Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
The Fifth Sunday of Easter, 28^th of April, 2023

Acts 8:26-40

I adore today’s story from The Acts of the Apostles. When Luise condoled with me for having to write a Reflection on ANZAC Day I replied, ‘Yes, but I’m writing about the Ethiopian Eunuch!’ And I meant it. You know that I love biblical stories in which gender and sexual outcasts are welcomed into the faith and family of Jesus Christ, and that is the story that we hear today.

The Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Rome, ‘We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose,’ or, as New Testament lecturer Brendan Byrne puts it, ‘in every way God works for the benefit of those who love him’. (Romans 8:28) As you may remember, my argument is that here Paul is saying that God can take things that may not in themselves be good and create good out of them. Today’s story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch comes from a time when the early church was being persecuted in Jerusalem, and the Christian community (not yet called by that name) was scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. Among those then most zealous in persecuting the church was Saul, the man who would later become the Apostle Paul. But in every way God works for the benefit of those who love him, and the author of Acts tells us that ‘those who were scattered went from place to place, proclaiming the word’. (Acts 8:4)

Philip the Deacon is one of the scattered, and while exiled from Jerusalem he has been successfully preaching the good news in Samaria. Now an angel of the Lord tells him to leave Samaria and head south to the wilderness road that runs from Jerusalem to Gaza. Here Philip encounters an Ethiopian eunuch.

One of the commentators I read on this story began his commentary by describing the first time he heard about Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. He asked his Sunday School teacher what the term ‘eunuch’ meant, and she said a eunuch was a person who oversaw the royal treasury. It was not until he was in college and taking a course on the Bible as Literature that he discovered that a eunuch was a man who had been castrated and was correspondingly shocked.[1] In one way his Sunday School teacher was right. Being castrated as a child enabled a man to be employed in a court; eunuchs were trusted more than other men. They could safely be used to guard women, whom they were unable to impregnate, and they were also thought to be able to safely guard treasure, because they had no spouses, children, or in-laws with whom to share stolen wealth. The complicated gender of this eunuch would have made him the perfect treasurer for a queen.

His inability to perform proper masculinity, while it might have improved his social status, would have caused him difficulty in his religious life. We do not know whether the Ethiopian eunuch was a member of the Jewish diaspora or a Gentile God-fearer. Ethiopian tradition is that the Queen of Sheba returned from her encounter with King Solomon pregnant, and their son later went to Jerusalem to meet his father before returning to Ethiopia with Jewish companions. That this man was Ethiopian was unlikely to have been a problem for him when he went to Jerusalem to worship. Indeed, he might have been seen as a desirable member of the greater Jewish community: wealthy enough to ride in a chariot; educated enough to read Greek; devout enough to study the Prophet Isaiah even while returning from the Temple. The fact that he was a eunuch, though, could have been a problem. The Jews were surrounded by cultures that practiced castration, but it was anathema to them. Jewish sexual morality was all about being fruitful and multiplying. Eunuchs, whether made or born, could not be fruitful. And so they were forbidden from worshipping in the Temple. Deuteronomy says quite clearly: ‘No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord.’ (Deuteronomy 23:1) When the Ethiopian eunuch asks Philip, ‘Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?’ it is not a rhetorical question. Whether Jew or Gentile God-fearer, the eunuch could have been seen as a defective man, unable to fully experience Jewish worship.

But the Ethiopian is reading from the prophecies of Isaiah and, according to Isaiah, the Lord foresees a time to come when: ‘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 56:4-5) For this Ethiopian eunuch, that time is now. Being of complicated gender, being unable to fulfil God’s commandment to be fruitful and multiply, being excluded and marginalised by the Holiness Code, none of that now matters. Another commentator I read this week points out that: ‘Philip does not tell the eunuch that if he only confesses Jesus Christ, receives water baptism, and prays hard, then God will give him gonads and a desire for women’.[2] All Philip tells him is the good news about Jesus. The one led silently to slaughter, the one humiliated and denied justice, the one who would understand the humiliation and denial of justice that the Ethiopian experiences as a eunuch, is also the glorious, resurrected Lord. In the good news of Jesus, suffering can be transformed into exaltation. So when the eunuch asks Philip what is to prevent him from being baptised, the answer, undoubtedly prompted by the same Spirit that told Philip where to go and who to speak to, is – nothing. There is nothing to prevent this person of complicated gender from joining the community. The Ethiopian eunuch is baptised and then goes on his way rejoicing, his joy another sign of the Spirit’s presence, and Philip continues to share the gospel through the region. The Ethiopian church identifies this as the moment when Christianity came to Ethiopia. Whether or not this is true, Ethiopia was the second country in the world to adopt Christianity as its official religion, in the fourth century.

It has been nine years since I last preached on this passage of scripture. In 2015, I thought I was brave to connect this story to the ongoing campaign for marriage equality in Australia and in the Uniting Church. Back then, I pointed out that Australian laws and religious rules that defined marriage as only between a man and a woman denied marriage to those of ‘complicated gender,’ transgender and intersex people who could be compared to the Ethiopian eunuch. I was preaching before the Labor Party National Conference decided that Labor MPs could have a free vote on the issue, which would only happen in July 2015, and before Tony Abbott held a joint Liberal-National Party room discussion on the issue, which happened in August, so I was being a little bit brave. But we know that marriage equality was an idea whose time had come. After the optional postal poll, it became the law of the land in 2017 and, after a huge amount of theological work, the Uniting Church embraced it in 2018.

That does not mean there is no longer any need for me to point out what stories like today’s say about the welcome the church should offer gender and sexual outcasts. Every step forward is followed by a backlash and those opposed to marriage equality, having lost that battle, turned their attention to transgender people. If you seem to be hearing a lot more about them than you ever did before, one reason is that the people and organisations that tried to prevent marriage equality are now using their time, energy, and resources to attack trans+ people. The lobby group ‘Marriage Alliance’ changed its name to ‘Binary’ and just kept going. As I said back in 2015, one of the reasons that I love the Uniting Church is that we are at least on a journey towards full inclusion of LGBTIQ+ people. We are undoubtedly a lot closer to full inclusion than most other churches. But it is no reason to rest on our laurels. Today’s story, and the entire theme of the Book of Acts, is that as the gospel spreads through the world it gathers in more and more of those who have been pushed away or forgotten. We are the descendants of the community we see being created in the Book of Acts, and so we always need to look beyond our doors to see who has been excluded, so we can welcome them in.

In today’s reading from the First Letter of John, the apostle reminds us:

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us. Those who say, “I love God”, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.

Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch show this love to each other: Philip by approaching the eunuch; explaining the Scriptures to him; and baptising him; the eunuch by welcoming Philip into his carriage and listening to his teaching. It was their mutual love, and their freedom from fear of the Other, the stranger, that led to Philip welcoming a new Christian to the community and the Ethiopian eunuch going on his way rejoicing.

We may think that we can decide when and where to share the good news of Jesus, to invite those we like and those who are like us to join the community of the people of God. Stories like today’s remind us that the Spirit is always going ahead of us, blowing where She wills, and calling the marginalised home. All we need to do, all we can do, is follow where the Spirit leads by welcoming the excluded Other. Amen.

[1] Peter J. Paris, African Heritage Sunday Lectionary Commentary, Sunday, February 8, 2009, p. 3.

[2] Karen Baker-Fletcher, Feasting on the Word, Year B, vol. 2, p. 458.