Sunday, July 16th: "Along the Way: Encounters"

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First United Presbyterian Church

“Along the Way: Encounters”

Rev. Amy Morgan

July 16, 2023

Acts 8:26-40

Then an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Get up and go toward the south[a] to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” (This is a wilderness road.) 27 So he got up and went. Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, the queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship 28 and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah. 29 Then the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over to this chariot and join it.” 30 So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” 31 He replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him. 32 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.

33 In his humiliation justice was denied him.

    Who can describe his generation?

        For his life is taken away from the earth.”

34 The eunuch asked Philip, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” 35 Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus. 36 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?”[b] 38 He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip[c] baptized him. 39 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. 40 But Philip found himself at Azotus, and as he was passing through the region he proclaimed the good news to all the towns until he came to Caesarea. 

This year’s Boston marathon featured runners from Kenya and Tanzania, Israel and Switzerland. Runners come from around the globe for the Boston race, which has been expanding in inclusivity over it’s more than 125-year history. Roberta Gibb became the first woman to run the marathon in 1966, and Eugene Roberts became the first wheelchair competitor in 1970. 

With all of the divisiveness in our society, I’m glad we have this shining example of unity, inclusivity, and celebration of diversity. I wonder if the kingdom of heaven that Jesus always talked about doesn’t look something like the Boston Marathon, people of all nations, different abilities, genders and classes all racing toward the same goal, shoulder to shoulder. The champions of the Boston Marathon may be the ones who crossed the finish line first, but I think the whole human race wins when we run like this. 

Maybe the kingdom of heaven looks like the Boston Marathon, but maybe it also looks like an Idaho police officer who gave a woman a prayer instead of a speeding ticket. When he learned that the car was speeding to an oncology appointment, the officer remembered his own mother, who had died of cancer, and he felt empathy for the driver and her mother, who was battling cancer. The officer was able to set aside his role, and any power or status that might come with that, to put himself inside that car, in the midst of the fear and pain that led an anxious daughter to press the pedal beyond the limits of the law. 

The Boston Marathon and this police officer in Idaho invite us to explore some of the same theological questions as our story from the book of Acts. But first, a little background on this story since some of us might not be super familiar with the Acts narrative. 

The Philip in this story is often conflated with the apostle Philip, one of the 12 disciples called by Jesus. But this is actually a different Philip, one of seven Greek-speaking Jewish Christians appointed to be the first deacons. In Acts, deacons are appointed to care for the Greek widows, who were presumably being neglected in favor of the Hebrew widows. So Philip, from the beginning of his ministry, is called to be a bridge-builder between the Jewish Christians and the Gentiles, or Greek Christians. 

Eventually Philip is sent by the Holy Spirit to Samaria. Nobody wants to get sent to preach the word of God in Samaria. This is a tough crowd, and he’s competing with magicians. 

But Philip heals people and performs miracles and talks about the kingdom of God and message of Jesus Christ, and he does such a great job that everyone in town, including the magician, come to believe and are baptized. 

Once all the hard work is done, the apostles Peter and John step in, and Philip gets called to head down a wilderness road.

Now, we know that wilderness road is biblical code word for a transformation event. We would expect to see in this story a major turning point in salvation history. Philip is sent along this wilderness road with no definite destination, through mountains and desert. He has no goals, no objectives, or strategic plan. He’s just told to go. The story isn’t about where Philip ends up. It’s about what happens along the way. 

Because along the way, Philip encounters someone very different from him. As different as a Kenyan is from a Swede. But they are traveling together, down the same road, experiencing the same marathon journey. One of these travelers has status in the earthly kingdom of Ethiopia, and the other is a servant of the realm of God. But both of them ignore their status to connect over common questions. 

Questions like, “do you understand what you are reading?” and “what is to prevent me from being baptized?” Or, put more broadly, “how do we understand God?” and “how can we be a community?” These theological questions come up when we encounter people of different religions, cultures, and experiences on our wilderness journeys, when we find ourselves running shoulder-to-shoulder with people from around the world. These questions come up for us when we set aside our differences in status or our official roles in society to see one another as human beings and to feel compassion for one another. 

These questions come up for us when we encounter holy strangers. Author Barbara Brown Taylor writes in her book, Holy Envy, “For reasons that will never be entirely clear, God has a soft spot for religious strangers, both as agents of divine blessing and recipients of divine grace.” Blessing and grace are at the heart of this encounter between Philip and the Ethiopian official. But this blessing and grace are often absent from what we know today as Christian evangelism, the sharing of good news. 

The classic evangelism model I was taught, based on this story from Acts, goes something like this: The Holy Spirit is calling us to go to people who don’t know Jesus, help them see how Jesus is in the Old Testament, bring them to faith by having them affirm Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, and then baptize them, preferably in a river if you have one handy. 

The Ethiopian, the foreigner, the stranger, the eunuch – this one who is as different from Phillip as he can possibly be and has a sexuality that doesn’t fit the defined norm – is CONVERTED to Christianity from whatever pagan religion he might have been following at the time of this predestined encounter on the wilderness road. The idea is that we take what is different and we make it the same as us. We use the authority vested in us by Jesus Christ to inform people of their sin and call them to repentance and acceptance of Jesus. 

This idea of evangelism, while highly effective during the Billy Graham crusades of the 50’s, misses the point of what is actually being transformed in this story. Philip, the bridge-builder, encounters a spiritual stranger. They discuss scripture and help each other understand it. They figure out what it means to be in community together. They go their own ways, rejoicing. Rejoicing because the whole human race wins when we run shoulder to shoulder, when our encounters with those who seem very different lead us to ask meaningful questions and figure out how to be a community. Rejoicing because our lives are enriched by the holy strangers God sends our way. Rejoicing because the church is more faithful when we welcome, listen to, learn from, and share with those holy strangers and, as Jesus commanded, love them as ourselves. 

The idea of evangelism as saving souls or growing churches is a bankrupt model. If evangelism isn’t about encounter, about exploring who God is with holy strangers and asking how we can be in community together, then it isn’t about good news. Someone who thinks they have all the right answers about God worked out and can tell me what I’m supposed to do to be acceptable in God’s community does not sound like good news. It isn’t good news. It isn’t what Jesus preached about the reign of God, and it isn’t the encounter Philip had with the Ethiopian official on the wilderness road. 

We’ve been hearing for decades about the decline of the mainline church, and the self-described evangelical church has felt largely immune from these declines. But that is no longer the case. Christianity, and identification with faith traditions in general, is in decline. Good news, however we might define it, is not being shared. And one reason for this is that we’ve neglected the truth, demonstrated here in scripture, that evangelism is about encounter, not conversion. 

God’s plan for salvation, for abundant life now and always, has never been about the maintenance of institutions, the homogenization of belief, or the promotion of a systematic theology. In fact, God’s vision of the Body of Christ may be so dramatically different from what we think it is that it requires the dismantling of some structures so we can get back to encountering holy strangers in the wilderness and run shoulder-to-shoulder with them as we build a community that looks more like the reign of God on earth. 

Maybe we are on this wilderness road, in this transformational space, because we are once again at a turning point in salvation history. God is about to do a new thing, and we are called to be a part of it. But it requires leaving the easy comforts of the familiar, setting aside the safety of strategies that have proven successful in the past, and moving down a dangerous and unfamiliar road.

And on that road, I guarantee we will find people like the Ethiopian official, people who are at the center of culture but on the outskirts of the religious “in” group. People who are curious about God, who want to know who Jesus really is, who are being moved by the Holy Spirit to seek meaning and purpose in their lives.  I am confident we will encounter those people because I know we already have. How many of you know at least one person who is spiritually curious but institutionally skeptical? Someone who used to go to church but found it wasn’t answering the questions they were asking? Someone who explores spirituality but thinks negatively about religion?

Those are the people traveling this wilderness road, and we need to get in the chariot with them. Not so that we can strong arm them into professing faith in Christ or add their membership to our church rolls or, best of all, get them tithing to our church coffers. We need to get in the chariot with them, run with them, so that we can all experience good news, blessing and grace. 

Maybe the kingdom of heaven is all around us, is coming into existence every day. But we have a hard time seeing it, or knowing it when we see it. And that’s what brings us here, to First on Fourth. Here, we have an opportunity to stop and wonder, to express gratitude, to ask big questions, to be honest about our fears and frustrations and failures. Here, we run side by side toward this goal, the kingdom of heaven, this possibility of a world made new. And, God willing, on the other side of this experience, we’ll be more prepared to see and to recognize God’s fingerprints all over our lives and all over the world. To God be all glory forever and ever. Amen.