The scriptures referred to are Acts 8:26-40.
I was on a website that listed all of these bizarre but supposedly true laws. According to it, in Georgia no one may carry an ice cream cone in his back pocket on Sunday. That might save you some laundry problems but why just on Sunday? In Arizona, donkeys are not allowed to sleep in bathtubs. What happened to give rise to this law? In Idaho, it is illegal for a man to give his sweetheart a box of candy weighing less than 50 pounds! You would think that would be the law in Hershey, Pennsylvania. And here in Florida, it is illegal to sing in a public place while wearing a swimsuit. There go my plans to stage a production of my new play, Jaws: The Musical!
Some laws are not just silly but dumb. In New York, the penalty for jumping off a building is death. So if you survive they execute you? And in Wisconsin, when two trains meet at an intersection of track, neither one shall proceed until the other has. So your wait for the next train may literally take forever.
Still other laws are merely antiquated. The Encyclopedia Britannica is banned in Texas for containing a formula for making beer at home. That must date from Prohibition. More chilling is the law in Maine that requires that people bring shotguns to church...in case of Indian attack.
Laws are meant to be concrete expressions of justice. Some laws become outdated. Some laws remain valid. Some human laws are bad from the start.
The Old Testament or Hebrew Bible contains 613 laws: some moral, some ceremonial, some civil. Some of its civil laws have influenced our own. But some are outdated, either because the institutions they cover, like slavery, have been outlawed in our society or because they are now considered cruel, like the rough justice of taking an eye for an eye. Orthodox Jews still observe some of the ceremonial laws, such as those concerning Kosher foods and the wearing of blue tassels on their prayer shawls. Those dealing with sacrifices and the priesthood ceased with the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. The Ten Commandments are moral laws. As Christians, those are the kind with which we are primarily concerned. Moral laws don't become outdated.
Today we look at the major breaking of the Mosaic laws in the book of the Acts of the Apostles. Someone said the book should be called “Some Acts of Some Apostles.” Its main focus is on Peter and later Paul. But Philip gets the spotlight here. In John's gospel, Philip, with his Greek name, was the one to whom Greeks came when they wanted an introduction to Jesus. Now he, not Paul, will be the first to take the good news of Jesus to the Gentiles.
The Holy Spirit tells Philip to go to the highway that leads from Jerusalem to Gaza and eventually to Egypt. It is a busy road. Philip sees an Ethiopian leaving Jerusalem. The man is a court official of the Candance, which is not a name but the title of the Queen of the African Empire of Meroe. (The Greeks called all of Africa south of the Nile Ethiopia.) Philip couldn't have known it at the time but the official was a God-fearer. That's what they called Gentiles who worshipped the Lord but didn't actually convert to Judaism. In the case of the official, he couldn't become a Jew. He was a eunuch and according to the law of Moses, he was excluded from the congregation of Israel. (Deuteronomy 23:1)
Prompted by the Spirit of God, Philip runs up to the chariot and overhears the man reading aloud from the book of Isaiah. He asks the official if he understands what he is reading and is invited to guide the official through what is a difficult passage. The man is reading from the 53rd chapter of Isaiah. It is one of the four “servant songs” that describe God's suffering servant. In some passages it appears that Israel is the servant but in others it seems to be an individual who comes out of Israel.
The song the court official is studying is the one that we read during Holy Week: “Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God and afflicted. Yet he was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that made us whole, and by his bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:4-6) The official had just read this before Philip arrived.
Of course, the man doesn't understand who Isaiah is talking about. Neither did Philip or any of the apostles before the risen Christ explained it to them. This passage describes a different way to think of the Messiah and his mission. So Philip was primed to speak on this very passage by the Holy Spirit.
A word here about the Spirit. In John's gospel, Jesus calls the Spirit a parakletos. (John 14:16) This Greek word has been translated as Advocate or Comforter. The truth is there is no adequate word in English that can capture every meaning of the Greek word. It basically means someone who is called in. It could be a character witness called in to testify for you at a trial. But it could also mean someone who is called in to boost the morale of dispirited soldiers or a team of athletes. The primary meaning then is someone called in to support you in times of trouble. The Spirit is our Helper, our Supporter, our Encourager, and our Defender.
Now the Spirit has led Philip to this man at a key moment. He enables the apostle to open the scriptures to the official and tell him the good news of God's love and forgiveness through Jesus. But did Philip anticipate where this was going? For they come to a body of water and the man says, “Look! Here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?”
Homiletics professor Fred Craddock says Philip could have responded, “Actually, I can think of a million reasons why not.” This man was not a Jew. At this point, only Jews have become followers of Jesus. Jesus was the Messiah sent to the Jews. Could a Gentile, a non-Jew, be saved?
And on top of that, the man is a eunuch. He is not considered a whole man by the Torah and is therefore outside God's covenant. Could he become a member of the body of Christ?
Philip can't consult Peter, James and the others on this, an unprecedented and important decision for the Jesus movement. On the one hand, he is being asked to include into God's people a man explicitly excluded by the law of Moses. On the other hand, the Spirit led him to this man at this time. Why would the Spirit of God bring all of these circumstances together if he didn't expect Philip to convert and baptize the man?
How long did Philip agonize over this? We don't know. But we know that he stepped down into the water with the eunuch and set a precedent. He broke a bunch of laws but what he did was just. He overlooked the external circumstances and saw that here was a man ready to accept the love of God and love him back. How could he say “No?”
Philip had a crisis of conscience. He was faced with either going against the law as it was taught him or going against the Spirit of God. He chose the Spirit. The law in this case no longer embodied justice.
The dramatic climax of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn comes when Huck wrestles with his conscience over his friend Jim, a runaway slave. Jim has told Huck that, if necessary, he will steal his wife and kids from their owner. Huck has been taught from birth that slaves are property and to steal a man's property is a sin. Huck should turn Jim in. If he doesn't, Huck believes that he will go to hell. But their time together on the raft has allowed Huck to get to know Jim in a way that white people seldom did in those days. He cannot think of Jim as property or an animal or anything other than a man and a friend. And though everything he has been taught tells him that he is wrong to do it, Huck decides to help his friend, even if it means going to hell.
Huck and Philip would have understood what we read in John's first letter last week: “By this we will know that we are from the truth and will reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.” (1 John 3:19-20) Sometimes we condemn ourselves needlessly but God knows better.
1 John continues: “And this is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he commanded us.” (1 John 3:23) God's commandments surpass human laws when they are in conflict. As Peter and the apostles said to the Sanhedrin, “We must obey God rather than people.” (Acts 5:29) Even laws intended to honor God may be broken if to obey them is to do something against our faith or to do something unloving. Jesus healed people on the Sabbath. He taught women. He ate with sinners. The experts in the Law said he was breaking the Law and in league with the devil. But Jesus did these things in obedience to a higher law. The law of loving God and loving others superseded the ones that denied and divided people. Laws may embody justice but administered without the Spirit of God they lack his mercy and his grace. Without his mercy and his grace we do not see a true picture of God. As it says in the very first chapter of John's gospel, “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” (John 1:17)
I wonder what the newly baptized Gentile eunuch thought when he picked up his scroll again and read on. Because just a few chapters later in Isaiah, it reads: “No foreigner who becomes a follower of the Lord should say, 'The Lord will certainly exclude me from his people.' The eunuch should not say, 'I am like a dried up tree.' For thus says the Lord: For the eunuchs who observe my Sabbaths and choose what pleases me and are faithful to my covenant, I will set up within my temple and my walls a monument that will be better than sons and daughters. I will set up a permanent monument for them that remain.
“As for the foreigners who become followers of the Lord and serve him, who love the name of the Lord, and want to be his servants—all who keep the Sabbath and do not defile it, and who are faithful to my covenant—I will bring them to my holy mountain; I will make them happy in the temple where people pray to me. Their burnt offerings and sacrifices will be accepted on my altar, for my temple will be known as a temple where all nations may pray.” (Isaiah 56:3-7)
Did Philip remember that part? Or did he just listen to the Spirit? Either way, he obeyed the will of God and the church grew in an unexpected direction. The African empire of Meroe is better known to us as the Nubian kingdom of Kush. It was so powerful that the Romans, unable to conquer it, made a treaty with it. Eventually Nubia became a Christian nation and resisted Islam until the beginning of the 16th century. It was located where Sudan is today. (And as a side note, the Ethiopian church, located in a nation to the south of Nubia, is one of the oldest in Christendom.)
Following Jesus is trickier than just following rules. Because, as C.S. Lewis says, the Christian life is not so much like following engineering plans as it is like painting a portrait. Each of us is in the process of becoming a portrait in miniature of Christ. We are not identical like photos but each one of us is like an individual artist's impression, as different and yet as similar as El Greco's Christ and Rembrant's and Giotto's and Da Vinci's and Dali's. As any artist knows, sometimes you have to break the rules to capture the truth of your subject.
Sometimes to save a person, to turn a life around, to find a lost sheep, you have to break some rules. After all, God broke a number of the laws of nature to redeem us. But we must never break the rules for frivolous or personal reasons. The way to know when to do it is to listen to the Spirit. And to make sure you hear him and hear him correctly, you must stay close to him, so close that he is in you and you are in him, and every incandescent thought is enkindled by his divine spark, every word is an echo of his concerns, and every action an expression of his love.
This was first preached on April 18, 2003. There has been some updating.
No comments:
Post a Comment