Acts 8:26-40
The United Methodist Church made the news again this week as their General Conference convened in Charlotte, North Carolina. Though a significant number of churches and districts have left the denomination in recent years, somewhere around a quarter of local congregations, they are still fighting over LGBTQI+ clergy and same-sex marriage. I find this frustrating, for while Methodism was never a stop on my particular spiritual journey, there is much to be admired in their theological heritage, never mind all those Wesleyan hymns, which are awesome. For one thing, their understanding of grace is way better than that of our Calvinist tradition, though that is a bit “in the weeds” for our purposes this morning. Besides, we’ve been ordaining LGBTQI+ folx for more than half a century.
So I guess that, given their queasiness about queerness, I should not have been surprised at what I discovered in my Bible commentary on the Acts of the Apostle this week as I was doing my sermon prep. That particular volume in the “Interpretation” series is authored by Methodist theologian and Bishop Will Willimon. I generally like Willimon, but he is off base when he states in his commentary that the Ethiopian eunuch in today’s reading was not necessarily castrated, and therefore not necessarily excluded from the Temple community. He then goes on to blatantly ignore that elephant in the room, going to absurd lengths to interpret the text.
So let’s be really clear, and really in-context. This story is weird and very radical.
Philip is a sort-of B-league apostle, not one of the inner four, but not among those we forget or that change depending on the gospel you are reading. He is a transfer from the movement surrounding John the Baptizer. He comes from the same town as Peter and Andrew, yet his name is Greek, and he is the one who connects with the Greeks at the door who wish to meet Jesus. We can assume that this conversation, between the Ethiopian court official and Philip, took place in Greek, which was the lingua franca of the eastern Roman empire.
The Ethiopian is a castrated court official, something that was not uncommon in that age and region, especially among royal courts that kept harems. And let’s just park all of the misogyny of harems, because it is obvious enough, and not the point of the story.
Willimon wants us to believe Luke is using the term “eunoxos” to mean court official, but that term, “dynastes,” is also in the passage. In the same way, Willimon wants to conflate “Eithiop” with otherness generally, but again, Luke has chosen all three descriptors. This man is what the text says he is, despite efforts to straight-wash him.
Castrated men were excluded from participation in the religious assembly. Look at Deuteronomy 23:1. We may know that the Book of Deuteronomy is a late and priestly fabrication, not something written by Moses, but Philip, the character within the framework of our story, and Luke, the author of this historical account of the early church, absolutely believed Deuteronomy to be the authentic rule of God.
Scholars believe the Mosaic ban on eunuchs was probably a way of differentiating pre-rabbinic Judaism from the fertility cults of surrounding cultures. It certainly cohered with ancient Jewish notions of impurity, where physical deformity was a sign of sin and/or divine sanction. And given the Jewish obsession with racial purity, evident in the scriptures and sometimes turned against their own, it is not surprising that any impediment to reproduction was viewed as anathema. A modern analog is the obsession of America’s white Christian ethno-nationalists with forced birth and any forms of non-reproductive sex.
The good news for the Ethiopian eunuch who served as a court official is that while there was always this racist argument over who was and was not a Jew, this puritanical obsession over who could and could not be a part of the religious assembly, God, as revealed through the prophets, would have none of it. The unknown author of Trito-Isaiah writes: “To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose what pleases me and hold fast to my covenant – to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that will endure forever.”
Still, this is a very queer caravan. The Ethiopian is probably a “theophobe,” literally a God-fearer, which was the term used for Gentiles attracted to Jewish community. Philip is a sort of forerunner to Paul, is the first to evangelize non-Jews in Samaria before Paul the Pharisee has a psychotic break on the road to Damascus.
Still, the angelic command to head to the Gaza road is a little weird, and only half as freaky as the end of the passage, where the Holy Spirit seemingly teleports Philip to Azotus, a town known in Hebrew Scripture as Ashdod.
Despite Willimon’s qualms, despite about 2000 years of trying to make this about things it isn’t actually about, this is about the wide-open community of salvation, and not just wide-open to Gentiles. The Ethiopian eunuch who serves as a court official is not a cisgender reproductive heterosexual. The conversion of the Gentiles begins with a queer, a modern category but completely appropriate in this context.
Which part of scripture do you choose to believe? The part that makes God a small-minded racist in a toxic and abusive relationship with one tiny tribe? Or the part that says God is bigger than all that hateful human nonsense?
And if you are here this morning, you’ve probably already made your choice. You’ve decided to let God be God, and to refuse to let Franklin Graham be God, or to let Pope Francis be God, or, for that matter, to let a text that is almost two-thousand years old based on sometimes contradictory originals be God.
But it doesn’t matter what we have decided. It matters what we actually do.
How do we make space for the Ethiopian eunuch who serves as a court official, and the man rebuilding his life after years spent living in a cemetery and fighting demons, and the woman who was accused of adultery, dragged through the streets and threatened with death?
I have my own ideas. I think humility matters. Not just theological humility, but personal and institutional humility.
I think laughter matters. Religion takes itself way too seriously sometimes. Well, most of the time if we are honest.
We have to have room for joy, and not the slightly creepy joy of sacrificial atonement and the Cross, but the joy of the addict who gets their green chip after 90 days and the joy of finding the first iris of the season in a burst of springtime magic.
We have to have love. Even when someone creates conflict over the carpet color or hymn selection, because it isn’t about the carpet color or the hymn selection, and whatever it is in their life making them anxious deserve our prayer and patience, and careful listening.
And speaking of listening, we have to create intentional space to hear stories, and not just the stories of Park or Thomas K. Beecher, but our stories and the stories of those who find their way to this community.
There is more, so much more. Having the courage to go immediately, like Philip, to create space where there was only prohibition, to bring the good news to strange places, like that road to Gaza, and that very queer caravan.
May we continue to be intentional as we share the good news, that in Jesus, we find a way to live and love, this day and always. Amen.