spirit is alive and active among us, no matter how difficult life can get.

Because today celebrates the free gift of God poured into our hearts, in our own languages, be those languages of art or music or hunting or baseball or auto mechanics or teaching or nursing or study. The creed confesses the Holy Spirit in the present tense. When it speaks to the work of God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, that’s all it says, all we can boil it down to, when it comes to the basics of the God we worship. When the creed speaks of Jesus Christ it points to the narrative of his eternal existence, his conception and birth, his suffering, death, burial, resurrection and ascension, as well as the future hope of his return. That’s how we know God in the person of Jesus, is that story which we tell over and over again. But the Holy Spirit, the way we know God in the here and now, we confess that Spirit revealed to us through the church, the community, the practice of forgiveness, the sacredness of the body to be resurrected, and the reality that the life everlasting includes the here and now. This is how we know and trust, how we believe in God in the present tense, in this numinous sort of mystery of the struggle of daily life in grace and the hard-won freedom that has been our inheritance. And you know I’m not talking about the hard-won U.S. freedoms we commemorate this Memorial Day weekend when we pray for fallen soldiers and their families, though many of them lived and died in that deeper, more lasting freedom, which spurred them on to more particular actions in their present moments while they lived. I’m talking about the bigger scale, the forever that includes today.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified. Who has spoken, and I believe continues to speak, through the prophets. God active and alive among us. God active and alive in you, Robin. Testifying about the love and the grace and the forgiveness of God, which render us eternally free from all threats of death, despair, and destruction. Testifying to the Truth who we call Jesus Christ. Testifying to the hope that is in us, the hope that one day we will all know freedom and peace and love and justice. For that is what we mean when we acclaim that Christ is risen, alleluia!

Jesus prays for us

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26

In those days Peter stood up among the believers (together the crowd numbered about one hundred twenty persons) and said, “Friends, the scripture had to be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit through David foretold concerning Judas, who became a guide for those who arrested Jesus - for he was numbered among us and was allotted his share in this ministry.” So one of the men who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us - one of these must become a witness with us to his resurrection.” So they proposed two, Joseph called Barsabbas, who was also known as Justus, and Matthias. Then they prayed and said, “Lord, you know everyone’s heart. Show us which one of these two you have chosen to take the place in this ministry and apostleship from which Judas turned aside to go to his own place.” And they cast lots for them, and the lot fell on Matthias; and he was added to the eleven apostles.

Psalm 1

Happy are they who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked, nor lingered in the way of sinners, not sat in the seats of the scornful! Their delight is in the law of the Lord, and they meditate on God’s teaching day and night. They are like trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither; everything they do shall prosper. It is not so with the wicked; they are like chaff which the wind blows away. Therefore the wicked shall not stand upright when judgment comes, nor the sinner in the council of the righteous. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked shall be destroyed.

1 John 5:9-13

If we receive human testimony, the testimony of God is greater; for this is the testimony of God that he has testified to his Son. Those who believe in the Son of God have the testimony in their hearts. Those who do not believe in God have made him a liar by not believing in the testimony that God has given concerning his Son. And this is the testimony: God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life.

John 17:6-19

I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world. They were yours, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; for the words that you gave to me I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you; and they have believed that you sent me. I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours. All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me. I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled. But now I am coming to you, and I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves. I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth.

*******

In most of our collective memory, when we think about the prayer Jesus prayed before he was arrested in the garden, we think of “My Father, let this cup pass from me, yet not my will, but Thine be done.” In the Gospel of John, however, Jesus spends the entire 17th chapter of this story praying for those God has given to him. Then they go to the garden where he’s arrested as soon as they arrive. It’s a very different picture. Rather than a man struggling with the knowledge that he will soon encounter rejection and brutality and death, Jesus is praying for those who will soon watch him go through all of this, for his disciples who will also be hated and rejected as he is. And even there he doesn’t pray for the cup to pass them by, but for God to give them the strength of heart and spirit to endure all of the abuse the world will throw at them.

Because the world hated Jesus, it will certainly hate any who claim to follow him. Because God loves the whole world, those who follow Jesus into the midst of the muck and mire will stay in the trenches for the sake of that love.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer had the chance to escape World War Two Germany on a boat for New York, but he decided to remain and try to overthrow Hitler and teach theology in community, believing that he would have no place rebuilding if he wasn’t present for the conflict. We refer to him sometimes as a particular Lutheran saint who wrestled with fear and faith and being a witness to resurrection hope in the midst of terrible times, even though his sacrifice for the sake of the Gospel ultimately cost him his life. And there are many who wish he had just gotten on that boat and survived to teach another day. On the other end of the popular ideology spectrum are those whose hope for a future heaven is so strong that there is little room in their lives, if any, for caring for the world of ecosystems and suffering people in the here-and-now bit of eternity.

So let me make this very clear: Jesus does not come into the world in order that we may escape from it. We are to be a light to the nations, and yeast cannot make a batch of bread dough rise by sitting in its own little bag off to the side of the kitchen counter. We are called and sent into the world to live in it, to love it, to serve and struggle amid all of its sufferings and sickness. And, honestly, there’s no real way to escape imperfection this side of death. I mean, we know this. You ever have one of those days where, when it rains it pours, and everything that could go wrong goes wrong, not to mention the things that never ought to go wrong in the first place are suddenly broken and backwards, like your own head and ability to form complete sentences and respond with kindness to strangers? I know those days when nothing is right and everyone within twenty feet of me gets the full blast of my pre-coffee short-and-sharp commentary on the last seven facebook posts that pushed my buttons or trolled me or just threw off my groove. It would be so much easier if I could just live in a perfect world.

But Jesus doesn’t come to take us away from it all like some Jamaican island vacation. Jesus himself didn’t live life elevated half an inch above ground so as not to get the hem of his robe dirty. Born in blood and the muck of a stable, raised in first century Palestine under the oppression of the Roman Empire, thrown out of the synagogues that raised and taught him, surrounded by hungry, hurting people, day in and day out, Jesus did withdraw from time to time to pray, to focus, and to recharge, but it was time set aside for the sake of entering more earnestly into the maddening crowds, the way that we gather together for worship on Sundays or might start each day with a moment of deep breathing and centering prayer and meditation.

So, knowing that we would face those maddening crowds in our own ways, Jesus spends his last night alive with his friends washing their feet and teaching them about hope, and then he prays for them. Praying that we may be as close a community as Jesus himself is with the Father. That we be protected from the evil one. That we be made holy in the truth of the love of the Divine.

And then, as only God enfleshed can do, he goes and answers his own prayer by making it so. It’s part of that mystery of what it means that Jesus is entirely human and entirely God. It’s kind of hard to explain or imagine, what that looks like or feels like, but it’s also kind of hard to explain or imagine what it looks like for a fantastically diverse people to be one. You just know it when you experience it, when the people of God shine in the world with such brilliance that the world throws all of its ugly fear right back in that co-dependent, abusive manner which says “I hate you, you’re awful, don’t leave me.” In reply to that world, Jesus prays for his disciples, “I love you, you’re human, I will send the Advocate to be with you.”

Because this past Thursday was Ascension Day. We’re in the in-between, waiting space again. Jesus has returned to the Father, and as we tell the Story through the liturgical calendar year, we are now in the space of waiting until the Spirit comes to guide our hearts and give us strength and hope for living in the world and loving it with the love of God. That is what we will celebrate next week at the Pentecost festival, affirming our faith and renouncing all of the lies that draw us away from God. All of the ways the world hates us and works to get us to hate ourselves. Next Sunday we will, with Robin, renounce the empty promises that defy God and cling together to the promises of God, trusting in the love of God as we have seen it expressed throughout Scripture and especially in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

But for today, for the week ahead, for the waiting, in-between resurrection and resurrection time, for all of the times when everything breaks and our tempers flare and our hearts weep and our witness fails, Jesus lives and loves us with a love that makes us one, that makes us whole, that has riven asunder the empty lies and anxious misgivings of a world that tells us we are never enough. We are now more than enough, because Jesus has made us one, has loved us with an eternal love, has sent us into the world with his own Holy Spirit and the truth of the Word of God, that the joy of Jesus may be made complete in us.

Jesus' "Last Lecture"

Acts 10:44-48

While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God. Then Peter said, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?” So he ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then they invited him to stay for several days.

Word of God, Word of Life

thanks be to God.

Psalm 98 (link to musical setting of the Psalm)

1 John 5:1-6

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For the love of God is this, that we obey his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome, for whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world: our faith. Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one that testifies, for the Spirit is the truth.

Word of God, Word of Life

thanks be to God.

John 15:9-17

As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.

The Gospel of the Lord

Praise to you, O Christ.

*****

If you’ve been following along with the readings for the last couple of weeks, it seems like all through Easter we have had the same theme repeated over and over again: love one another. Do not fear. Jesus shows up despite our failures and even in them. As though this is important or something. As though we need to be reminded. As though Jesus knows how hard it is to be human and live in the world while marching to the beat of a different drummer.

Well, it is hard sometimes. Oftentimes. If we’re part of the ‘in’ crowd, we may feel like we’ve finally ‘made it’ and can take it easy and have earned some comfort. But even then, life around us is difficult. People get sick. Natural disasters destroy homes and lives. Neighbors argue and trespass on our property. Whether you’re living in community or living as a hermit, there will be pain and loss and suffering in life.

This whole section of the Gospel of John, for instance, is part of a multi-chapter sort of “Jesus’ Last Lecture” before he’s hauled off and crucified. We are reading it and telling it this side of the resurrection, but there was something very important to him about encouraging and directing his disciples in love before they were to be scattered in fear. This Gospel reading is part of that dinner Jesus had with his disciples when he washed their feet. When he took up the basin and the towel like a servant, like one of those people who just do the dirty work and get ignored until something’s not clean enough and we yell at the help for being lazy. Jesus the Rabbi, Jesus the teacher, Jesus the one who turned water into wine and brought Lazarus back from the dead and confounded the religious authorities with his understanding of Torah, Jesus who ought to have had the head place at the table while the others served him and washed his feet, turned the tables and got down in the dirt with his friends.

Have you ever had the chance to meet someone you idolized? Someone you’ve only known as a famous personality? Someone who’s way higher up on the totem pole? I’d like to meet Stephen Colbert, for example. So I’ll use him as an example. It would be as though Stephen Colbert and I went out for coffee and he asked my opinion and took me seriously despite how little I know about politics and current news events. Only bigger. It’s a relationship shift. It’s a move that takes us out of the great pyramid of power and levels it all. Like suddenly becoming friends with your mother after years of only knowing her as the woman who cleans the house and darns the socks and makes the dinner and buys the school clothes and breaks up fights between you and your brother. In those precious years between being parent-child and being parent-caregiver. Jesus has shifted our position in the divine-human relationship by getting down in the dirt with us before lifting us all up with himself in resurrection.

Which is a complicated and much more serious position to be in. I mean, if Jesus is the teacher and we are only the students, then it all falls to Jesus to love and teach and serve. If we admire somebody who’s a saint, what’s to give us the strength to act the same way they did since we’re not saints but only humans? That’s an argument that doesn’t hold water, though, because, as Luther reminds us, we are all saints in and through our baptism. ‘Priesthood of all believers’ means ALL believers. So now that Jesus has made us friends, has chosen us to bear fruit that will last, we’ve got some responsibility. We’re working hand-in-hand with God for the healing of the world. Which is the reasoning behind September’s “God’s Work, Our Hands” events seeking to serve the larger community. But it’s not a once a year thing, either. It’s an always thing.

And it starts with an always thing. The always thing, the real thing, the deeper thing, the thing that keeps us going and keeps us coming back is the thing we have been hearing about over and over every time we gather for worship: the love with which Jesus loves us always, ALWAYS, comes first. He spends his last hours with the disciples reminding them to love as they have been loved, telling them not to fear, promising the Holy Spirit to give them strength and guidance. If you had to choose your last words to your loved ones, if you got to write the script for your deathbed scene, wouldn’t you want to say the things that are most important, closest to your heart, to the people who are most important and closest to your heart? And if you knew those loved ones were afraid and confused, if you knew they would strike out and hurt each other in their fear and confusion, wouldn’t you want to remind them that your love for them, each and all, remains no matter what?

Jesus also knew that those nearest and dearest were about to abandon him. He could have likewise decided to abandon them, but it’s not in his character. Jesus the Christ doesn’t abandon us, not ever. That’s what makes him the Christ. It’s because he is God’s anointed, God in the flesh, God in the dirt with us, lifting us up and choosing us before we can think about choosing at all. Kindred in Christ, we are God’s chosen beloved friends. There is no greater love that can love us. And the love of the One who has laid down his life for us is a love which will never let us go.

The legacy of Jesus

Psalm 22:25-31

1 John 4:7-21

John 15:1-8

(click on the links above for the full complement of readings for today. The Acts text below is the primary preaching text, read first in the worship service during the season of Easter.)

Acts 8:26-40

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, the 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 before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his offspring? For his life was 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.

*****

For those who need to be warned, there is some graphic language ahead:

A reading from the Law of God, as recorded in Deuteronomy chapter 23: No one whose testicles are crushed or whose male organ is cut off shall enter the assembly of the LORD.

So, there was this guy who served the queen of Ethiopia. For context, it is an 83 hour drive from Jerusalem to the capital city of Ethiopia, south through Egypt and Sudan on the north eastern coast of Africa. But that’s an 83 hour drive in a car, not in a carriage drawn by horses. This must have been a big deal for the main treasury official to travel all that distance on behalf of his queen. So it’s a good thing for them all that he was made safe before he set out. And I don’t mean he was heavily protected, I mean the queen could trust him not to get into trouble because he had been made docile. Rendered impotent. Probably he could still hit those high notes when he sang. For all of our obsessions with sex in this country, it still makes a lot of people queasy to talk about castration, which is why I warned you before I read that Deuteronomy passage. Yet we are strangely fascinated with those forbidden body parts, comparing and ranking sexual prowess, asking inappropriate questions of transgender people, you know the ones, about surgery. Bruce Jenner isn’t the first person to come to mind, but for some reason we define people by what’s in their pants and what they do, or don’t do, with it. And that was how this Ethiopian was defined. He had been set aside for a very important role in the service of queen Candace, and in order to be deemed trustworthy with her secrets and her treasury and with the other women… need I say more?

And he traveled by carriage some 4 thousand kilometers to a city that would not allow him to worship in the temple. Not even to enter it.

But, you know, when I opened my Bible to find that verse in Deuteronomy, I saw, just across the page, at the end of chapter 21, another law: “And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God. You shall not defile your land that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance.”

So the Ethiopian and Jesus are both right there together, in the Law, as condemned persons. Outside of the assembly. Thrown far away from the people and cut off from the fruitfulness of the land.

And that’s really the good news we celebrate today. Everything which would stand between us and God’s eternal love for us has been stripped of its power by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus has gone to every far-off corner of creation, by the Spirit that walks through closed doors and warms hard hearts, to gather every lost sheep into his fold, as we have been celebrating this Easter season. What I think happened in that carriage on that road there, when the Ethiopian eunuch was reading the words of the Prophet Isaiah, is that he identified with that story. When the prophet writes: 

“Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his offspring? For his life was taken away from the earth.”

Wouldn’t someone who had been sterilized find something familiar in these words? And to have Philip there to explain to him that the prophet was talking about the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, who was the head of this new Jewish movement that welcomed all sorts of people? No wonder he was so excited to be baptized!

By the time Philip has told him the Jesus story they’ve come upon some water. Might have been a stream, might have been a puddle. The eunuch sees this opportunity to be part of something and points it out to Philip: See! Here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?

I wonder how tense that moment was for either of them. We’ve just gone through the reason he shouldn’t be baptized, he’s just been denied entrance into the worshiping community because of his status, and Philip knows the rules even better than the eunuch does. What is to prevent me from being baptized?

What is to prevent anyone from being baptized, then? If Baptism means being grafted into God’s family and the mission of Jesus Christ, if it means hearing the words that God has claimed you as God’s own, what can get in the way of that? I’m sorry, your grades weren’t good enough this term? I’m sorry, you didn’t make enough money this year? I’m sorry, you don’t speak good English? I’m sorry, you abused your power? I’m sorry, you rioted in the streets? I’m sorry, you got addicted to heroin? I’m sorry, you didn’t take the proper Baptismal instruction course? No! None of this! What is to prevent anyone from being Baptized? What can get between us and God’s love for us?

Not a thing. Not a singe thing can cut us off from God’s love. No matter how we label each other, how we fear each other, how we envy and slander and expect the worst of each other, God has brought us all together into one vine, one source, one life-giving tree, that we may abide in perfect freedom and love. Jesus has claimed us as his own that we may know that love which secures our place in heaven and casts out all fear. The Spirit has given us gifts to bear good fruit in the world, fruits of justice and grace and forgiveness and hope, as is our new nature in Christ. We do not love because we have to, we do not give because we know the bills keep coming in, we do not welcome the stranger because it is in our mission statement to seek and serve the ever changing needs of our community - we do these things, rather, because we are connected to the vine and so it is now in our nature to share the life which flows through us. There is no longer any place for shame or fear. Even the Ethiopian eunuch now has a rich legacy to impart, a heritage, and descendants in the faith of Jesus who has embraced him when all other laws have rendered him impotent. Because God can make a way out of no way. God can make life spring from places of death. God can sit with us through the night of grief all night long and bring joy in the morning. God can, and God has. God has already done this in Jesus, and God continues to do this in and through us by the power of the Holy Spirit.

What is to keep me from being baptized? From being welcomed? From being loved? Nothing. Not any more. Thanks be to God.