Rooted, but not Stuck
A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Easter – May 10, 2009 – RCL
The Rev. Diana Carroll – The Church of the Holy Trinity, Rittenhouse Square
“Rooted, but not Stuck”
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts
be acceptable in your sight, oh God our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
“Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, 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.”
Imagine yourself for a moment in the position of the Ethiopian eunuch. You come from a country to the south of Egypt, in what is now northern Sudan. Judea and Jerusalem are pretty far away from home, but somehow or another, you have heard a little bit about the Jewish people and their religion and it’s gotten you interested. You are a seeker of sorts, looking for knowledge and insight into the nature of God, and so you decide to make the trip to Jerusalem to find out more and, hopefully, to worship in the temple there.
At home, you are a very important person, but in Jerusalem, you are treated as an outsider. Because you are not Jewish, you are not allowed to go into the temple beyond the outer court: known as the court of the gentiles. When you make enquiries about becoming a proselyte to the Jewish faith, you discovered that that avenue isn’t open to you either. According to the book of Deuteronomy, eunuchs are not allowed to be “admitted to the assembly of the Lord,” (Deut 23:1)
apparently because they are unable to fulfill the role of a man in producing offspring. It would seem that there is no way in for you, no way for you to belong to the faith that has captured your attention.
And yet, something about this people and this faith continues to call to you. So on the way home, you decide to continue your learning. You take out one of the scrolls you bought and begin to read aloud, even though you can’t really understand what any of it means. You keep hoping that you’ll discover something, that a pathway will open up, that you will find a way to be included among the people of God.
When Philip met the Ethiopian eunuch on the wilderness road and shared with him the good news about Jesus, it must have sounded to him like good news indeed. Here at last was the answer to his questions, here was the God he had been looking for when he went to Jerusalem. But there must have also been a little moment of hesitation. This Jesus was, after all, the Jewish messiah, and the eunuch was not and could not be a Jew. Could the good news really also be meant for him?
And so the eunuch asks the question: “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” It’s not rhetorical. He knows very well that there are at least two things that could prevent it: His ethnic identity as a non-Jew, and his ambiguously gendered body, which did not fit Jewish expectations about gender or sexuality. It’s a very real question for him: Would there be room for this outsider in the new community of God?
Philip’s actions make the answer abundantly clear. When the chariot is stopped, both of them get out. They enter the water together, and there beside the road, in the middle of a wilderness,
Philip baptizes the eunuch.
The book of Acts is full of stories like this one. Dramatic, moving, thrilling, Acts tells the tale of how the gospel of Jesus Christ began to spread beyond Jerusalem, and how the good news was opened up to all people. It is a narrative about a circle that is being continually widened, as the earliest followers of Jesus are forced again and again to reckon with the radical inclusivity of God’s grace.
Its significance is often overlooked, but the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch has a crucial place in this narrative. You see, if we follow the order of events in Acts, the eunuch was the very first gentile to be baptized. Peter had not yet gone to preach to Cornelius and his family. Paul had not yet been converted and begun his mission to the gentiles. Philip himself had recently baptized a handful Samaritans, but the Samaritans already had close ethnic and cultural ties to the Jewish people, so it wasn’t quite the same kind of leap. Baptizing a gentile—that was another question entirely. And then there was the matter of the eunuch’s “incompleteness” in the eyes of Jewish law. It was not an easy question that Philip faced there on the wilderness road.
Baptizing the eunuch was a big step for Philip. It was an unprecedented move, a spontaneous act that at the time could have gotten him in trouble with the other apostles. But Philip was able to make that move, and it he was able to make it because he was genuinely tuned in to the Spirit of God. Philip was connected. He was plugged in. To use the word that appears over and over in today’s epistle and gospel readings, Philip knew how to abide.
Like a branch woven around and around the vine, he was intimately connected to the source of his faith, and from that connection, the Spirit flowed through him like sap. And so he was able to hear the prompting of the Spirit, leading him down that wilderness road, leading him into conversation with the eunuch, leading him to take that radical step and welcome him into the community of Christ through baptism.
Philip knew how to abide. But he also knew that abiding in Jesus is not the same thing as holding still. Abiding is not a static activity, and it has nothing to do with hunkering down or preserving the status quo. To abide in Jesus means to remain deeply rooted, but the purpose of remaining rooted is so that the branches may continue to grow and change— and ultimately bear fruit. Philip was able to grow and bear fruit because he was rooted, but not stuck. We are able to grow and bear fruit—individually and as a community—when we abide in Jesus in that same way.
The first letter of John tells us that, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” When we are plugged into the love of God in Jesus Christ, then we will not be afraid to grow and change, and to keep on expanding our welcome of those who may seem, to us, to be outsiders.
For the past ten days, the Anglican Consultative Council has been meeting in Kingston, Jamaica.
(Now, when I told my partner Sarah that I was going to talk about the Anglican Consultative Council in this sermon, she informed me that I was not allowed to turn it into a lecture on Anglican polity. I will do my best. But I’m guessing that a lot of folks here have never heard of the Anglican Consultative Council, so I think just a little bit of explanation is in order.)
The Anglican Consultative Council, or the ACC for short, is one of the ways that the churches of the Anglican Communion, including the Episcopal Church, are able to come together for conversation and decision-making. It is made up of representatives from all of the churches in the communion, and it includes lay people, clergy, and bishops. Among other things, the ACC has spent this time considering how we can remain together as a communion in light of the current struggles that are taking place—struggles that have arisen because of differing perspectives on scriptural authority, church leadership, and human sexuality. And the conversation happening at the ACC is just one part of a larger process of figuring out the future shape and identity of the Anglican Communion.
I don’t know what the outcome of that process will be, but I do know that if we in the Anglican Communion are truly going to listen for the Spirit and seek to discern where God is leading us, then we are all going to have to learn to abide. That means staying connected to Christ, and it means, through Christ, staying connected to one another. In order to grow, we have to remain rooted—rooted but not stuck—as individuals, as local churches, as dioceses, as a communion.
And I also know that when Philip met the Ethiopian eunuch on the wilderness road, there was not a single barrier of human difference that could keep him from being received into the household of God. It remains the challenge and the mission of the church to make sure that the inclusive grace of God continues to be declared to all people. Amen.
