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.