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 silent before its shearer,
so he does not open his mouth.
In his humiliation justice was denied him.
Who can describe his generation?
For his life is 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.
--Acts 8:26-40 NRSV
Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Creator and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Do we suffer? Really. Do we suffer?
For a long time and as a result of much life experience, I thought I did. And, yet, I’m not really sure I have truly suffered. I see images of children in Gaza, war-torn and devastated, who have lost everything, often including their parents and siblings. Whose eyes seem empty from the trauma they’ve experienced. I hear stories of women brutalized by Russian soldiers in Ukraine, husbands killed, their country decimated from two years of war. And I wonder whether I have even begun to know what it feels like to suffer. In all my privilege. Perhaps you feel the same.
Do we really know suffering?
Perhaps the closest I’ve truly been to suffering has been an experience that has been, for the most part, vicarious. Through the suffering of someone else. As you know, my son and daughter-in-law were divorced last year. That was hard. What you may not know, however, is that a few months afterward, my daughter-in-law, whom I love dearly, came out as a lesbian. And, in the process, was completely shunned and abandoned by her entire family. People who claim to be devout Christians. I have witnessed in her the deep pain this has caused. The sense of abandonment she has felt. The way in which she has been shunned. How the people who claimed to love her have pushed her to the edge of belonging. And how she has suffered. Deeply. Because of it.
I wonder if, in part, that has been the experience of the Ethiopian eunuch in our story today. They - and I use that pronoun because they do not fit neatly in any of the binaries we have created in our world - they, too, have likely experienced what it feels like to be at the edge of belonging. Simultaneously man and non-man. Neither male nor female. Sexually impotent. Powerless. Scorned by society, especially according to Roman constructions of masculinity and virility. Lacking any kind of social standing, more so if they might have been enslaved. Yet, one with power. An official. In charge of the queen’s treasury. They are literate and wealthy enough to have an Isaiah scroll and use of a chariot. But, having gone to Jerusalem to worship, if they are Jewish, likely unable to ever do this in the temple - banned according to Deuteronomic law. Then, from Ethiopia - south of Egypt - or, as writers of the time would refer to as being from the fringes of the inhabited world. With darker skin color. Viewed as coming from a very different place than that of Israel - a place both romanticized, yet also viewed as completely inferior - a reflection of Roman xenophobia. They are, for many, an unfamiliar, complex, fluid identity, especially when placed beside the norms of the culture in which Acts was written. Likely viewed as an oddity. Or even gawked at.
That, my friends, is suffering. Suffering that most of us may never experience.
It’s why, perhaps, they are stuck on the passage in Isaiah 53. As they read it aloud, Philip, nudged to this place and this person by the Holy Spirit, hears them reading it aloud, over and over. And asks, “Do you understand what you are reading?”
Philip uses this passage in Isaiah as a springboard for telling the eunuch about Jesus. And while the author of Acts doesn’t tell us exactly what Philip says, it is interesting to note what he does and does not cite from Isaiah 53.
He cites the portions of the text about the servant’s silence and the part emphasizing that the servant was unjustly condemned. Innocent. Philip draws the connection to Jesus, whom human leaders judge worthy of death, but whom God judges to be innocent and worthy of an eternal throne. Isaiah 53 underscores that innocence. Philip, however, doesn’t include the very end of the Isaiah passage where it says that the Servant was “stricken for the transgression of my people.” Philip - and the author of Acts - do not develop a theology of substitutionary atonement, of Jesus dying for our sin. But, instead, depict Israel as complicit in an injustice with the death of Jesus. That Jesus, unjustly condemned, knows human suffering, because he has experienced it. And that this puts him in sympathetic solidarity with all victims of violence and stigmatization. Like Isaiah’s slaughtered lamb. And, especially, like the Ethiopian eunuch.
This good news that Philip shares with them - the good news of a Jesus who suffers in solidarity with them - acknowledges their own worth and dignity. It leads them - and not Philip - to raise the topic of baptism. Because they see that because of the worth and dignity inherent in them as a child of God, their outcome can only be one of inclusiveness. Of participation. And belonging.
Justo Gonzalez, a Cuban-American liberation theologian writes that “in studying the history of the Church and its missionary progress, we repeatedly see that the great movements, the most notable discoveries of unsuspected dimensions of the gospel and of obedience to it, usually appear not at the center, but at the margins, at the periphery.”
Perhaps, for us as for the Ethiopian eunuch, this lesson on Isaiah 53 is also a lesson for us. A lesson that calls us to resist easy answers. To resist the categorization of human beings into neat binaries. To resist categorization in its entirety. And to simply move closer - not to those at the center, but to those on the edges. Of belonging. And to notice the Holy Spirit there, already at work.
Because the good news will not travel to our community and to the ends of the earth primarily because of focus groups, strategic plans and demographic analyses. It will do so because individuals - we - carry it there gladly. Because they recognize that it speaks to them, no matter who they are or how others may measure them. And because they recognize that the good news acknowledges their own worth and dignity and thwarts the prejudices that societies - and religions - keep falling into.
This, my friends, is not about a call to go out into the world and suffer, but more about how our own suffering - which may be minor in comparison - is a way in which we are called into the work of God in the world.
May we be courageous in our call. Amen.
Preached Sunday, April 21, 2024, at Grace & Glory, Goshen, KY, and Third/MOSAIC, Louisville, KY.
