Focus: The Holy Spirits gathers us from all places and walks of life.
What does a Christian look like?
There’s a great little cartoon going around Facebook that shows a big, burly, tattooed guy in a biker jacket sitting on a bench. On either side of him are well-dressed people holding their Bibles. The woman, leaning away, says, “He thinks he is Christian,” while two men on the other side think, “You aren’t a true follower like us.” But as you look at the picture, what you notice is the man in the middle is praying “Christ, my heart is yours.” He is also the only one of the four people who actually has his Bible open. The cartoon is a blunt reminder of Mother Teresa’s famous quote, “If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”
So what does a Christian look like? That’s the question in today’s reading from Acts. We last met Philip in Acts 6, when he and six other men, including Stephen, were ordained as deacons, set apart for the distribution of food, so that the apostles (such as Peter and John) would have time to focus on prayer and preaching.
…which is why it may seem odd that Philip, a deacon, and not one of the apostles, is sent by the Holy Spirit into this bizarre situation where he is going to preach, teach, baptize, and, no doubt, pray a little bit along the way. Whatever the case, Philip has never seen anything like this before, and I don’t just mean the angel who appears to him.
At first, the juxtaposition in this story is comical. Philip, who we imagine is an average Joe, finds himself in the middle of a royal caravan in the wilderness! Imagine if you showed up in your pick-up truck in the middle of a presidential motorcade. And he hears this Ethiopian man reading out-loud. Ethiopia back then for a simple kid from Palestine was at the edge of the known universe: different country, different government, different language, different skin color—and not only that—this guy is the treasurer to the Queen. He is exotic, he is powerful, he is nowhere in Philip’s league, he is…a eunuch.
In general, eunuchs were respected, trusted to guard the Queen. But when it came to religion, it was “complicated,” as we might say today. Acts doesn’t tell us this particular man’s religion. He’s clearly not an Israelite. He may be what was called a “God-fearer,” someone who’s not Jewish, but believes in the God of Israel; he’s coming from Jerusalem and reading the prophet Isaiah, after-all. But what we can say is this: as a rule, eunuchs were prohibited by the Torah, Jewish law, from entering the assembly (Dt 23:1), from gathering with people at the Temple.
So what do you do with this man if you’re Philip? On the one hand: respected, even powerful! On the other: foreign, ritually unclean! We now have our answer as to why God sent Philip. If “when you judge people, you have no time to love them,” we have in the deacon Philip a man who has spent his entire Christian “career,” giving away food, helping the needy, loving people. In him, we see the opposite of that statement: “When you love people, you have no time to judge them.”
And Philip wastes no time. The Holy Spirit tells him, “Go! Join this man! Jump in this chariot! Join this motorcade!”—if you will. And, no doubt shocking all the dignitaries, he runs there, beside the eunuch. What does a Christian look like? Philip answers this question with his feet.
The rest of the story is beautiful. We meet in this man who’s unfortunately for all-time known simply as “the Ethiopian eunuch” a man who is so much more, who shows his character. He is humble, saying he doesn’t understand the reading without Philip’s teaching and preaching. And yet, he is bold. This man who would have been barred from worship in the Temple asserts his right to join the church. “Look, here is water. What’s to prevent me from being baptized?” Almost as if to say: “Are you going to stand in my way?” And Philip doesn’t.
What does a Christian look like? The man is a great portrait: Someone who reads the word of God, who prays, who asks questions, who has faith, who is baptized in Christ. The rest of those details that seem so important to the world: social status, wealth, race, national origin, power, they simply don’t matter.
Not to the Holy Spirit anyway. I said last week that the story of Acts is the story of the church of all-times, a story that we find ourselves in, too. Let’s be honest. The church has not always been so good at this. Congregations are still often separated by socioeconomic status. Race: Well, it took 200 years to get the Norwegian-American Lutherans and German-American Lutherans to worship together, for crying out loud. Martin Luther King’s words that “Eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America,” still ring true to our great shame.
But instead of focusing on the negative, I want to focus on the positive. When we get out of the way and let the Holy Spirit do her work, awesome things happen. Biblical scholar Will Willimon puts it this way: “In being obedient to the Spirit, [Christians] like Philip find
themselves in the oddest of situations with the most surprising sorts of people.” 1 That may sound like a pretty hollow endorsement: “oddest situations,” “most surprising sorts of people,” but, you know, often that’s how we grow—when we get to know people who see things differently from how we do, when we meet people who seem to have nothing in common with us, when we allow ourselves to be surprised by someone else’s gifts or perspective.
My favorite prayer in the Book of Common Prayer is for All Saints Day: “Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord.” Knitting. I’m not much of a knitter (some have accused me perhaps of being a nitpicker), but I know beauty when I see it: different fabrics, different colors, all being brought together to create something beautiful.
When I look at the church, that’s what I see. We are all here from different backgrounds, maybe we grew up singing out of different hymnals or no hymnal, we are here in the Spirit with Christians from across the town and across the world. And we all have different gifts and voices that are being knit together. Not by ourselves, but by the same knitter who brought together Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch that strange day two thousand years ago, the same knitter who sowed Jesus’s resurrected life together after the grave: the Holy Spirit. We Christians don’t always have much in common, except for one thing: we are baptized into Jesus’s name, we are joined into his death and resurrection, we trust in his promises. And that has always been and always will be enough.
What does a Christian look like? Let’s be like Philip, let’s answer the question with our feet, and find out. Amen.
1 William H. Willimon, Acts (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1988), 72.