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May 17, 2009 Sermon

Water in the Desert

Rev. Sally Harris & Rev. George Millard

I have a few questions about this startling story in Acts: First, how can there be water in the desert? You are traveling a desert road and there is water just when you are contemplating baptism? Sounds fishy to me – Water in the desert – how can that be? But that is only the beginning of my wonderings about this astonishing anecdote. An angel tells Philip? How does an angel sound? How do you know it is an angel and not a hallucination? And then what about who Philip is to meet? I mean Ethiopian - a person of color – that is astounding… and then there is the whole thing of a uh…. well the complicated gender thing – a eunuch – they were considered blemished, unclean… this angel does not sound orthodox to me.

The few things I do know about the details of this tale is that the country, from which the Ethiopian eunuch came, is not modern day Ethiopia, but modern day Sudan, often referred to as Cush in the Bible. It was outside the Roman Empire, and caused a good deal of trouble for the Romans. The country was ruled by a succession of queens, whose title was Can-da-see and who were in constant battle with surrounding nations. Both because they were outside the empire, and also because Rome did not succeed in conquering them, this country represented "the ends of the earth." Remember at the beginning of Acts Jesus commissioned the disciples:
“You shall be witnesses… to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:7)

The Ethiopian eunuch represented the ends of the earth, as a black person he signified a racial difference from the Jewish disciples, he epitomized a class difference, because he was a cabinet minister, the Treasurer of the Candasee, the equivalent of say an Alan Greenspan, and an economic difference: he was wealthy. We know he was wealthy, because he was riding in a chariot driven by someone else (the ancient limousine), and he has purchased in Jerusalem a luxury item: a scroll of the book of Isaiah. As far as his gender identity goes, well in his day he would be “perceived as other – an ambiguous sort of creature like a crow, which cannot be reckoned either with the dove or with ravens, neither man nor woman but something composite, hybrid and monstrous, alien to human nature”
(from the second- century satirist, Lucian of Samosata)

In Jewish circle eunuchs were classified among the ritually impure, unfit for priestly service – so this is a significant rhetorical strategy of the author, Luke – a social and cultural outsider became a powerful polemical device. I cannot help but wonder if we all are asking the same question this quintessential outsider asked of Philip: How can I understand the scripture unless someone guides me?

I wonder if we would understand more if he were here to tell his own story…

You are here! Come and tell us your story.

{Rev. George Millard tells the Ethiopian eunuch’s story}

A Spirit is coming, Jesus declares, that will keep challenging us and guiding us to new truths. Truths that are freeing, truths that are threatening; truths that are dangerous to former ways of thinking. Truths that are public and turns on its head the way the world usually sees God. Jesus knew that such a concept of truth and justice in the context of a world that claims the agenda of God will be an uncomfortable place, a dangerous place, a place where one will need an advocate, a counselor, a presence more powerful than the world – a resurrecting power. Jesus seems to say, " I am setting you a hard task, and I am sending you out on a very difficult engagement. But I am going to send you a counselor, an advocate, who will guide you as to what to do and enable you to do it. And I leave with you, peace.”

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you, not as the world gives do I give you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.

[Resource: Gay L. Byron’s Symbolic blackness and ethnic difference in early Christian Literature]

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