The Ethiopian Eunuch and Grace
The Fifth Sunday of Easter
April 29, 2018
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?” Acts 8
One of the things that we like to play at our house is Table Topics – and you can get them in all sorts of forms – like Table Topics for Kids, or Girls Night Out, or Couples Table Topics. So what they are, are boxes of cards with questions on them. One of the ones that I particularly like is “what would you do?” table topics. And I hope it is okay if we play that today. So I am going to have three scenarios in a couple of minutes that you have to pretend to be the parish priest, and you make the decision about what to do. They are based on three true examples, none of which reflect anything that has happened here – and some of you have heard two of these scenarios before.
Ready to play?
So first I want to set the scene by examining our text from this morning’s lections from the Acts of the Apostles. So it is a pretty interesting story. The first thing to know is that Philip is an example of ultimate obedience. The spirit tells him to go to Gaza and immediately he goes. Then the spirit again tells him to go over to a chariot – so Philip runs over, meets the Ethiopian Eunuch, and when he hears him reading (out loud) the passage from Isaiah, he asks the Eunuch if he understood. And then Philip explains this Isaiah passage, and the Good News of God, and in this passage, we can infer that the Eunuch sees himself. Biblical scholars suggest that he relates to this image of the suffering servant as the shorn sheep, we can infer as he himself is scarred. Eunuchs, just to give you some background, were often made so before the started puberty, and then were trusted to serve in Royal Households, particularly around women because they were deemed safe.
But this status also deemed him, and all eunuchs, as immoral (to no fault of their own) – and therefore were only afforded marginal participation in the assembly – even though it is likely that the eunuch was Jewish.
The Eunuch sees in Isaiah the message of hope and comfort – for all captives, the blind, the lame, and outcasts and for himself (Feasting on the Word, p.454, Year B, year 2). And Philip being a good Jewish man, and a good follower of Jesus, reaches out to him with encouragement and compassion. This reaching out is not uniquely Christian – it is a teaching that was part of the Jewish tradition that we inherited as Christians. So this all culminates in the Ethiopian Eunuch being baptized.
So the lesson from Acts according to one commentary is that “We, like Isaiah, Jesus, Philip, and the Eunuch, are affirmed in the call to share the good news of God of Israel, as revealed in Jesus without partiality or prejudice.”
So that’s the background –
So here comes “Table Topics for Ministers” – and let me just say – whatever answer you come up with is okay because I can guarantee you there is a minister out there who agrees with you, and if they don’t, it still does not matter. And the topic is around the phrase, “what is to prevent me from being baptized?”
So first scenario is this:
This was a specific question from a colleague in England but this happens all the time in both the US and in Great Britain. So this is what would you do: Question for colleagues (remember you are now all priests): A non-churchgoing parent is complaining that the people she has chosen to be Godparents cannot be Godparents, because they have not been baptized. The baptism is in August, and the next Confirmation class doesn’t begin until after Christmas. What would you do?
So the missing piece of information here is, in the Church of England, not here, if you are an adult who wants to be baptized, you have to be baptized and confirmed at the same service. So what this question means is that these godparents won’t be able to be baptized before the August baptism date. And when a child is baptized the godparents have to be baptized Christians.
What do you do?
Answers from the congregation included: talk to godparents to find out why they are not baptized, find another church to get parents baptized and confirmed before the August baptism, include non-baptized godparents but have someone, or a couple of the people from the congregation to stand in as baptized godparents. There were many innovative ideas on how to have this baptism go forward because many congregants said the most important thing is to allow the child and the parents to have some kind of connections to the church through baptism. Vast majority if not all said that they’d figure out some way to get the baby baptized and to have the requested godparents be godparents.
The Second Scenario is this. This is a real example from Father Richard Loring:
A group of Roman Catholic Latino parents who are not married, want to have their babies baptized. In this particular area, Chelsea in the 1980s, the Roman Catholic Priest will not baptize the babies because their parents were unwed. They come to the Episcopal Church to have their babies baptized.
What do you do?
Congregation answers: Baptize the children no matter what.
What Father Loring did is he baptized the babies, later married the parents, and built a cultural and ethnically diverse church.
The third scenario is one of my own from back in 1996 or -97:
A couple comes to the church, which they have never attended- even once, and then out of the blue, they do not even come to church but call the vicarage (where the church office is) and ask, “can we get our baby baptized?” You are pretty sure that you will never see them again, unless they happen to stick around the area for a bit, until the time for the baby to get married. The Church of England is affectionately known as the Hatch, Match and Dispatch church – meaning that the vast majority of English people only come to church to be baptized, married, and buried. These are different from Creasters, of C and E Christians who come regularly, twice a year to church, for Christmas and Easter. The vast majority of people who consider themselves Christian in England do not attend church. In the United States, the Christian population reports that 40% attend church on Sunday (although many argue, that statistic is really closer to 25%).[1] In the UK, the worshipping population is 1.4%.[2]
What do you do?
One of the priests on staff, Austen Williams, who was in his 80s said, and I will never forget this, he said: If you say no to those parents, all they will remember is the church said no to them when they really wanted and needed something from the church. Do you want that to be what they remember about the church?
So for me, it always comes back to these words of the Ethiopian Eunuch – “Look here is water, what is to prevent me, or him, or her, from being baptized?” And as a minister, or as ministers, we need to be clear, are we the gatekeepers of sacraments of grace, like baptism, or are we the conduit?
Today in Sunday Forum we are going to be talking/we talked about Grace which can be defined “the unmerited favor of God, divine regenerating, inspiring and strengthening influence of being so influenced.”
As ministers, and as fellow Christians, we are invited, like Philip to be aware, to be open to being under the influence of an angel of the Lord. In what simple actions can we be obedient to that voice? And what we seem to read in the Bible over and over again, from the Old Testament to the New Testament, is that God’s grace is prevalent, waiting to land on whomever will openly receive it. Let it be us, and let us also be instruments of grace that help draw all who yearn to know God closer to God. Let us be windows, rather than gates.
[1] (churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-articles/139575-7-startling-facts-an-up-close-look-at-church-attendance-in-america.htm).
[2] www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/12095251/Church-of-England-attendance-plunges-to-record-low.html
0 Comments