Berry French
“An attempt to keep up with the Holy Spirit!”
June 23, 2024
Acts 8:26-40
In this Pentecost season, Meg and Jarrett preached through some of Acts prior to their Sabbaticals, and today we’re picking back up in Acts chapter 8 with the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. Jarrett reminded us that though the New Testament book is sometimes titled the Acts of the Apostles, the main character is the Holy Spirit – that mysterious and hard to nail down third person of the Triune God.
Acts is all about what the Holy Spirit is doing in the early church as those first Christians try to figure out the boundaries in this new sect of Judaism. Early church leaders like Peter and Paul and Phillip are trying to keep up with what the Spirit is doing in the days following Christ’s resurrection. Spoiler alert: one of the major themes of Acts is the Holy Spirit’s nudging us towards the ever-widening boundary of who is included in God’s love and grace-filled embrace.
Because I know that many of us are Presbyterian and generally speaking we are less likely to lean into the Holy Spirit than some other versions of our Christian tradition, before we turn to Scripture, I am going to invite us into some personal reflection.
I invite you to take a full minute and consider times in your own life that you have felt God’s presence. Many of us modern Americans live primarily in our head, thinking and analyzing. I want to invite us into a different space and ask you to move into your heart and memory.
If you’re willing, I invite you to close your eyes to attempt to disengage your analytical mind, and let your memory drift to a moment or season in your life where you notice God’s Spirit at work, or you sensed and felt God’s presence. Maybe it was in connection to music, or a powerful moment in your personal life or in your family’s life. Maybe time in stillness or time in the natural world, or when you have been immersed in a life-giving hobby. Folks experience the movement of the Holy Spirit in a variety of ways … there is no wrong way to do this. Take a few quiet moments to close your eyes and find a memory. [30 seconds]
Friends, as you’re ready, you can open your eyes and come back. Thanks be to God for these moments and these memories. If you end up in a beautiful memory of connection with God, that’s a good reason to tune me out for a couple of minutes. If you recall something powerful, I invite you to consider talking about it with someone you trust later today.
I imagine for some of us, that might have been a hard exercise. I fear that we sometimes fail to reflect and are not trained to pay attention to the movement of the Spirit. We may not even have the language nor practice of reflecting upon our days looking for God’s movement in our lives. But I do hope that we each might consider LOOKING for – and even anticipating – the Holy Spirit’s influence on our life.
With all that, let us turn to God in prayer:
Spirit, Wind, Breath, Ruach,
Move among us and within us as we engage these ancient and sacred words.
Let them fall afresh on us. May we hear your word to us today, and in hearing, may we be transformed! Amen.
Hear these words from the book of Acts, chapter 8:
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 Philip got up and went.
Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Can-da-ce, 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?” The eunuch 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 A-zo-tus, and as he was passing through the region, he proclaimed the good news to all the towns until he came to Caesarea.
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Sermon
Chris Everett just graduated from Carolina and was an active member of Presbyterian Campus Ministry – PCM – and he was often at worship here at UPC, always sitting in the balcony. Chris served at UNC’s student body president his senior year, and I suppose he appreciated the anonymity the balcony afforded him of being able to slip in and out of worship on Sunday mornings.
Like many PCM students who don’t grow up Presbyterian, Chris found his way to Presbyterian Campus Ministry his junior year because some of his close friends loved PCM and invited him to come with them. I suppose lots of students show up initially for the really good, free home-cooked meals we serve every Thursday night, but I imagine they stay because of the community we have created … where students don’t have to perform and are not judged on their academic or athletic prowess. College students are able to sense a genuinely caring community with a focus on following Jesus, and expanding their understanding of God to be big enough to handle their questions and theological wrestling with a serious attempt towards social justice. If you were to ask Chris why he committed to PCM, I’m certain you’d get an articulate response that would be some expansion on those tenants.
I’m telling you all of this because as Chris’ graduation day grew nearer, he became more persistent in a humble yet bold request that we’d been discussing at his prompting occasionally throughout the last year or so. Chris wanted to be rebaptized and he wanted me to do it!
Chris grew up in the Black Baptist church in eastern NC, and like most baptist churches, rebaptism is the standard widely-accepted way that one marks the significant moment when a person finds a new faith community to be part of and theological framework to claim as their own.
You see, not unlike many of our queer PCM students, Chris had a complicated background with his home church. As a child, they loved him well and taught him about Jesus. However, they could not – yet – accept his sexuality as a bisexual man. And so Chris, like so many of our PCM students, found himself in this complicated relationship with church and God.
I am heartbroken to tell you that up to this point in the story – it’s a repeatable and predictable story. It’s the same story as SO many Carolina students or any college student, or frankly any person in the LGBTQ community who has been raised in a church community or family of origin that isn’t yet open to God’s love of ALL people.
After embracing their own sexuality, in the face of their home church’s harmful stance on sexuality, one is left with a complicated relationship with the church and therefore relationship with God riddled with complication, and often therefore a theology and worldview that is complicated. Calling it a complicated relationship puts it mildly, unfortunately naming it deadly may be more honest.
Thanks be to God, Chris’s friends invited him to PCM, to experience God’s expansive and inclusive love. And Thanks be to God, Chris, like so many of our LGBTQ students at PCM, found the incredible strength and admirable courage to show up AGAIN to a Christian space with a cautious but curious heart. God’s Spirit created the personal connections with Chris and some of our faithful PCM students and Chris’s trust in those personal relationships was strong enough that he showed up and then kept showing up at PCM. And God’s Spirit does what she does and made beautiful things happen!
I have to wonder what Philip, that early Christ follower turned prophet, was up to before the angel of the Lord appeared to him and told him to go travel that wilderness road to Gaza. Acts doesn’t give us much detail on Philip. I also have to wonder what the Ethiopian eunuch’s experience must have been like – Acts tells us he meets Philip when he’s traveling home after a spiritual pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
It seems at first glance that Philip is the hero of the story. He is the one that baptizes the Ethiopian eunuch after all. But listen to the action of the story:
● The angel of the Lord said to Philip, Get up and go to the road that goes to Gaza. … So Philip got up and went.
● Then the Spirit said to Philip, Go over to this chariot and join it. … So Philip ran up to the chariot.
● Then the eunuch invited Philip to join him in the chariot … so Philip did.
● Now, the eunuch was already reading Isaiah before Philip showed up. The eunuch asked Philip about the Scripture. Then Philip explained the Scripture and proclaimed the good news about Jesus.
● Then the eunuch said, “Look here is some water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” Then Philip baptized him.
That mysterious Spirit is at work – sending Philip south on a road to Gaza, where he meets an Ethiopian eunuch who invites him into his chariot and asks to be baptized.
I suppose Philip should be commended for his listening to the Spirit and responding to eunuch. The Spirit initiates and the eunuch invites and asks, Philip simply responds. As Reformed Christians, it’s what we believe about God – God is sovereign. Meaning God acts first and loves first and we are invited to respond, to join in on God’s redeeming of all of creation. That’s what Acts tells us Philip is doing – trying to keep up with the Spirit’s movement of widening God’s mercy and love, gathering in more and more of those who have been pushed away.
So what is a Eunuch, you ask? Good question! Important question for this story. This particular eunuch is an Ethiopian eunuch. He’s a dark skinned man from the lands south of Egypt, and he’s in charge of the Queen’s treasury – so he’s got some money and power. He rides in a chariot, and he possesses a costly scroll of the prophet Isaiah.
But more important than his race or wealth, he is a eunuch. A eunuch is a castrated male servant. Eunuchs were castrated before puberty and therefore deemed to be safe to serve among women and royalty. Due to their sexual status, eunuchs would have no family of their own, and therefore have total allegiance to their king – in this case queen. They often served in powerful positions and performed social functions for royalty. In our eunuch’s case, Acts tells us he was in charge of the entire treasury.
This particular eunuch is interested in Judaism; Acts tells us he is on his way back home from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to worship and he is reading from the prophet Isaiah. Most scholars suggest that the Eunuch is non-Jew who accepts the theological and ethical teachings of Judaism, worships in the synagogue with Jews, but has stopped short of circumcision.
At his recent visit to the temple, he could not get past the court of the Gentiles as his sexual status would have denied him entrance to the temple. But here he is, riding along, reading the prophet Isaiah, wondering about the reference to this suffering servant who is referred to as one who is shorn, one who has been humiliated and denied justice. The Eunuch wonders aloud, “who is this man whose story sounds like my story?”
It’s no coincidence that the eunuch is reading from the book of Isaiah, with a more hopeful word for those that religion has labeled “outsider.” The book of Isaiah promises freedom from marginalization, including release from certain laws found in Deuteronomy and Leviticus.
The eunuch must be asking Philip: “which is it – this law of exclusion, or this word of inclusion?” And Philip serves as his guide, sharing the good news that Jesus loves and accepts all people! The Holy Spirit leads Philip and the eunuch right down into the waters of baptism and proclaims boldly: “YES, you are welcomed into God’s embrace and into this family of faith!” Philip and the eunuch are both transformed in this act … and the early church with them!
And Acts says, “The eunuch went on his way rejoicing!” Oh how he went on his way rejoicing! Rejoicing in the power of the Holy Spirit, rejoicing in the open arm acceptance of Jesus the Christ, rejoicing in the love of God that has now been showered upon him.
I mentioned earlier that my heart breaks over the harm the Church has done to folks who have been made to feel excluded or less than … and what that can and does do to folks who then have a tortured relationship with the Church which often extends to how they understand their relationship with God, which can lead to some dark places.
Sometimes where our heart breaks is where the Spirit may be calling us to invest our gifts to work for change! So in a continuation of the eunuch’s rejoicing, I want you to know that I often rejoice in experiencing the Holy Spirit’s healing work with wounded students who make their way to our campus ministry. Many of our college students come to us wounded for a variety of reasons –
complicated church histories,
or unbearable losses in their family,
or unsure if they are in fact worthy of God’s love.
And somehow, often through the love of the healthy and thriving community that defines PCM, the Spirit offers healing through allowing students to experience the floodgates of God’s unconditional love!
Last month, PCM celebrated 20 graduating college students who we blessed and commissioned to go out into the world
more whole,
more healthy,
more spiritually grounded,
and more embracing of their secure identity as a beloved child of God.
[As we wrapped up another year of campus ministry … I along with the PCM staff, the PCM student leadership team, and the PCM Board went on our way rejoicing in all the ways that the Holy Spirit has been at work.]
One of those seniors who we commissioned was Chris Everett. After wrapping up his official duties as student body president in early April, Chris joined us for PCM’s spring mountain retreat.
Those of you who know your Presbyterian polity may recall that we feel quite strongly that baptism is about who God is and not about who we are. So when an infant or a child or an adult is baptized, one baptism is enough! There is no re-baptizing in the Presbyterian Church – which is true in most mainline churches. Being baptized in the name of the Triune God means you have been baptized and claimed by God and there is no need for “re-doing” it as if somehow it didn’t stick the first time.
So Chris’s rebaptism request put me in a tricky spot, as a dutiful Presbyterian that agrees with both the theology and polity of one baptism. Thankfully, I am not the first nor the last clergy to be in this tricky spot and our faithful and wise forebears in the Presbyterian tradition have what our polity and Book of Common Worship calls a “reaffirmation of the baptismal covenant marking occasions of growth in faith.”
So while I couldn’t offer Chris a baptist re-baptism dunking, the two of us discussed at length what it would mean for Chris and other baptized PCM students to remember and affirm their baptisms. So on a Saturday morning in April on that PCM spring retreat, in a cold mountain stream part way down a hiking trail a little south of Asheville, Chris and a group of PCM students joined in a creekside, reaffirmation of our baptisms – PCM style!
PCM’s Pastoral Resident Reverend Paul Burgess had a book of common worship in hand and we affirmed our faith. We gathered in small groups with our toes in the cold mountain water and told one another what we could remember of our own baptisms or other baptisms we’d been part of. We just had 3 PCM students baptized at UPC a couple months prior, so there were some fresh baptism memories to share.
And there in that mountain stream, we found a faithful and meaningful way to mark and celebrate the Holy Spirit’s movement in Chris’s life, and honor Chris’s courage to re-claim Jesus and this common faith we share!
So what about you?
Are there ways you can cultivate a practice of listening for the Holy Spirit’s nudgings?
Where is your own heart breaking and how might the Spirit be calling you to action in response?
What might God’s mysterious and mischievous Spirit be nudging us towards?
Come Holy Spirit Come … and transform us into the people you hope we become! Amen!