May 14, 2006 - On a wilderness road
5th Sunday of Easter
14 May 2006
Acts 8.25-40
On a wilderness road
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006
In the recently released film Akeelah and the bee, an 11-year-old girl has a gift for remembering how words are spelled. Her teacher notices her extraordinary ability and encourages her to enter the school’s spelling bee, the first step in a process that could lead her to the finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
The problem is, Akeelah is poor, the youngest child in a family held together by a working widowed mom, and living in the crime ridden Crenshaw district of south Los Angeles. Her subculture is against her. Schoolmates torment her for being a brainiac. Her gangward leaning brother gives her a hard time. Her mother considers her interest in spelling a frivolous self-indulgence. One potential ally is so tough on her that she rejects his support. Nearly everyone and everything around her conspires to convince Akeelah that she can’t succeed in spelling bees, and if she does, she’ll be scorned within her culture.
When Akeelah does work up the courage to enter the school’s spelling bee, she wins, of course, and advances to the district competition, where she confronts the world beyond her subculture. That strange world is no more supportive than the familiar one. When she is not altogether ignored, she is intimated by people who either scoff at or outright berate her. Akeelah has nowhere to turn but inward.
Well, that’s not quite true. There’s a young contestant from the nicer suburbs in the San Fernando Valley who sees something valuable and interesting in her. He’s Hispanic, and his father is a successful writer, so they’re different, but there’s a feeling of believing in Akeelah as someone with value as a contestant and a person. She can sort of believe she’s worth something.
I wonder if the Ethiopian eunuch believes he’s worth something. Someone—it could have been his parents—believed he wasn’t worth leaving sexually intact. Whether it was his parents or some other person with power over his destiny, someone considered him more valuable without his sexual organs than with them. Eunuchs aren’t worth much as social beings in his culture, but the rich and powerful think eunuchs can be trusted with their personal household property, namely their treasure and their women. For the trustworthy management of finances and females, the eunuch was well provided for.
Hence we find the Ethiopian eunuch traveling in relative comfort across the countryside. He is educated, of course, and a scroll of the prophet Isaiah has come into his hands—we don’t know how or why. At the moment we meet him, he is reading Isaiah 53, that long, sad account of the suffering servant who was “despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”
If he was reading the Hebrew scriptures in the hope that he’d find comfort for himself there—if he thought that outside his native culture that mutilated him and isolated him from the normal course of social life and welcome he’d find inclusion—he was mistaken. Deuteronomy 23.1 clearly establishes that a eunuch must not be “admitted to the assembly of the Lord.” This eunuch may be coming back from worshiping in Jerusalem, but not in the temple with the acceptable people. That group doesn’t want him either, not as a normal, integral member of the community.
Here’s where God comes in. Philip is on his way from Jerusalem to Gaza on what Luke, here in Acts, describes as “a wilderness road.” The Greek words are often used to describe the area around where a city had been laid waste. So it may be more than barren wasteland this wilderness road runs through; it may have been purposely and viciously wiped out by someone powerful with overweening and perverse self interest, kind of like the eunuch’s sexuality. The eunuch is motoring along in the slow lane with Philip ambling to his right.
The Spirit, like an angel, speaks to Philip, “Go over to this chariot and join it.” Whatever. So Philip steps it up till he’s able to overhear the eunuch, or maybe he reads his lips. In any case, the book is Isaiah, Philip can tell, and how far has the eunuch read so far? And does he have any idea, Philip wants to know, what Isaiah’s wild ideas mean to the unwashed and uninitiated mind? And the answer is, of course, yes and no.
Yes, the eunuch knows what it means for a lamb to led to the slaughtering bench. He knows more than Philip at the moment could realize what that lamb would feel like facing the butcher’s knife and having nothing to say about it. When Isaiah says, “In his humiliation justice was denied him,” he knows very well what that means, the eunuch does. On the one hand, the eunuch understands a great deal of Isaiah.
On the other hand, what could the eunuch understand about this man of sorrow of Isaiah, for whom “it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain” [Isa 53.10] and yet to whom the Lord promises to “allot him a portion with the great”? [Isa 53.12] It would surpass wonderful if the eunuch could make something of a life crushed with pain and yet destined to an allotment with the great. This eunuch of great economic value knows the crushing pain of being a perpetual social reject and a hopeless spiritual outcaste. But who is Isaiah talking about, and what does he mean? The eunuch can’t understand. “How can I,” he wonders out loud to Philip, “unless someone guides me.”
So Philip guides him. He tells the eunuch, beginning with Isaiah’s words, about a redeeming life that has walked this earth. From birth he was the living, breathing idea of love. This life of love drew to his crib the least and lowly of the grazing lands and to his playground the wise and wealthy of the east and. He “grew and became strong in spirit,” Luke reports, such that one day his elders sat at his feet to learn, and another day his peers rose to their feet to stone him. He saw the truth as none had seen it, and when he told his truth the powerful shook with rage. When he told a perplexing story, it clarified the meaning of life. When he clarified the will of God, it perplexed the traditional mind.
All of this drove authorities to distraction, and they had to get rid of this man, who thus came to be rejected, mocked, abused, and “like a sheep . . . led to the slaughter.”
The rest of the story gets better, though. It is like the story Mahatma Gandhi told about what happens when you meet oppressors with nonviolence: “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.” The good news about Jesus that Philip tells the Ethiopian eunuch is that this grace filled, holy life of love was sustained by such pervasive and irresistible grace that it not only survived but it prevailed. The most cut off, unclean, humanly dispensable wretch of the world is, in fact, beloved of God and infinitely worthy of undying love and peace. You get into this life of love and peace by submitting to it, not by destroying everyone in the way of your seizing it. That submission Christians call baptism, and baptism is all it takes.
As Philip and the eunuch 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?”
Nothing.
Nothing is to prevent the eunuch—this sexual, social, ritual, spiritual reject of the world—from being baptized. He practically baptizes himself. He leaps off his chariot and descends into the muddy waters some unknown lake or river, and Philip splashes in with him, baptizing him with whatever words it takes, or no words at all, but maybe just the laying on of such hands as know when to touch what God has made holy. Nothing prevents God’s love and grace, and Philip knows better than to stand in the way.
People I know don’t believe this. From the first days of my sense of call to the ministry, the people I’ve often known best and cared about most have not believed that the grace of God in Christ, as I understand Christ, was for them. They thought that real life was not the simple, tidy picture of piety that adorned the wall of their Sunday school, if they ever went to one. At least, their life wasn’t that. They couldn’t accept the peace that passes understanding, because they’d come to understand too much. They’d come to understand that nice guys finish last; that God helps only those who help themselves, which makes God a redundant God; that peace is won through force and not relationship; that hypocrisy is as much a fixture in churches as elsewhere, and is more obvious there; and that people will kill and destroy for the sake of their religion if you scare them bad enough.
So I got very sad about that, and I am still sad about it. I am a minister because of this sadness. I see all those inadequacies in the church, too, but I’ve come to believe they don’t have to be what the church is. Nothing about the story Philip told the eunuch, starting with Isaiah, led me to see the church that way, not anymore. All I’ve wanted to do is tell them—tell all the people who, like the eunuch, have become learned and curious and lonely and hungry for truth—tell them the story they’re already, in their way, fascinated with.
Everyone with a heart, it seems to me, is fascinated with a God whose world includes the obvious pain and suffering we keep seeing and yet a God who decides to allot the sufferer crushed with pain “a portion with the great.” I think my learned and curious friends are deeply disappointed that the world does not seem to be turning out this way, and they would like to trust, if only it didn’t make them look terribly foolish, that the world would not turn out this way. They would like to believe in a God of a world that would not turn out to be so disappointing.
I believe the God of Jesus is the God my friends would like to believe in. For they would sooner hope than despair; they would sooner love than fear; they would sooner show compassion than hate; they would sooner surrender to peace than dominate an enemy that only multiplies with every new assault. For too much of their lives, my friends content themselves with a world so much less than the one they would sooner believe in. So I keep thinking of how I might tell them a story of faith that would liberate their soul from their baleful skepticism that they might change the world, the fear that besets the smart and sophisticated, if they’re paying attention at all. Their skepticism may be grounded in this fear that they’re inadequate do anything about it all.
In Akeelah and the bee, a middle aged would-be mentor tells Akeelah such a story to liberate her from fear. He points to words framed on the wall of his study, something Nelson Mandela told the liberated blacks and coloreds of South Africa in his 1994 inauguration speech:
You know the sound of someone who wants to believe that other story, the story you have and might tell. It’s the sound of the once-upon-a-time romantic whose disappointment about it all has left her with a bitter taste. Here is the irony. As long as that disappointment is there, you are still in the presence of someone longing to believe. I’m one of these; I’m one of these.
There are those of us who were born with a longing to believe so strong that we just did go ahead and believe in the glory of God in us all. But then life happened, and we grew disappointed. The glory of God was tarnished, tainted, and trashed so often in so many that we grew disappointed and even bitter. Still, that longing never left us, and we wished there would be a way to keep believing in the glory of God and the glory of life. That longing to believe in the glory of God in us all grew so dogged and fierce that we could not stop ourselves from finding a place, a gathering, and a pulpit where we would try again and again to tell about it.
So we just did keep telling about it, and now some of us believe that these disappointed romantics like us, among others, are ready to hope again. We believe that if the likes of us don’t hope again and speak again and work again toward a world full of the glory of God, the planet will suffer incalculable loss.
Many of you know all this, and I don’t really have to tell you. You know that you have always believed in the glory of God in you and in everyone. You know that the world has denied this, and the world has crushed you with the pain of in its denial. You know friends who are crushed with this pain, and you may know inside yourself that you love them and want tell them a story that would restore their hope.
You have that story in you. That is what you are here in these pews. You believe in that story, and so you are here. Now, all you have to do is figure out how that story goes. And then you have to tell it. Amen.
14 May 2006
Acts 8.25-40
On a wilderness road
© J. Christy Wareham, 2006
In the recently released film Akeelah and the bee, an 11-year-old girl has a gift for remembering how words are spelled. Her teacher notices her extraordinary ability and encourages her to enter the school’s spelling bee, the first step in a process that could lead her to the finals of the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
The problem is, Akeelah is poor, the youngest child in a family held together by a working widowed mom, and living in the crime ridden Crenshaw district of south Los Angeles. Her subculture is against her. Schoolmates torment her for being a brainiac. Her gangward leaning brother gives her a hard time. Her mother considers her interest in spelling a frivolous self-indulgence. One potential ally is so tough on her that she rejects his support. Nearly everyone and everything around her conspires to convince Akeelah that she can’t succeed in spelling bees, and if she does, she’ll be scorned within her culture.
When Akeelah does work up the courage to enter the school’s spelling bee, she wins, of course, and advances to the district competition, where she confronts the world beyond her subculture. That strange world is no more supportive than the familiar one. When she is not altogether ignored, she is intimated by people who either scoff at or outright berate her. Akeelah has nowhere to turn but inward.
Well, that’s not quite true. There’s a young contestant from the nicer suburbs in the San Fernando Valley who sees something valuable and interesting in her. He’s Hispanic, and his father is a successful writer, so they’re different, but there’s a feeling of believing in Akeelah as someone with value as a contestant and a person. She can sort of believe she’s worth something.
I wonder if the Ethiopian eunuch believes he’s worth something. Someone—it could have been his parents—believed he wasn’t worth leaving sexually intact. Whether it was his parents or some other person with power over his destiny, someone considered him more valuable without his sexual organs than with them. Eunuchs aren’t worth much as social beings in his culture, but the rich and powerful think eunuchs can be trusted with their personal household property, namely their treasure and their women. For the trustworthy management of finances and females, the eunuch was well provided for.
Hence we find the Ethiopian eunuch traveling in relative comfort across the countryside. He is educated, of course, and a scroll of the prophet Isaiah has come into his hands—we don’t know how or why. At the moment we meet him, he is reading Isaiah 53, that long, sad account of the suffering servant who was “despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”
If he was reading the Hebrew scriptures in the hope that he’d find comfort for himself there—if he thought that outside his native culture that mutilated him and isolated him from the normal course of social life and welcome he’d find inclusion—he was mistaken. Deuteronomy 23.1 clearly establishes that a eunuch must not be “admitted to the assembly of the Lord.” This eunuch may be coming back from worshiping in Jerusalem, but not in the temple with the acceptable people. That group doesn’t want him either, not as a normal, integral member of the community.
Here’s where God comes in. Philip is on his way from Jerusalem to Gaza on what Luke, here in Acts, describes as “a wilderness road.” The Greek words are often used to describe the area around where a city had been laid waste. So it may be more than barren wasteland this wilderness road runs through; it may have been purposely and viciously wiped out by someone powerful with overweening and perverse self interest, kind of like the eunuch’s sexuality. The eunuch is motoring along in the slow lane with Philip ambling to his right.
The Spirit, like an angel, speaks to Philip, “Go over to this chariot and join it.” Whatever. So Philip steps it up till he’s able to overhear the eunuch, or maybe he reads his lips. In any case, the book is Isaiah, Philip can tell, and how far has the eunuch read so far? And does he have any idea, Philip wants to know, what Isaiah’s wild ideas mean to the unwashed and uninitiated mind? And the answer is, of course, yes and no.
Yes, the eunuch knows what it means for a lamb to led to the slaughtering bench. He knows more than Philip at the moment could realize what that lamb would feel like facing the butcher’s knife and having nothing to say about it. When Isaiah says, “In his humiliation justice was denied him,” he knows very well what that means, the eunuch does. On the one hand, the eunuch understands a great deal of Isaiah.
On the other hand, what could the eunuch understand about this man of sorrow of Isaiah, for whom “it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain” [Isa 53.10] and yet to whom the Lord promises to “allot him a portion with the great”? [Isa 53.12] It would surpass wonderful if the eunuch could make something of a life crushed with pain and yet destined to an allotment with the great. This eunuch of great economic value knows the crushing pain of being a perpetual social reject and a hopeless spiritual outcaste. But who is Isaiah talking about, and what does he mean? The eunuch can’t understand. “How can I,” he wonders out loud to Philip, “unless someone guides me.”
So Philip guides him. He tells the eunuch, beginning with Isaiah’s words, about a redeeming life that has walked this earth. From birth he was the living, breathing idea of love. This life of love drew to his crib the least and lowly of the grazing lands and to his playground the wise and wealthy of the east and. He “grew and became strong in spirit,” Luke reports, such that one day his elders sat at his feet to learn, and another day his peers rose to their feet to stone him. He saw the truth as none had seen it, and when he told his truth the powerful shook with rage. When he told a perplexing story, it clarified the meaning of life. When he clarified the will of God, it perplexed the traditional mind.
All of this drove authorities to distraction, and they had to get rid of this man, who thus came to be rejected, mocked, abused, and “like a sheep . . . led to the slaughter.”
The rest of the story gets better, though. It is like the story Mahatma Gandhi told about what happens when you meet oppressors with nonviolence: “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.” The good news about Jesus that Philip tells the Ethiopian eunuch is that this grace filled, holy life of love was sustained by such pervasive and irresistible grace that it not only survived but it prevailed. The most cut off, unclean, humanly dispensable wretch of the world is, in fact, beloved of God and infinitely worthy of undying love and peace. You get into this life of love and peace by submitting to it, not by destroying everyone in the way of your seizing it. That submission Christians call baptism, and baptism is all it takes.
As Philip and the eunuch 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?”
Nothing.
Nothing is to prevent the eunuch—this sexual, social, ritual, spiritual reject of the world—from being baptized. He practically baptizes himself. He leaps off his chariot and descends into the muddy waters some unknown lake or river, and Philip splashes in with him, baptizing him with whatever words it takes, or no words at all, but maybe just the laying on of such hands as know when to touch what God has made holy. Nothing prevents God’s love and grace, and Philip knows better than to stand in the way.
People I know don’t believe this. From the first days of my sense of call to the ministry, the people I’ve often known best and cared about most have not believed that the grace of God in Christ, as I understand Christ, was for them. They thought that real life was not the simple, tidy picture of piety that adorned the wall of their Sunday school, if they ever went to one. At least, their life wasn’t that. They couldn’t accept the peace that passes understanding, because they’d come to understand too much. They’d come to understand that nice guys finish last; that God helps only those who help themselves, which makes God a redundant God; that peace is won through force and not relationship; that hypocrisy is as much a fixture in churches as elsewhere, and is more obvious there; and that people will kill and destroy for the sake of their religion if you scare them bad enough.
So I got very sad about that, and I am still sad about it. I am a minister because of this sadness. I see all those inadequacies in the church, too, but I’ve come to believe they don’t have to be what the church is. Nothing about the story Philip told the eunuch, starting with Isaiah, led me to see the church that way, not anymore. All I’ve wanted to do is tell them—tell all the people who, like the eunuch, have become learned and curious and lonely and hungry for truth—tell them the story they’re already, in their way, fascinated with.
Everyone with a heart, it seems to me, is fascinated with a God whose world includes the obvious pain and suffering we keep seeing and yet a God who decides to allot the sufferer crushed with pain “a portion with the great.” I think my learned and curious friends are deeply disappointed that the world does not seem to be turning out this way, and they would like to trust, if only it didn’t make them look terribly foolish, that the world would not turn out this way. They would like to believe in a God of a world that would not turn out to be so disappointing.
I believe the God of Jesus is the God my friends would like to believe in. For they would sooner hope than despair; they would sooner love than fear; they would sooner show compassion than hate; they would sooner surrender to peace than dominate an enemy that only multiplies with every new assault. For too much of their lives, my friends content themselves with a world so much less than the one they would sooner believe in. So I keep thinking of how I might tell them a story of faith that would liberate their soul from their baleful skepticism that they might change the world, the fear that besets the smart and sophisticated, if they’re paying attention at all. Their skepticism may be grounded in this fear that they’re inadequate do anything about it all.
In Akeelah and the bee, a middle aged would-be mentor tells Akeelah such a story to liberate her from fear. He points to words framed on the wall of his study, something Nelson Mandela told the liberated blacks and coloreds of South Africa in his 1994 inauguration speech:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God; your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. The glory of God: It is in the lamb on the way to the slaughtering bench. It is in the eunuch, whose life until now has been defined by what happened at the slaughtering bench. It is in you. It is in me. We watch our televisions in their high definition, and, not unlike the eunuch, we are given to see that we are not the sexually and socially spectacular beauties that populate the airwaves. Anyone who does not wear that dress or fill that bra or drink that beer or attract that babe or drive that car is so undesirable as perhaps to be trusted with little else but a stash of treasure, but such a person does not matter. That’s the story of this sad world—the lie our television keeps telling us—and the other story is that the glory of God is within us all, every one.
You know the sound of someone who wants to believe that other story, the story you have and might tell. It’s the sound of the once-upon-a-time romantic whose disappointment about it all has left her with a bitter taste. Here is the irony. As long as that disappointment is there, you are still in the presence of someone longing to believe. I’m one of these; I’m one of these.
There are those of us who were born with a longing to believe so strong that we just did go ahead and believe in the glory of God in us all. But then life happened, and we grew disappointed. The glory of God was tarnished, tainted, and trashed so often in so many that we grew disappointed and even bitter. Still, that longing never left us, and we wished there would be a way to keep believing in the glory of God and the glory of life. That longing to believe in the glory of God in us all grew so dogged and fierce that we could not stop ourselves from finding a place, a gathering, and a pulpit where we would try again and again to tell about it.
So we just did keep telling about it, and now some of us believe that these disappointed romantics like us, among others, are ready to hope again. We believe that if the likes of us don’t hope again and speak again and work again toward a world full of the glory of God, the planet will suffer incalculable loss.
Many of you know all this, and I don’t really have to tell you. You know that you have always believed in the glory of God in you and in everyone. You know that the world has denied this, and the world has crushed you with the pain of in its denial. You know friends who are crushed with this pain, and you may know inside yourself that you love them and want tell them a story that would restore their hope.
You have that story in you. That is what you are here in these pews. You believe in that story, and so you are here. Now, all you have to do is figure out how that story goes. And then you have to tell it. Amen.
posted by J. Christy Wareham at
11:21 PM
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