When the Breath Returns

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 05.24.15

Scripture Lesson:  Acts 2:1-21; Ezekiel 37:1-14

Listen to Audio Here:

All of us have our own gifts, our own abilities, certain things we’re good at.  They are as different and various as our personalities, as those unique features of our nature that make us distinguishable as individuals.   And then there are those gifts that all of us have, because they are a necessary part of life and being human.  

Like, say, breathing.  It’s a skillset that we all share, and that presumably, we all need to be pretty good at.  It’s kind of necessary that we be good at it.

I feel this reality, from my memory of being a boy, because when I was a lad, I was asthmatic.  I was bad at breathing, which isn’t the same thing as being terrible at calculus or getting a C minus in AP European History.   My folks got me tested, once, and it was determined that the source of my asthma was my allergies to a few things.  Like grass pollen and tree pollen, dust and dust mites, cat dander and dog dander and guinea pig dander and wombat dander and the dander of the Kalobatippus, which may have been extinct for one point seven million years, but ya just know some of that stuff has is still floating around.  My body was convinced that every last one of those things was a dangerous enemy, bent on my destruction.  It tolerated nothing.

Which meant, every once in a while, that my breathing didn’t work so well.  I remember the feeling, sitting awake at three in the morning, watching the one channel of television that was still broadcasting in 1980, watching a rebroadcast of that season’s Hart to Hart, and laboring to breathe.   Every breath shallow, because my lungs felt different, as small and tight as my little boy fists, and I would strain with each breath to stretch them out, to return them to what they should be.  

My lungs would crackle and bubble and whistle, as the breath hummed through constricted airways with a peculiar musicality.  Sometimes, because being up late and struggling to breathe gets old after the first few hours, I’d talk or sing with the wheezing, using the sounds of my strangled breathing as a proxy for the vibrations of my larynx.  

And the moments would stretch by, seemingly forever, each breath like Sisyphus heaving that rock eternally up that mountain.  

But then there’d come a moment when that changed.  Somewhere in the complexity of my hypersensitive immune system, the overzealous monitor who’d pressed the big red shut-down panic button would realize that there really wasn’t anything wrong, and signal the all clear, and the breath would return.

I’d feel it, this movement, this release, like the Grinches heart at that moment of realization.  And the breath would ease, and the whole character of life would return to how it was meant to be.

That, in a funny way, is what Pentecost marks, every year, in the life of our faith.  

The Pentecost story in Acts 2 is an important fulcrum in the story being told by Luke.   Having told the story of the passion, crucifixion, and resurrection in the Gospel of Luke, the same historian begins the narrative of the movement that would rise up in response to Jesus in the Acts of the Apostles.  

Chapter one of the Acts of the Apostles was mostly transition and housekeeping.

It is with chapter two that the story of the early church begins, when the confusion and bafflement about what comes next after the cross and the empty tomb gets swept away.   It starts on a day of noise and hubbub in Jerusalem, with the disciples gathered into a room by themselves.  Pentecost means, in the Greek, “The Fiftieth Day,” and the crowds that were in Jerusalem had gathered for one of the many festival celebrations that defined the life of that city.

The Jewish celebration of Pentecost marked fifty days following the celebration of the Passover, and the festival was often called either the Festival of the Weeks or the Feast of Harvest.  Shavuot, they call it today, which is what I’ll be celebrating when I wander over to share it with our Jewish friends over at the Sanctuary retreat center this afternoon.  Shavuot is the grain harvest, as opposed to the later harvest of fruit, Sukkot.

On that day Jerusalem was full of life and noise.   With the disciples gathered all together, we hear that “..suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind.”  How many of you remember what it sounded like when that derecho roared through here a couple of years back?  In my mind’s ear, what I hear is that...a great sound, a huge sound, a someone-grab-the-dog-cause-we’re-going-to-the-basement-right-now sound.  

As with most language describing our interaction with God, it’s metaphor.  It has to be metaphor, because wherever God is involved, human language comes apart like wet toilet paper in a tornado.  What happens is not a violent wind, but is “like” a violent wind.  The image are intended to evoke the immense and transforming energy of God’s presence, but in slightly different ways.   The word for wind used by Luke is pnoes, derived from the word pneuma, which in Greek means wind, breath, and spirit.   It’s the same word used to describe the Holy Spirit in verse 4.  It’s the same word used in the ancient Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Bible that was circulating at the time of the Apostles, way back in Genesis.   There, pneuma fills in for the Hebrew word ruach, which means exactly the same things.  Wind, breath, and spirit, all at once.  Both words speak to the life giving and ordering presence of God, that wind blowing across the primordial waters of chaos in the first Creation story.  The wind that blows across the waters of chaos, we think, and it sounds like something that could easily roar like a supertyphoon.

Yet it is also the word in the second Genesis story, where God forms the first adam, the creature of earth, from the clay, and breathes life into it.  There is a tenderness there in that story, a softness, an intimacy...and yet the ruach, that spirit that transforms a dead and inanimate thing into a living being, is the very same thing.

It is that breath that returns in the passage from Ezekiel this morning, as part of that prophet’s message to a people who were without hope.

This vision is one of a great valley, one that could be accurately called the “Valley of the Shadow of Death.”  It’s filled with bones and lifelessness, the remains of a people.  There’s nothing there anymore, nothing at all.  They are not just bones, but dry bones.

It’s a stark and desolate image, in which no hope remains.  It is the most primal form of ruin.

In the midst of this bleakness, Ezekiel finds himself set down by his Creator’s hand and spirit.  He surveys the death around him, shown them all by his Creator.  He gets asked a question.  “Can these bones live?”   And he says, wisely, “Um, I think you have the answer to that.”  The answer rested in God’s creative power, so far beyond Ezekiel’s grasp that in this vision he wisely chose not to even hazard a guess.

In this vision, that which seems totally lost, irrevokably broken?  It gets remade.  And then it is not just remade, but given life again.  “Come from the four winds, O breath,” Ezekiel is told to say, and he does, and what seemed broken beyond repair is made whole again.

This, on Pentecost, is the gift we are called to remember.  It is the gift of life, of potential and possibility, written into the moments that are to come.  This is our breath, God’s breath, and God’s breath is not just life, but the ability to transcend all of the boundaries and barriers that we set between ourselves and others.

It struck me, as I was praying and meditating over these passages this last week, that there was a peculiar resonance with this return of breath, a resonance that had to do with the cross. How does crucifixion kill? It's not loss of blood, and not really shock. Crucifixion kills by putting an endless pressure on the human diaphragm, until it is so overstrained that you cannot continue to draw breath. It crushes the breath from you, suffocating you over hours and hours.

And yet here, as the church is born, the human beings who took the breath from God-made-flesh are given God's life and breath in return. It is that moment, the "inspiration" of God, from which the church draws its life and its power.

It is a power that steps across language, across race and gender and ethnicity and nation, across our self-doubts and limitations.  It is God’s own love, God’s own nature, working to overcome our strangling fears of everything that is not us.   On this Pentecost Sunday, let that be the breath that fills you.

Let that be so, for you and for me,

AMEN

The Time In Between

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

05.17.15; Rev. Dr. David Williams

Scripture Lessons:  Luke 24:44-53; Acts 1:1-11

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

Nothing is harder on the soul than those places in between.

Oh, goals we understand.  Destinations we get.  They are nice and clear and finite, easily described and definable.  We set ourselves to do a particular thing, and we’re striving towards it, and we know where we’re headed.

When I was in first grade, there it was.  My goal was to be a sixth grader, those giant almost adults who wandered like titans through the sea of lowly kindergarteners.  Just do your homework, and don’t punch anybody, and there you go.  And in high school, the goal was...well, it was supposed to be college, but eighty five point three percent of the time, it was pining over getting a girlfriend.

After that fourteen point seven percent of effort somehow miraculously got me into college, there was the goal of finding a major, and the goal graduating.

At each of those stages, there was a clear destination, where you could mark the time and check the box and get the piece of paper that told you you’d accomplished the thing you wanted to accomplish.

Those places were straightforward.  There was a timeline.  There was an end-goal.  There were markers and metrics and measures, and the world seemed clean and manageable.

But then there are the places in between.  

Like adolescence, that awkward time when you transition between childhood and adulthood, neither fully one nor fully another.  Like when you’ve graduated, and time stretches out before you, and you really don’t have a single clue what you’re going to do with that lovely little diploma you’ve spent all those years getting.  You can get that job at Starbucks, of course, but that pretty much only covers your student loan payments.  

Or when those children you’ve spent most of your adult life raising are suddenly grown, and off in the world, and you realize you have no clue what exactly you’re supposed to do with your time.  Should I take up macrame?  Competitive yodeling?  And you have this flicker of memory...hey...wasn’t I married to somebody?  I think it might be that person who drives the kids to karate.  

“What happens now?” we ask ourselves.  And the answer we get isn’t much of anything.  A faint hint here.  A nudge there.  But mostly, we’re in that place between places, and in that time in between times.

“Liminal,” the word is, for those who like fancy descriptive words from the social sciences, which being a Presbyterian and all, I totally do.   Liminality is a term from the field of anthropology, derived from the Latin word for “threshold.”   It’s used to describe that tension we feel when we’re right there in the middle of things.  We are neither one thing nor another.  We have left an old identity behind, but the new identity just isn’t there yet.

Liminality is ambiguous, an anxious, vulnerable space.  Everything is fluid...or solid...or maybe gas….or some weird admixture of multiple states of being all at once, like quicksand or fusion plasma.  You really don’t want to spend too much time in quicksand, and fusion plasma is over a million degrees celsius, which in fahrenheit is...um...really, really hot.

The scriptures we heard today are about an in-between time, about a threshold, a time between times.  The first reading, from the Gospel of Luke, brings things to a close for that story of Jesus.  There are teachings, and then...whoosh...Jesus is caught up into heaven.  

Like most liminal things, this first passage is a bridge, intentionally overlapping with the second reading, blending verses, creating a connection between Luke’s story of the early church and the end of the Gospel.  The Acts of the Apostles offers us up more detail about what Jesus did as he prepared for his departure. The disciples have come together with the risen Christ, and during the Q&A at the end of the meeting, they’re trying to figure out what in the world is going to happen next. Is this it? Are we done?  Is God’s Kingdom finally here?

Jesus tells them pretty clearly: No.  No, this isn’t it. They’d been hoping that this was the thing they’d expected, the arrival of Jesus as the great warrior who would liberate all of Israel, bringing about the fulfillment of the Kingdom. Jesus tells that that this isn’t how it’s going down. When exactly things are going to completed, when the age of messianic fulfillment will come, none of those things are to be known by anyone but God. It’s not on the table. It’s not going to be shared, at least, not in the way that they expect. But something else, something they had not expected, is going to happen.

In response to their question about the Kingdom, Jesus goes on to tell them that power will come to them through the Holy Spirit, and that from that, the disciples will become witnesses to Christ in Jerusalem, in the southern kingdom of Judea, in the northern kingdom of Israel, and to the ends of the earth itself. They are not yet there. They have not yet arrived.  

After all that, after the travels through Galilee, the healings and the crowds, the terror of capture and execution, the sorrow of the grave, the explosive half-crazy joy of Easter?  And they’re not yet there?  They’re still crossing that threshold?  Ack.

Imagining their frustration at this point reminds me a little bit of one of the best games I’ve ever played, a wonderfully crafted puzzle game called Portal 2.  In it, you’re a nameless young woman trapped in a vast underground facility, as a witty and malignant artificial intelligence forces you to engage in test after test, a sequence of increasingly complicated three-dimensional exercises that require you to manipulate space itself with your handy dandy portal gun.  Over and over again, the game makes you think you’ve finally cleared the final hurdle, only to pull back.  Oh?  You thought that was the exit?  Nope.  There’s just more testing ahead!

And so the apostles realize, as Jesus ascends, that the game has really only just begun.  What they thought was the final boss battle turns out to be just another step forward.  

But forward to what?

Which brings us to verse eight of chapter 1 of the book of Acts, which overlaps with verse forty-nine of the last chapter of the Gospel of Luke. They are moving towards an event that is deeply vital and pivotal to the Gospel proclamation in Luke and Acts. They are moving towards the arrival of Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, God’s own Spirit, which comes down from heaven and fills them with God’s presence.

And that movement, from Christ-experience to fulfillment, from Easter to Pentecost, is the liminal space we’ve been occupying these last few weeks.  

Next Sunday is Pentecost, though it’s close to two thousand years later. And over those two thousand years, we Christians have been stuck in this strange in between time.  We’d stepped across that threshold, or so we’d thought.  The faith that Jesus came to share teaches that we’ve crossed over into a new place, but the challenge is that this new place isn’t a nice solid final destination.

What we have stepped into is liminal space, and a liminal time.  It is both the goal and the journey, blended up into one wild and frustratingly ambiguous mess.  It is both now and not yet, which, as those anthropologists who came up with the term “liminal” remind us, is the very nature of the sacred.

And yes, that can be frustratingly uncertain.  But it is also filled with possibility, filled with the unknown, a bridge into a reality of which we have only hints and whispers. And, sure, we might find that a little hard on our souls.  Whenever we’re in transition, moving from one state of being to another, it’s hard on our souls.  

But as Jesus reminds us, at the end of Luke, at the beginning of Acts, that time of change is not something we must do alone.  

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

The Water and the Blood

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

05.10.15; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: 1 John 5:1-6

LISTEN TO AUDIO HERE:

For the very longest time, I had a thing about blood.

I can’t remember exactly the first time I realized blood freaked me out, but I think it might have been at around the same time as a very very old memory.  I have no idea how old I was, but it’s there in my head, of me on the front porch of our little house in Kenya.  It was beautiful and cool, and sunny, and my Grandmother was there, towering huge above me as all adults did.  Grandmother was, in actuality, a very small woman, slender and filled with mischief, but I was a very small child.  Maybe three, or perhaps four.

I’m not even sure it’s an accurate memory, as those neurons have been written and re-written over hundreds of times.  But there it is, a little faded, like the cover of an old comic book left out too long in the sun.  I close my eyes, and I can call it up, flaws and all.

I was messing around in the way that little boys did back then in that unmediated era, noodling about in the dirt, and had found something on the ground that I didn’t recognize.  It was a little metal rectangle, all shiny and interesting and impossibly thin.  What could it be?  I had no idea, so being the curious little monkey that I was, I picked it up to inspect it.  I passed it from hand to hand.  So light!  So interesting!  What could be its function?

I walked it over to Grandmother, who I assumed must know everything about everything, because she wasn’t just an adult.  She was a double adult, a mother to mothers.  A super-adult.

I remember holding it up to her, there in my hand, and asking, looking up into her face.  I don’t really remember what my voice sounded like.  In my memory, it’s my voice, which is probably wrong, because I don’t think I was a baritone when I was four.  

But I do remember, faintly, the look on her face.  Concern, not panic, because she was not a panicky person.  “Oh dear.  Let me have that, Davidy.”  And she took it from my hand, because it was an abandoned razor.

That was when I saw my hand.  There was no pain.  Not at all.  Razors are too sharp.  But there was blood.  I looked at my other hand.  There was blood.  It was my blood.

Not a lot of my blood.  I wasn’t badly hurt, or deeply cut.  Not that you would have known it from what I recall as my response, which was analogous to one of those air-raid sirens they set off at the beach from time to time.

My inside juice was outside!  My life-stuff was leaking!  AaaaaaaAAAAAAAA! I am damaged!  aieeeEEEEEE!  But Grandmother cleaned me up, and washed my hands, and calmed me down, and may have given me a cookie or seven.

I was, for quite a while after that, squeamish around blood.  At least until my early twenties.

Blood and life have always been woven up together in the minds of human beings, which is why in the ancient world “blood” was considered a sacred thing.  This is particularly true of the worldview of the Torah, that five thousand year old tradition from which our faith arises.  Many of the Jewish laws of kashrut, of keeping kosher, are about far more than keeping us from eating delicious bacon cheeseburgers.  Kosher regulations often revolve around dealing appropriately with this peculiar fluid, of how it does and does not mingle with the meat.  The ancient codes of cleanliness and sacrifice that rise out the Jewish temple tradition are similarly focused on dealing with life fluids.

Now, of course, we know so much more.  Blood is a wildly complicated organic slurry, fifty-five percent plasma--a mix of water and proteins and minerals--and most of the rest a slush of oxygen-bearing erythrocytes and body defending leukocytes and self-repairing platelets.  Blood binds us to both air and earth, as it bears the oxygen for our respiration and the nutrients from our digestion.

Blood is the stuff of life, so complex that it’s a little magical, more than a little dangerous, and it tends to freak us out a little bit.

Even when we’re not a panicky three or four year old, the idea of it tends to be written into our stories of fear, of terror and violence.  And sure, that’s strange, because we need it to live, as our bodies take in oxygen and distribute it throughout our beings.

Which I think might be one of the most significant reasons we encountering passages like the one from 1 John today.  It’s a lovely little bit of writing from the early church, this letter, filled with passages that soar and resonate and sing to our souls.  Like all of the Johannine literature, meaning The Gospel of John and the three letters, it is simultaneously simple and sophisticated, capable of expressing meanings that speak beyond the spare language used by the author.

Johannine writings are a bit like Dr. Seuss, I think, with a richness that burns bright even though the vocabulary itself is very simple.  And so, from First John, there are all manner of simple grace notes that have those of us who live two thousand years later nodding our heads.

“Whoever loves a brother or sister lives in the light,” we hear, earlier in this little book.  “Little children, let us love in in word or speech, but in truth and action.”   Yeah!  We can do that!

But then we hear talk about the blood?  Oh, that sounds weird, sort of freaky, more than a little bit vampiric.  Blood?  We get squeamish.  It can bother us, this talk of being Jesus being the one who came by the blood...not just the water, but of the blood.  We can recoil a little bit at the thought of it.  It’s barbaric!

And in the context of the cross, it’s even harder.  

Blood and hardship and mess are just not how we’re told to expect a new life.  New lives are born when we’ve purchased a 12 DVD set of inspirational lectures from Amazon, or downloaded that self-help ebook with the smiling man on the cover, promising to turn it all around if only you can learn these seven amazing life hacks.  New lives are made when we purchase that treadmill or that new car or that new flat screen, a convenient consumer product that will magically make us anew.  Newness, or so we have been made to think, is the result of a transaction, easy and anodyne, clean and unthreatening.

Which, as this scripture shows up coincidentally in the lectionary on the day when we celebrate the women who gave birth to us and the women that raised us, strikes me as particularly odd.  

Because if you’ve been around the event that makes for motherhood, there is both water and blood.

Who here has witnessed a birth, been there through the whole of it?  It isn’t easy.

Birth is mess and risk and the unknown, even in this age where everything is carefully managed and contained and controlled.  Because although our society would like us to think of the moment of new life as a transaction, as neat and orderly as the ten page itemized bill we receive from the hospital, the reality is that new life is a relationship.   

New life is not a transaction.  It’s a relationship, woven of the stuff of existence, of water and of blood.

And relationships, like blood, are the stuff of life.  They are complicated and messy, both a little bit magical and a little bit frightening.

Which, on this Sunday, we choose to remember.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.

The One Who Is Not Welcome

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

05.02.15; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Acts 8:26-40

LISTEN TO AUDIO HERE:

We love categories.  It’s a fundamental part of human nature, our love of categories.  Why?

Because categories are power.  When we name something, we exert control over it.  We can claim understanding of it, and in claiming understanding of it, we gain a sense of control over our world.  I live in a world of roads and wheeled vehicles, and there’s not a single one I can’t name, because that is my mannish tendency.  My sons and I used to play that game, back when they were smaller.  Boomboomboom, I would go, rattling off the brands, names, and years of the cars that passed.  Wow, they would go, at my mighty mastery of automotive trivia.

Of course, put me in a forest, and I can’t name the trees.  “Hey Dad, what kind of tree is that?”  “Um...Oak.  Maybe sycamore.  Or is that the larch?”  “Dad, that’s a telephone pole.”  

Neither could I successfully tell the difference between edible woodland plants and inedible ones, which for some reason strikes me as a more useful thing to know in a crisis than the difference between Toyota Camry model years.  “No, son, that’s not an edible Camry.”

Categorizing and labelling things gives us a sense of power, even--and especially--power over our own sense of our identity.  That’s why, I think, we so love those online quizzes that we take.  We can know, in this era, which Avenger we are.  Which X-Man we are.  Which captain on Star Trek we are.  Which Kardashian we are, God have mercy on our souls.  I tried to take that test, but my mind kept shutting down for self-protection.

We can know which house the Sorting Hat would put us in.  Ravenclaw.  I’m consistently Ravenclaw, because really, it’s the most Presbyterian of the Houses.  We can know which of the factions in Divergent we’d be part of, although we still can’t figure out why any sane society would divide people up in that way.  What’s the point of being brave but not selfless?  Or smart but not honest?  But the books sell like hotcakes, because we love us our categories, yes we do.

We human beings like that form of thinking, because it lets us establish a sense of who we are and what we are.  Which is all well and good, if it’s just a silly bit of wasted time online.  But throughout our history, that’s not how it has manifested itself.  Where we have found our distinctiveness, been able to look at ourselves and find those characteristics that make our culture and language and appearance different, we have assumed that distinction means we’re better.  

Those who don’t fit that mold, who speak differently or look differently or understand themselves differently?  They become the Other.  The one outside of the category of the “us” becomes the one we can dislike, the one who is inferior or inherently flawed or our enemy.

Our categories become ways to not see the person in front of us, to not see their complex and God-loved reality.  They become reasons not to welcome, or reasons to reject.

Here, the story from the Acts of the Apostles this morning, about Philip and the Ethiopian, is worth hearing.  It’s an interesting story for a whole bunch of different reasons.

Philip is in the midst of a mission to the Other.  He’s just spent time, or so these stories of the church tell us, up in Samaria.  He was spreading the message of Jesus to the Samaritans, who were traditionally reviled and hated by the people of Judah.  As things wrapped up there, he finds himself on the road between Jerusalem and Gaza, which we hear wends its way through the wilderness.  On that road, he encounters someone passing by.

One thing worth noting: Philip is moved to engage with this stranger, but there’s a detail that should jump out at us.  He hears what this stranger is reading.  It’s a little difficult for us to wrap our heads around why this is, but I’ll up and tell you: in the ancient world, reading was something you typically did out loud.  Again, it was not common to read quietly to yourself.   Most people weren’t literate, of course, only a small minority, but those that were did not view reading as something that involved you sitting there quietly in the evening with a scroll and a nice cabernet.

When you saw a word, you spoke it, so as to share what you were reading with those around you.  That’s just how reading worked.  Reading was primarily social, a shared thing, meaning it was exactly the opposite of texting.

There’s a story about St. Augustine, and how his teacher St. Ambrose used to read to himself in silence so that he wouldn’t disturb anyone.  It used to freak Augustine out.  Augustine would see Ambrose doing it, and say: “Hey, Ambrose, you’re just sitting there, staring at a book.  Why aren’t you reading it?”  And he would say, “I am reading it, just in my mind,” and Augustine would be, “What?  What is this strange witchery?”  It’d be like sitting with your hand on a closed laptop, and telling people you were reading your e-mail---with your mind.  

So here, the eunuch is just doing what everyone did back in that era.  He had a book, and was speaking it as he read it.

This meant, of course, that Philip could hear him, and hear what it is he was reading.  What Philip would have heard were the words of the prophet Isaiah, which would perk up the interest of any self-respecting disciple.

Here, the prophetic book of the Bible that most resonates with the teachings of Jesus, and it is being read by...well...who?

Someone who would generally have been considered an outsider.  Were they Jewish?  No, no they were not, neither Judean or even one a them Samaritans, who were Jew-ish.  This was an Ethiopian, but there was more.

The man was a eunuch, which meant, well, that, um,certain significant parts of his anatomy had been forcibly removed before he entered into the service of the court.  

And we think the Civil service exams are hard now...

And that made him interesting because it meant that he was radically and doubly the Other.  As a foreigner, outside of the blood and culture of Judaism, he would have been forbidden access to the temple and the sacred ritual.  In the books of Nehemiah and Ezra, the role of foreigners was clear.  They were to go away.  They were not welcome.

As a eunuch, someone whose unchosen sexual identity differed from the norm, he would have been viewed as unacceptably different, unclean, and forbidden by the laws of Torah from ever coming near the holy of holies.  Right there in Deuteronomy, clear as a bell.  Eunuchs are forbidden, inherently ritually unclean.  They were not welcome.  They cannot participate fully in the life of the community.

And yet still, there was something about Isaiah and about the covenant that fascinated this Ethiopian, that drew him to seek connection with God and with the Scripture he held and read.

But there’s a funny thing about the Torah and the Prophets.  They require attention, because if you read Isaiah, it goes a totally different direction.  It from the book attributed to the Prophet Isaiah that we find, in Isaiah 56: the foreigners who are faithful to God are welcome, and must be included.  It was from that same chapter that we hear: the eunuchs who are faithful are welcome, and loved by God.

And so here we have Philip, engaged in interpreting a sacred text with someone who is doubly rejected by the culture that created that text.  He sits with this stranger, seeing past the parts of his identity that do not matter to God, and instead seeing a person who needs to hear the Good News.

It ends with a baptism, and a joyous parting, and for those of us who want to use our walk with Jesus as a reason to exclude or condemn others because they fit into categories that we traditionally have viewed as Other, it’s a reminder.

Our call and our purpose as people who have chosen to model our lives on Christ is to extend the good news to all who yearn for it.  

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.