RCL Year B, Proper 14

I’ve been with you at ECA long enough that you probably have a pretty good sense of who I am. You see me parent my kids, you engage with me in meetings and conversations, you listen to me preach. You might think you know me well enough to predict what I’ll do next. But here’s something you might not know. If I got to do everything my own way, I’d be living very differently than I do now.

I would sleep in in the mornings – not too late, just a little bit, later than I do now. Then I’d get up and go for a long run, sit and pray in silence, eat breakfast in peace. I’d go to work at a job that was high-powered and important (or as important as you can get in the church), something where I got to do all interesting things all day and never anything boring, and where I got to travel a lot and meet interesting people and have Sundays off. I’d wear better clothes and style my hair. I’d read a lot of books and I’d be current on my periodicals and I’d know all the most recent films. And in my time off, I’d be up in the mountains, backpacking for long stretches of time and climbing all the major peaks in the lower 48, maybe even Denali up in Alaska. I’d be terrifically interesting to talk to because of all this.

But instead, I’m who I am here in front of you now. Maybe you’re thinking, darn, that other one would be a much cooler rector to have. But I’m who you’ve got.

I get up earlier than I’d like to every day, because I have kids who get up early and a husband who also wants to fit in his exercise in our busy mornings. I run only as long as I’ve got time for, rarely more than an hour, because I have to get back to help the kids get ready and drive Benji to his school. I work in parish ministry because I love people like you, and I care about your walk with God, and how in all the little ways of daily life we can figure out together how to grow deeper in faith. I’m not at the office all the time or traveling to big conferences because I need to be there for my family as well. But I work Sundays because that’s when you all come to church. I don’t do much with my clothes or hair because sticky fingers are always grabbing me and there’s not enough time to get a haircut and besides, all of that costs money. I rarely have time to read. I can’t go on long backpacking trips – last week our family accomplished a one-night, 2-mile trip together, and that will have to do. And I don’t climb mountains anymore, because it’s too risky and I have to stay alive for my family. I’m less interesting, maybe, but I’m more reliable than I would be if I did everything for myself, my own way. And I wouldn’t give up anything I have now for what I had when I was single and more able to do what I want, either.

I tell you all this because we’re reminded yet again in today’s scriptures that following Jesus and being a friend of God means giving up a lot of our own agenda and selves. We’re hearing a stretch of several weeks from the Gospel of John, of Jesus going on at some length about being the bread of life. It might start feeling a little circular and confusing and repetitive, because John’s language can sometimes be that way.

But to take what Jesus is saying out of the abstract, he’s telling us not to spend our time and energy on what doesn’t really feed our souls, on food that doesn’t last. Instead, Jesus is what sustains and nourishes us, giving his life for us so we can live. And in him, God is teaching us about how we should live. Jesus’s life is the message for us about how to be: we also are supposed to give ourselves up for others. That’s where eternal life is; that’s how we also are nourished and truly, deeply live.

The opposite of this is what happens with David in today’s Old Testament reading. His son Absalom has risen up against David with a rebel army, and Absalom has done outrageous things in order to claim his father’s throne for himself. David has had to flee Jerusalem, but has gathered up his forces for an all-o[...]

RCL Year B, Proper 13

The other day I was driving the kids to their summer day camp, with the morning radio on. A talk show began on the topic of climate change and global warming, with an interview of Richard Muller, a UC Berkeley professor of physics who has recently come around to the idea that climate change is a result of human action. Frances was listening intently, as she always does. She asked what they were talking about, and I tried to explain: weather on the Earth is changing, getting warmer, and it’s because of the stuff we’ve been putting into the air. She asked if it was bad, and I said, well, yes: it means more droughts, and higher sea levels, and hotter temperatures in some places, and so on. She was quiet for a moment, and then she said, And it’s our fault? I said yes, it’s because of what people did. All the rest of the drive we said very little, except as I dropped her off she asked, is something our family does putting bad things in the air? I said, well, yes, every time we drive the car, for one thing. That was that – she ran off to join her new friends at the camp, I walked Benji to his room, and then I returned to the car. I drove to church, and then I started to cry. It wasn’t the first time I’ve thought about these issues, but it was different being confronted with it by my child. Because yes, I am part of what will make this world harder for Frances and Benjamin to live in. And we have done a lot to ruin it.

That’s the kind of realization David comes to in today’s Old Testament reading. Last week we heard the racy story of David and Bathsheba, of how David takes another man’s wife for himself, gets her pregnant, and then has that man killed to cover up his sin. This is perhaps typical tyrant behavior, but this is not just any old Middle Eastern potentate doing a power play – this is the chosen king of Israel, God’s own beloved. There’s nothing good about David in this story. He’s a greedy, power-mad autocrat who uses other people and destroys them in pursuit of his own pleasure. This is a long way from the David who heard God’s call through Samuel and was anointed king; a long way from the David who wanted to build God a temple. So God sends Nathan to speak the truth to David’s closed mind – and Nathan does so artfully, with a story that arouses David’s righteous indignation. ‘A rich man with a lot of sheep stole the one sheep owned by a poor man – owned and loved and cared for by that poor man as his own child – just to slaughter it and serve it to his guests. What do you think should happen to him, O king?’ David responds immediately: ‘He deserves to die! What a horrible thing to do.’ ‘You are the man,’ says Nathan to David. ‘This story is really about you, O king.’ And David immediately gets it. He could hotly deny it; he could have Nathan killed for his temerity. But instead he responds, ‘I have sinned against the Lord.’

Sin comes in many forms. Sometimes we get it ourselves when we’ve done something wrong. We hear the message loud and clear inside ourselves, maybe even before we act, and we know too well how badly we have behaved. Other times we have to hear it from others to see for ourselves. The sin might be something as huge and hideous as committing adultery and arranging for murder. More often it’s something smaller, a mean word spoken or a kind word withheld. We all do little things every day that can cause lasting hurt to others. It also might be sin that we’re a part of without really meaning to be – what I felt confronted with by Frances’ questions – the sin of living at the expense of others, simply because of how our world has been set up.

No matter what we have done or where the realization of our sin comes from, however, we deal best with the wrong we have committed when we hear Nathan’s words addressed to ourselves. Nathan says to David, you are the man who did this. We need also to hear it: You are the man. You are the woman. You are the one who did this. Harsh words – but it[...]

RCL Year B, Proper 11

Life is what happens when you’re making other plans. Or, in another way of putting it: if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

That seems to be the gist of what we hear in today’s readings. In the first, David is seized with the brilliant and laudable idea that now is the time to build a temple for worshiping God. But God says no. In the gospel, Jesus takes his disciples off for a long-overdue sabbatical. But the crowds find them – break time is over. In both stories, good, reasonable decisions get turned on their heads by equally good, reasonable arguments to the contrary. You think it’s hard to find a plan and stick to it? If folks in the Bible have this problem, no wonder it’s hard to keep ourselves on track.

In the Old Testament story, David is perfectly right to think that it’s time to get Israelite worship more established. The pilgrim people have found a home – they are in the Promised Land, Jerusalem is built, they have a proper king and that king has a proper palace. The ark has been brought into the holy city. Now is the logical time to build a temple. David’s trusted prophet Nathan agrees. But God does not, and makes his feelings known to Nathan – happily, before David starts his building project. ‘I never asked for a house,’ God says. ‘It’s not your job to build me a house. In fact, I’m building you a house, raising up your offspring after you to be king for ever. That king will build me a house, but as for you, forget about it.’ Oh, says David. I just thought…well, never mind.

In the gospel, Jesus and the disciples are perfectly right to think it’s time for a break. They can’t go anywhere without the crowds of people thronging around them. Jesus has been doing nothing but preaching and healing, and his disciples are run ragged with crowd control. They haven’t even had a chance to eat. Everyone knows you need to eat and rest if you’re going to keep serving others – it’s the whole essence of self-care. You can’t care for others if you’re run down yourself. So they go to do just that…but here they all come again. And Jesus is seized with such compassion for the people that he gets up and starts teaching and healing all over again. Never mind about taking that rest. The disciples are exhausted, and in next week’s reading we’ll hear them grumble about that. But there’s need to be met, and for Jesus, that takes priority.

So what’s the message here? Build up the church and offer glorious worship? No, focus on being faithful and prayerful, and let God take the lead. Take a sabbath rest and recharge yourself? No, serve the needy and poor who are all around you. Makes you wonder just which direction we’re meant to be heading in. It’s no wonder these arguments have remained unresolved in the church throughout the ages – no wonder councils of the church are such complicated things. Our church’s General Convention just ended last week, and though there were some clear stands taken on certain issues, it’s hard to say in other ways just what decisions did get made. The grumbling is rampant. All that time and they can’t even decide what to do about the church headquarters in New York. All that time talking about restructuring the church and they end up naming a committee to look into it. And as one conservative columnist and many other pundits objected, all that time pandering to trendy liberal ideas and no clear path forward for a dying church. C’mon, people, we need a plan!

Maybe you’ve seen this happen in your own lives too. We just returned from a long, long road trip with our two small children. It’s a ridiculous idea, a road trip with two small children. To that brew we threw in family members and ailing parents. We tossed in a week of camp that began the trip, with transitions of power and unclear lines of authority and responsibility. We added a liberal dose of serious injury when Frances burned her hands. And to round it off well, we sprinkled in exhaustion and a fever, and a small [...]

RCL Year B, Proper 6

 

So in the saga of Israel’s kings, things have not turned out well with King Saul. Samuel told the people it was a bad idea to ask for a king, but they wanted one anyway. And Saul has not turned out to be a godly king. He has disobeyed God’s commands, full of his own power instead of listening to what God wanted him to do. God tells Samuel that he’s going to replace Saul as king, but by now Samuel has gotten invested in Saul and is upset about this. So Samuel and Saul have a bitter argument, and Samuel chastises Saul for his disobedience – but God has decided, and so Samuel must as well. So Samuel, now even older than before, sets out again on God’s mission to anoint a new king.

God tells Samuel the new king will be one of the sons of Jesse from Bethlehem, but he doesn’t tell him which son.  So there is this elaborate process of each son passing before Samuel, while Samuel waits on the Lord to tell him which is the one. Samuel sees the eldest and thinks he must be it, but God says, that’s not him – remember, I see differently than you. And after all the sons have gone by and God hasn’t spoken, Samuel asks, aren’t there any more? Well, yes, says Jesse, there’s David, but he’s the youngest and he’s out watching the sheep. Samuel says, bring him. And when David is brought, God says, this is the one – he is good in my sight as well as yours. Anoint him.

There’s a whole play of words going on in this passage around seeing – some version of the word ‘see’ is used in this passage eight times, though it doesn’t show up that way in our translation. God tells Samuel to go to Jesse’s family because he ‘sees’ a king among those sons. When Samuel thinks Eliab must be the chosen one, God says, don’t see his appearance or height as the sign – for God does not see as mortals see. They see outward appearance; God sees the heart. When David comes, he is described as good to look upon – easy on the eyes, we might say. And God says, this is the one I saw as king. In the end there’s a happy coincidence of God-seeing and human-seeing in David – God chooses him, the ruddy, handsome one. It’s a sign that both God and people will find him to be a good king, indeed the model of good kingship for Israel for ages to come.

There’s also a happy coincidence for us of this passage with the parable Jesus tells in today’s gospel about the mustard seed. The kingdom of God, Jesus says, is like a mustard seed: tiny and insignificant to look at, but it grows and takes over before you know it. Humans look on the seed as not much of anything; God sees in the seed the potential for what is to come. And as one scholar, John Dominic Crossan, notes, ‘The point…is not just that the mustard plant starts as a…small seed and grows into a shrub… it is that it tends to take over where it is not wanted, that it tends to get out of control…And that, said Jesus, was what the Kingdom was like…like a pungent shrub with dangerous takeover properties.’ Mustard is a plant that grows without being planted, and takes over fields that are left fallow. It’s really kind of a nuisance plant, and the birds that come and nest in it are the kind of birds who might eat the seeds you’re trying to sow in the fields you’re cultivating. Not necessarily the image we might come up with for God’s action among us.

But there’s a lesson in these two readings, and it’s one that I for one need to be reminded of over and over again. In God’s world, what we think of as greatness doesn’t count. In God’s world, the weak and insignificant might be the very ones God has in mind to choose – and the ones who will change the world.

This week we had our Vacation Bible School at ECA. We spent the week focusing on the Olympic Games – we chose this theme because the Summer Olympics will take place later this summer in London. On the one hand, the Games are all about excelling and being the best: the one who beats everyone else is given the gold medal, the highest honor of all. Athletes [...]

RCL Year B, Proper 5

In the church lectionary – the cycle of scripture readings – we now settle into the long season of ‘ordinary time.’ After all the readings chosen for the themes of the season, now we get to spend a long period just following the narratives along, hearing about casts of characters and what they’re up to as the plot moves on. I like this season – I like stories, and the chance to tell and listen to stories with other people. It’s one of the chief joys I find in having kids, that I get to read aloud to them – especially so when they’re old enough to read something in chapters, like the Little House books or the Wizard of Oz series, with lots of different plot twists and developments in each chapter that you get to experience together. It’s a refreshing change from reading Where the Wild Things Are for the twentieth time that week – as wonderful as that book is. I’ll leave it to you to guess which of my kids prefers which book.

We get stories both ways in scripture. The old old story of Jesus’s life, his birth, his ministry, his passion & death, his resurrection – that is a great big story that is well worth telling and retelling time and again. But there are other stories in scripture that are wonderful ones too, and in our Old Testament cycle this year we get to hear some of those. This is the year we hear about the kings, about Saul and David and Solomon and all of their exploits and intrigues. These stories are exciting, the kind they make into children’s books – battles and scheming and rebellions. They’re also the kind they don’t make into children’s books, as we’ll hear when we get to the story about Bathsheba.

But before we get to the exciting stories we have to set the stage for them, which is what happens in today’s reading. First, it might help if we have a brief review of the history: There were Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the patriarchs: grandpa, son, and grandson. Jacob had a son named Joseph who was sold into slavery by his brothers to Egypt, but who then rose to power there and was able to save his family from famine when they came begging. So all the family settled in Egypt. But some time later, a new king, Pharaoh, enslaved these people, who had become known as the Israelites. Moses was called by God and led the people out of Egypt with God’s help. They wandered around the desert wilderness for 40 years, crossed over the Jordan River under Joshua’s leadership, and settled in the Promised Land of Canaan. They fought lots of battles to conquer that land, and as a small warrior tribe they were led by various charismatic leaders called judges who arose from time to time when leadership was needed. Finally Samuel became their judge and leader. But in today’s reading the people tell Samuel they’re through with him and don’t want a dynasty passing to his sons. They want to have a king so they can be like other nations. If you think of the people of Israel as a single person, they were a child with the patriarchs, an adolescent in the wilderness, and now they’ve grown into what they think is adulthood. It’s time, they think, for them to start calling the shots about who’s in charge. They want what other people have – they want the good job and the nice car and all of that, and they think it’s high time they get it. The word ‘entitlement’ might apply well here.

Samuel doesn’t like this – no wonder, for he’s being ousted from power before his time. God doesn’t like this – for similar but very different reasons, which we’ll get to in a minute. But God tells Samuel, give them what they want. Just make sure you tell them what having a king entails – if they think they’re so adult, let them make this decision with eyes wide open.

So Samuel does, and he lays it on thick. You want a king? This is what the king will do to you. He will take. (He says this 7 or 8 times over.) He will take what is yours for himself. He will take your children. He will take your crops. He will take your money. You will go[...]

RCL Year B, Trinity Sunday

So it’s Trinity Sunday. I’m going to begin by saying that it really doesn’t matter to me whether you accept the doctrine of the Trinity or not. Christians can get really caught up on doctrine, even those of us in the squishy Episcopal Church who don’t think doctrine matters that much. We can put too much emphasis on which beliefs we intellectually agree with and which ones we think are nonsense – perhaps one legacy of the Enlightenment, that we tend to exist so much in our heads, even when it comes to faith. When Elizabeth I settled the English Reformation by creating the Anglican church we still live in today, she said in essence, ‘Let them believe what they like, as long as they worship together.’ To waste a lot of time dithering about which details of doctrine make sense to us and which do not, and to think that therein lies the essentials of our faith, is neither within our tradition nor, I think, what God wants from us. There’s my manifesto.

But despite that, I think we do need just a few words of background about the doctrine of the Trinity. First of all, ‘doctrine’ isn’t a word we use very often in the Episcopal Church.  It has a certain quality of ‘something you’ve got to believe, because the religious authorities tell you to,’ and we don’t like being told what to think. (Actually, that’s more the definition of ‘dogma’ – ‘doctrine’ simply means teaching, while ‘dogma’ means a teaching that you’ve really got to accept.) But if you’ve ever thumbed through the catechism at the back of the Prayer Book – perhaps during a sermon – you’ve seen fairly clear statements about what our church believes. And there one question asks, ‘What is the Trinity?’ and is answered, ‘The Trinity is one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.’ We get that formulation first from the Bible, from the end of Matthew’s gospel when Jesus says go out and make disciples, ‘baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.’ And then that was cemented and clarified by a series of councils and arguments in the 4th century, specifically the Council of Nicaea and the Council of Constantinople. Described in 4th century Greek metaphysical language, the main teaching became that God is one in essence, distinguished in three persons. Working this out was extremely important to those councils, because people were killing each other over terms like essence, substance, persons, etc. The councils essentially weighed in on what the Trinity is not:  the Trinity is not three gods, nor is it a pantheon of three godlike figures with different amounts of power; the Trinity is not one God wearing three different masks. This is the stuff seminarians still puzzle over now, trying to make sense of the difference between terms like homoousios and homoiousios, but no one has fought a war over it in quite some time.

And you’re wondering, how is this relevant to my life today?

The thing is, despite the abstractions, the doctrine of the Trinity is at the very heart of the Christian faith. Like everything else we’ve come up with to say about God and the world, the doctrine of the Trinity is really an expression of what people have experienced in their lives. The tangles of logic in the 4th century were attempts to put words to the sense people had of God – God in the Bible and God in the community that grew out of the stories in the Bible. God was experienced in different ways: as the creative force in the world, and so they called God Creator or Father – using a male term partly because it was believed that the male had more to do with creating life than the female. They experienced God in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, so they called God Son, the living God in human flesh. They experienced God as still active in the world and in their communities, so they called God Spirit, the breath of God amongst them. Even though none of this is clearly outlined in the Bible, the doctrine of the Trinity was a[...]

RCL Year B, 7 Easter

A few months back when the liturgy committee and our stewardship chair talked about focusing on stewardship in this season of Easter, we looked at the readings for each week to see what different angles on the theme were suggested by the scriptures. We had a few ideas in mind of different aspects of stewardship we wanted to talk about, but different ideas came up as we looked at how to align those with the readings in question. We didn’t intend for it to work out this way, but it does seem that we’ve kind of progressed along in a certain direction – from the easy and obvious to ideas that are more difficult for us to deal with. We started with care for creation, a pretty simple sell: Earth Day and the environmental movement have been around long enough that the idea of caring for creation is pretty standard now. It might be politically charged just how we apply that, but it’s not novel that we have some responsibility for creation. The next week we talked about caring for our brothers and sisters around the world – again, not too revolutionary an idea for Christians. Then came a week on living out our mission in everyday life and work – obvious as an idea perhaps, but very hard to put into practice. Last week we tried to get our heads around our spiritual gifts and how God gives them to us for other people, not for our own glory. That goes against the grain a little. And this week – well, this week we’re winding it all up with how we live through and serve God through change and transition. And no one ever likes to think about change.

But the theme of change fits with this Sunday in the church year, the Sunday after the Ascension and before Pentecost. In the gospel story, this is the week of transition. Jesus has died and has risen from the dead, and for forty days the disciples have all been spending time with him and living into this new reality of the risen Christ. But now, suddenly, he’s left them. He tells them to wait for the coming of the Spirit, who will tell them what to do next. And then the Holy Spirit comes on Pentecost and utterly changes them and everything else besides.

Of course, from the disciples’ perspective, everything in the gospel has been change. From the moment Jesus calls to them in Galilee, things start shifting – they leave their livelihoods and families, they wander with him around the countryside, they get excited about the large crowds following and then they totally despair when Jesus is arrested and killed. There’s no status quo in the story. And it’s all change within the disciples too – they go from being fishermen and tax collectors to followers of a Messiah to preachers and evangelists throughout the known world. Talk about a career shift.

But it’s a long ways from there to the old joke, How many Episcopalians does it take to change a light bulb? If you’re wondering, the answer is four: One to change the bulb, and three to say they liked the old one better. It could be argued that Jesus was crucified in part because he represented too much change – the powers that be were so threatened by that that they killed him. Something in our nature, whoever we are, resists change.

But like it or not, we live, of course, in a time of great change.  Technology is evolving faster than we are – some of you have barely got onto email and others of you already call it old-school. You just learn one version of an Apple product and they come out with the next, much better one. A 20-year-old comes up with a fun way to connect people on campus and eight years later the company is worth $104 billion. And social change is happening more and more quickly – one writer pointed out how it took a century or more for the civil rights movement to take shape, while perspectives on gay rights have shifted in less than two decades. The church, of course, is changing too – the number of people who go to church has steadily declined over the last 50 years, and the average age of the church has gone [...]

RCL Year B, 6 Easter

 

We’re working our way through this theme of stewardship during Easter season. If you’ve heard me more than once, you should be getting the idea now. Everything we have is of God; we are stewards and caretakers of it, for the good of others. This idea shapes all we do as Christians. We care for creation; we care for each other’s physical well-being; we care for others through our daily work and conversations. Today I want to talk about how we care for ourselves – not in the usual sense of ‘taking time for me’ or eating healthy, but how we steward the specific gifts God has given each of us. Which means we have to think about what gifts we have, where they come from, and how we discern what to do with them.

There are a few different places in scripture, mostly in Paul’s letters, where spiritual gifts, or ‘charismata,’ are listed and named. They range from miraculous gifts like prophecy, healing, the gift of tongues – things we tend to see as obviously charismatic gifts, supernatural and not very common – to gifts like teaching, preaching, and generosity – things that have something to do with our character or our calling. People have tried to collate all the gifts into one list, numbering 25 or so spiritual gifts it is possible to have. But none of the lists in scripture are meant to be the sum total of all spiritual gifts – they just seem to be the ones Paul thinks of in the context of that particular letter. And the Holy Spirit being what it is, most accept that there are more gifts than are in that long list – talents, skills, aptitudes, all of them things that help build up the body of Christ.

The origin and purpose of the gifts are all the same: they are gifts given by the Holy Spirit, and they are for the benefit of others, not the one possessing them. We don’t control which ones we get; we don’t choose them. It’s the Holy Spirit who chooses how to dole them out, and we may not know the reasons why.

We get a reminder of the unpredictable plans of the Holy Spirit in the reading from Acts today. Peter the good Jew has just had a mind-blowing experience, visions and a calling to come visit the Gentile Roman centurion Cornelius and his household. The visions have been coming thick and fast to both Peter and Cornelius, and Peter is slowly realizing that maybe God has an interest in the Gentiles too. He preaches what one writer calls the most powerful sermon of all time, saying, ‘I truly understand that God shows no partiality,’ and then going on to tell the Gentiles the whole Christian story. In the middle of this fine sermon, the Holy Spirit interrupts him and ‘falls upon’ everyone there, Jews and Gentiles alike. (How awesome to have God drop in and validate your sermon while you’re still preaching it!) And with that, any reason for division just evaporates. The Gentiles have the Holy Spirit too – may as well invite them in. And so they’re baptized.

Peter, it seemed, had the gift of preaching. The Holy Spirit gave it to him, but Peter had no idea what that gift would be used for. Turns out the Spirit had in mind the total upheaval of all of his assumptions, and all the weight of ethnic history behind them. And the Holy Spirit wanted to use Peter’s gift for the explosive growth of the church. And to share the gospel without barriers, available to all.

Preaching – or exhortation, as it’s sometimes called – is just one of the gifts. No one has all of them. Everyone has some of them, at least to some extent. So there are many different spiritual gifts inventories and questionnaires that help you determine which you seem to have more of – a little like the vocational aptitude tests I took in high school, where you filled in a lot of bubbles and then learned that you were destined to be an occupational therapist. (That was one on my list – it stood out because at the time I had no idea what that was, and now that I do know, I know I would probably not make a good occupational therapist.)

The problem [...]

RCL Year B, 5 Easter

We’re still exploring the theme of stewardship in this season of Easter, looking at all the ways we care for and live out God’s gifts in our lives. On Earth Day we talked about care for creation; last week we talked about caring for brothers and sisters near and far away. Today it’s the stewardship of daily life: how we do our work, relate to our families, go about the tasks of every day as stewards of the gifts God gives us.

We have a great story to work with today, this one from the book of Acts about the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch. Acts is full of conversion stories, often of unexpected and unlikely people. This one we heard today is maybe the most surprising of them all. It’s about Philip, one of the seven men called as deacons, those who care for the needs of the widows and orphans in the community and who serve at the Lord’s table in the Eucharist. Stephen was one of those seven deacons as well, famous in Acts for preaching a long wonderful sermon and then being stoned to death. Philip fares better, preaching and proclaiming the gospel to people in Samaria, including Simon the magician. Then, called by the Spirit, he journeys to a road in the wilderness, where the eunuch comes riding along.

The eunuch is from Ethiopia, what would now be northern Sudan. He is a highly placed finance minister in the queen’s court, wealthy and influential. But in Jewish terms, he is an outcast, because as a eunuch he would not be able to participate in the Temple rituals – should he choose to convert to Judaism. He has not converted, but he clearly is interested, reading Isaiah as he rides along. The Spirit tells Philip to catch up with him, and he does, accosting the eunuch’s chariot. The eunuch invites him to sit up beside him and explain the scripture. Hearing the gospel from Philip, the eunuch is converted instantly, and passing a pool of water, they immediately stop the chariot in order to perform his baptism. As soon as that is accomplished, Philip up and disappears, heading off to preach and proclaim some more in Gentile regions.

For this encounter to happen and bear the fruit it did, both Philip and the eunuch have to do something extraordinary. The eunuch is a rich and powerful businessman, riding comfortably in his expensive car. But he invites Philip, on foot and out of breath, ragged from travel, to join him, so that he can hear what Philip might say. The eunuch longs to hear what the scripture is really about, and he will seek that understanding wherever it might be. Philip, for his part, listens to how God’s Spirit is calling him, first getting himself to this lonely road through the wilderness and then running up alongside this lavish chariot to holler out, ‘Do you understand what you’re reading?’ Even though the eunuch is an outcast and a Gentile, Philip hops up alongside and then, when the eunuch is ready, baptizes him. In this conversation, both sides reach out past their normal boundaries. And when they do, God works on their hearts, turning confusion into joy. A brief encounter between strangers from different worlds becomes holy; far more happens than you would ordinarily expect.

I came across an excerpt from a book by Matthew Fox called The Reinvention of Work. In it Fox talks about the difference between jobs and work. A job, he says, is a discrete task, often joyless, something that has to get done. Work, on the other hand, comes from our deepest self, an expression of creativity that serves others and therefore has real meaning in the world. I think he’s about right – when someone describes their work by saying, ‘Well, it’s a job,’ then you know that they’re not finding a lot of joy and meaning from what they do. The question Fox poses then is how we can turn a job into work. Given that everyday life is full of jobs – whether it’s the place we go to work every day that feels like a job, or just the list of to-dos and tasks that occupy our time, none of us can escape doing jobs. But [...]