Fifth Sunday of Easter
Acts 8.26-40
Psalm 22.26-32
1 John 4.7-21
John 15.1-8
©Suzanne Grimmett
What does it mean to you to belong?
Where does ‘belonging’ fit in your understanding of who God is and of how we are to live?
Do you ever feel like you don’t belong?
I wonder if these are questions occupying the attention of the Ethiopian eunuch as he reads the scroll from Isaiah. He has a theological problem- and it is a problem to which we may all relate in our experience of reading scripture. The Bible is not one book but a whole library of books and genres which speak of the relationship of God to creation and humanity to God. There are also profound contradictions and texts that theologians and commentators have wrestled with for thousands of years without arriving at agreement on a definitive meaning.
Anyone who has tried to read the whole Bible will have come across moments that leave them confused, bewildered, or even angered. This appears to be where we find the Ethiopian eunuch in today’s first reading. Philip, who encounters him, is one of the deacons set aside as servants and evangelists of Christ and the early followers of the way. After some angelic prompting, Philip had taken this journey where he found a chariot parked and a traveller who was a eunuch from Ethiopia. A eunuch is a neutered male human being who would have been castrated before puberty to enable him to be deemed safe to serve the queen and the women of the royal household. While we rightly point to the abhorrence of this historical practice and its enforced servitude, this eunuch was not poor and without influence but apparently wealthy and at the heart of royal power. What is fascinating about this story is that while other parts of the Bible (see Deuteronomy 23:1) make it plain that no eunuch could enter the Jewish temple or holy assemblies, the prophet Isaiah says something very different, and it seems it was the prophet’s scroll the Ethiopian was reading. If he knew the Deuteronomic writings, he may have been wrestling with one of those scriptural contradictions I mentioned- Deuteronomy says one thing and the prophet Isaiah another. It is high stakes- can he belong in the household of God or not? Not long before the part from Isaiah that the Ethiopian man reads to Philip about ‘a sheep led to the slaughter’ we find these words … and I can’t help but think this is what caught his attention.
Do not let the foreigner joined to the Lord say,
‘The Lord will surely separate me from his people’;
and do not let the eunuch say,
‘I am just a dry tree.’
For thus says the Lord:
For thus says the Lord:
To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths,
who choose the things that please me
and hold fast my covenant,
…I will give, in my house and within my walls,
a monument and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that shall not be cut off. Isaiah 56: 3-5
‘An everlasting name that shall not be cut off.’
This promise of eternal belonging must have been a beautiful thing to read for this travelling court official. Love and belonging are such basic human needs. Sometimes I think as church today we can inadvertently communicate the opposite. Sometimes we can be so inculcated in church life that we do not notice when we use language that is completely incomprehensible to those new to church. Sometimes we act in ways that seem foreign or not connected to the problems of the world. Sometimes when being a ‘cradle Anglican’ is celebrated, it can inadvertently communicate that there is some kind of deeper belonging from which the rest of us are excluded. While none of this is intentional, it can obscure the good news that prompted the Ethiopian in his chariot to seize the moment and cry ‘Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptised?’
The answer of course was there are no barriers. Everyone belongs in the family of God, with the great challenge that if we are to sit down together at such a joyfully diverse table we need to remain open to the great gift of our difference and welcome all. What holds us together as family across so much difference is the presence of the crucified and risen one in our midst and the sacramental life we share; a life where the only thing excluded is exclusion itself. God is a mystery far bigger than any category we can devise or boundary we can construct.
The Ethiopian eunuch may have had some influence in court, but he would have known the suffering of life denied him and what it was to feel religiously ostracised. He asks Philip about the one he reads about in Isaiah- the one who was also an outcast, denied justice and led as a sheep to the slaughter. In Jesus, the story of shame, injustice and suffering is transformed into a narrative of restoration and hope. These scriptures which seem so contradictory and confusing, through the Spirit’s intervention via Philip, suddenly offer a word of hope and liberation. Sometimes we need the Spirit communicated through the presence and insight of another human being. Philip was able to make it clear that because of Christ, the suffering servant, shame and exclusion has no place in the family of God.
This language of belonging in God is in all our other readings today. In the letter of John we read;.
“God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”
and in John’s Gospel we hear;
“I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.”
In these lines we hear the power of that beautiful word ‘abiding’ but we also will see the emphasis on our need for one another. We cannot go it alone in this life. God does not, in my experience, often send individual angels to help us out, but we may find a fellow traveller like Philip, inspired by the Spirit, can help us understand sacred texts and see them in new ways. I am so grateful for all the fellow pilgrims on my path who have helped me through the witness of their faithful lives. We live in a culture that promotes individuality and honours independence. While there is a need to honour and trust ourselves, if our self-worth becomes equated with our own success and the things we do, we can become self-serving and self-focussed. It is not possible to be a solitary Christian because our whole life is about abiding- abiding in Christ and Christ abiding in us, uniting us by the Spirit. We are called to belong to God and to one another and the fruit of that abiding is love. John’s letter says it perhaps the most clearly, if a little brutally, “Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars.” The fruit of our lives is to be love- a love of God and love of one another that cannot be separated.
Presumably if Philip had not obeyed the promptings of the Spirit to stop, the Ethiopian court official would have remained there stuck and without hope, puzzling over the contradictions of scripture. Sometimes we can be like that- stuck until someone else, often someone with a different life experience- can offer us their insight into scripture or to what it means to live today as a disciple of Christ. And at those times where we are not feeling close to God, or to one another, may we lean into the promise that God is holding us in abiding love regardless of how we might be feeling. In those seasons, which we all experience, we can rest in the prayers of our sisters and brothers, who might just happen to stop by our chariot sometime and find beautiful words to assure us of our eternal belonging.
+Amen