Dr. Jon Burnham preached this sermon from Acts 8:26-40
on May 10, 2009 at St. John's Presbyterian Church in Houston
(Easter 5B / High School Graduates honored today)
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In an old Peanuts strip, Peppermint Patty and Violet are reflecting on being a grandmother. After Patty declares that she would like to be a grandmother, Violet agrees and says it would be nice because all they have to do is "sit and rock" (not quite the case, is it?) The girls then decide that the trouble with being a grandmother is that first you have to be a wife and then a mother and Violet sighs, "I know it it's all those preliminaries that get me!" (Adapted from Peanuts. Original strip run March 13, 1950. Reprinted in 2004 in The Complete Peanuts: The Definitive Collection of Charles M. Schulz's Comic Strip Masterpiece 1950-1952.)
Sometimes we have trouble responding to what our mother tells us to do. So imagine the act of faith it took for Peter to respond to the angel of the Lord who told him to get up and take a wilderness road. A wilderness road is a road to nowhere. Even so, Philip does what the angel tells him to do. This story is a couple of thousand years old. Today, we don't often hear from angels who speak to us. In fact, if one of the Presbyterian ministerial candidates we heard speak at presbytery yesterday had said that an angel had spoken to her and directed her to speak to someone else some questioning eyebrows would have been raised by that statement. Yet our Bible story today begins with the Spirit sending an angel of the Lord to speak to Philip. The preliminaries in our story today has to do with an angel of the Lord speaking to Philip.
Angels are messengers in the Bible and Philip is a messenger in our Bible story today. So the word goes from our angel messenger to a human messenger. And the message from the angel to the human messenger is that Philip is to speak to a spiritual seeker who is unnamed but clearly identified as an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Queen of Ethiopians. So we have so far the seeker who is the eunuch and the speaker who is Philip.
Let's consider the eunuch. As the person in charge of the Queen's entire treasury, the eunuch is an important man. He is described as an Ethiopian. The eunuch has a powerful position in the court of Candace, queen of Meroe, a Nubian realm along the upper Nile.
The eunuch has been to Jerusalem to worship God in the Jewish temple and he is now traveling home by chariot and he is reading as he rides in the chariot. Reading was what people then did during travel since neither the miniature DVD player nor the Game Boy Advance system had yet been invented. The eunuch was open to the Holy Spirit and was ready to receive guidance. The eunuch is a seeker.
The Spirit speaks to Philip through an angel and tells him to head South from Jerusalem to Gaza. This is a wilderness road. The Spirit often sends messengers first to the wilderness to test and purify them. For example, the Spirit sent Jesus to the wilderness immediately after his baptism. To the wilderness to be tested by the devil. The Spirit calls us to be messengers like Jesus and like Philip. And like them, the Spirit sometimes sends us out into a spiritual wilderness to be tested and purified. The Spirit may use a bully at school or work to grow in us the fruit of the Spirit: Patience, kindness, gentleness, and self-control. The Spirit works in mysterious ways in our lives and in the life of the eunuch in our Bible story today. The Spirit uses other people, even strangers, to teach us spiritual truths about Jesus. Notice how the Spirit speaks to the eunuch through a stranger named Philip. The Spirit finds a way to communicate with spiritual seekers such as the eunuch.
The Spirit told Philip, "Climb into the eunuch's chariot." What a strange suggestion the Spirit gives Philip. The Spirit's suggestions often sound strange but if we obey the Spirit then miracles may happen before our very eyes. The Spirit told Philip, "Climb into the eunuch's chariot. "Running up alongside, Philip heard the eunuch reading Isaiah and asked, "Do you understand what you're reading?"
The eunuch said, "Tell me, who is the prophet talking about: himself or some other?" Philip grabbed his chance. Using this passage as his text, he preached Jesus to him.
As they continued down the road, they came to a stream of water. The eunuch said, "Here's water. Why can't I be baptized?" He ordered the chariot to stop. They both went down to the water, and Philip baptized him on the spot. When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of God suddenly took Philip off, and that was the last the eunuch saw of him. But he didn't mind. He had what he'd come for and went on down the road as happy as he could be. (Translation from The Message) The Spirit used a speaker to connect to a seeker.
Seekers are all around us. The teenager who has questions about science is a seeker. The college student who has questions about God is a seeker. The mother who is about to bid farewell to her son who is leaving for college is a seeker. Seekers surround us. Our challenge is not finding seekers. Our challenge is to hear and obey the Spirit as Philip did. The Spirit works to draw people to Christ. The Spirit asks us to cooperate in this process. We cannot save anyone and we are not responsible for the salvation of anyone. But we are called by Christ to cooperate with the Spirit as Philip did. To speak when the Spirit urges.
Friends, we live in a broken world. People are hurting out there. People have questions about Jesus. People have questions because the Spirit is working in their lives. Let us not be afraid to speak for Jesus. We may not be Biblical scholars. We may not be eloquent speakers. We may not even know what to say. But if we open our mouths in faith the Spirit will speak through us. The challenge to our graduating senior is the challenge to us as well: “Be a seeker and be a speaker.”
There are many ways to speak and the Apostle Paul told us about the most eloquent way to speak, in the language of love, in 1 Corinthians chapter 13, which is called “the love chapter.” Let me share you a paraphrase of that passage adapted for mother's day by an unknown author.
If I live in a house of spotless beauty with everything in its place, but have not love,
I am a housekeeper--not a homemaker. If I have time for waxing, polishing,
and decorative achievements, but have not love, my children learn cleanliness -
not godliness. Love leaves the dust in search of a child's laugh. Love smiles at the tiny fingerprints on a newly cleaned window. Love wipes away the tears before it wipes up the spilled milk. Love picks up the child before it picks up the toys.
Love is present through the trials. Love reprimands, reproves, and is responsive.
Love crawls with the baby, walks with the toddler, runs with the child, then stands aside to let the youth walk into adulthood. Love is the key that opens salvation's message to a child's heart. Before I became a mother I took glory in my house of perfection. Now I glory in God's perfection of my child.
As a mother, there is much I must teach my child, but the greatest of all is love.
I hope our graduating seniors take something from their experience in this congregation. I hope they take from here the importance of sacrificial love, selfless giving, expecting nothing in return. They have seen selfless giving demonstrated in this congregation in many ways: Through church school teachers who show up even when no one else does, from youth group leaders on mission trips, through prayerful support for their families. Our graduates have also seen sacrificial love in countless acts of kindness from their mothers and fathers. The kind of love a mother has for her child is the kind of love we are called to share as Christians.
Let's speak out for Christ in the language of love as did Philip. The results may be immediate and astounding as in our story today with Philip and the eunuch. More likely, we may never witness the results. That doesn't matter. We'll leave the results to the Spirit. All that really matters is that we speak a healing word. We do not have to hear from an angel before we speak to seekers. Thanks be to the Spirit who gives us the language of love and helps us to eloquently speak that language to seekers.
