What is to prevent?

Today is the fifth Sunday of Easter. For fifty days, we light the Paschal Candle, we use our best white vestments, and we say and sing “Alleluia” every time we get the chance. During the Easter season, every Sunday we also read from the book of Acts. That makes sense, because Acts tells the story of the Easter Church, the story of that first generation that knew Jesus and witnessed his resurrection, the story of how they responded to all that he taught them. Acts is an Easter book.

The first generation of Christians was remarkable. They faced persecution and suffering, but still they lived and proclaimed the Gospel without fear. Before the words “church” or “Christian” were ever used, Jesus’s followers spoke of “the Way.” They shared everything they had with one another.

They weren’t perfect. They made mistakes. Argued. Jockeyed for power. They were human. They still had things to learn. But they had met Jesus, and they did their best to follow him.

One question that came up again and again in those early years was the question of just how far God’s love could reach, of how broad this new community should be. Who was in and who was out? Again and again they asked the question: “Can we include this person? This stranger? This foreigner? This person whose appearance and speech and habits are so different from everything we know?” Again and again they asked. And again and again the Holy Spirit taught them that the answer was “yes.” Yes, God’s love could reach so far. Peter could dine with a Roman military leader who didn’t keep kosher. Paul could form communities of Greeks and Romans. Foreigners and women and blind beggars: all were welcome.

We heard one of the most remarkable of those stories this morning—the story of the Ethiopian eunuch.

This man was about as foreign as he could be. He came from modern-day Sudan, south of Egypt, at the outer borders of the known world. His skin would have been very dark, African rather than middle-Eastern. He served a ruling queen in a matriarchal form of government. “Candace” was a title, not a name. And he was a eunuch.

I hope you’ll forgive me for mentioning some awkward details, but we can’t understand this passage without understanding a bit more about the role of eunuchs in ancient societies. Eunuchs were men who had been castrated, often when they were still children. The lack of testosterone gave them a distinctive appearance – no facial hair, a round face, a high voice, often a short stature. They could be recognized at a glance, and they were at once privileged and outcast. Privileged because they were trusted as servants in contexts where they needed to be alone with women. Outcast because they were viewed as disfigured and unclean. They could have no children, no families.

The book of Acts tells us that the Ethiopian was a court official in charge of his queen’s treasury and that he had come to Jerusalem to worship. We’re also told that he was reading the prophet Isaiah. That probably means that he was what was known as a “God fearer”—a non-Jewish follower of the Jewish God who hadn’t fully converted. He was probably a gentile, but even if he had been born into a Jewish family, as a eunuch he would have still been an outsider. He wouldn’t have been allowed to fully participate in the Jewish faith.

A eunuch on his way home to a foreign court was a pretty unlikely candidate for evangelism. Foreign origin, foreign appearance, foreign culture, and foreign sexuality. But still an angel sends Philip to seek him out. Philip runs up to him, hears him reading aloud from Isaiah, and asks if he understands what he’s reading. Philip tells the man about Jesus. As the two continue traveling along the road, the eunuch sees water. And he says “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?”

What a loaded question that was. “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” What fear and hope are wrapped up in those words! “What is to prevent me from being baptized?”

So many things. He almost surely wasn’t Jewish—and this was long before the church resolved the debate of whether gentiles could be baptized without converting to Judaism. He was a foreigner on his way home, so he wouldn’t be joining any local church. He’d had no time for long study or prayer. He’d only first heard about Jesus moments before. He was part of a sexual minority, an outcast, seen as unclean by the society in which Philip lived.

“What is to prevent me from being baptized?”

To Philip, the question required no verbal answer. Just action. “Philip and the eunuch went down into the water, and Philip baptized him.”

This was the first gentile convert to Christianity we hear about in the Bible. An obvious foreigner. A sexual minority. An outcast from much of normal society.

What was to prevent him from being baptized?

Nothing.

Think back to that first generation of the Church, that Easter Church. They learned again and again that Jesus’s message could and must be proclaimed in contexts beyond their imagination. They learned that in the Way of Jesus, no person could be an outcast.

The men and women who witnessed Jesus’s resurrection lived as if the walls their society insisted upon simply didn’t exist.

People are people, though. Within a generation, dividing walls reappeared. And walls remain today. Our very human prejudices and fears teach us to set limits, to guard what we have. To be wary of those who are different than us, of people we don’t fully understand. But that is not and has never been Jesus’s message.

Jesus taught that God’s love and grace is so much broader than our own.

I hope we can remember the lesson Philip learned from the Ethiopian eunuch whenever a new person comes through our doors. I hope we can remember it whenever we’re tempted to keep our distance from someone whose life and experience we don’t fully understand. And I hope we can remember it in those moments when we ourselves feel like the outsider, the foreigner, the outcast.

As the letter of John puts it: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.”

What is to prevent us from living out that message of love?