10:30 am, Sun, April 28, 2024 ~ FBCA

(Acts 8:26-40; 1 John 7:7-21)

A week or two ago I was minding my own business, listening to the radio in my car. I was listening to CBC, so I should have been ready. I heard a song, a duet, by Orville Peck and Willie Nelson. “Cowboys are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other.” The song is actually more than forty years old, and Willie, for one, covered it in the past, back in 2006. I’d never heard of this ‘gay cowboy song.’

Today’s story from the Acts of the Apostles gives us reason to ponder people whose sex and gender do not fit into simple, easy categories. Man and woman, in other words, male and female. We know there are quite a few other categories or variations. God knows there is variety. What is the good news of our faith for everyone?

An apostle of Jesus named Philip is sent by the very Spirit of God to meet up with a traveller who, as the hymn just said, had dark skin and a foreign language. He also happens to have a very big job, back in Ethiopia: treasurer for the Queen. So, he has some status and position; but he is a eunuch, so people would have seen him as somewhat odd. What was a eunuch? What is a eunuch? A castrated male. This has been a practice in many lands and cultures of the world for thousands of years. Men have been castrated for various cultural and religious purposes - from preventing them from fathering children among the people they work for, to keeping their youthful, soprano voice into adulthood. Eunuchs were well known, but certainly considered different by many people.

This man, in Acts 8, also appears to be a God-fearer, which is what the Jews called people of other cultures who started following Jewish ways of worship and lifestyle. He is educated - he can read - and has the luxury of possessing a copy of some Jewish scripture, the Isaiah scroll, at least.

This unnamed person becomes one of the first converts recorded by Luke in his book called Acts. It is even the story of a baptism. The baptism of a Christian. Events all guided by the Holy Spirit.

But the African man does not quite check all the right boxes, eh? As the teacher of preachers, Thomas Long, clearly put it, “He belonged to the wrong nation, held the wrong job, and possessed the wrong sexuality.”

Some serious Hebrews - and early Christians - could have quoted Deuteronomy 23:1 which prohibits men whose, uh… privates have been damaged… from assembling with the rest of the faithful for worship. And other ‘laws’ of old. Plus all the attitudes and values tied in with being married, and the blessing of having children, and all that one supposedly is supposed to do. As a good person of God.

Sometimes, in religion, it seems there have been such rules and keeping out of many wrongdoing people and many problems for all of history. Yes, there have been. But other faithful prophets have been the voice of including and welcoming someone ‘different.’

In this case, we could look to Isaiah 56, which appears to speak into the moment in the sixth century BCE, when the Hebrews got to return from up north in Babylonia, back down to the Promised Land. A prophetic voice declared, about foreigners and eunuchs who wanted to follow the Jewish Deity:

3 Do not let the foreigner joined to the Lord say,

“The Lord will surely separate me from his people,”

and do not let the eunuch say,

“I am just a dry tree.”

4 For thus says the Lord:

To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,

who choose the things that please me

and hold fast my covenant,

5 I will give, in my house and within my walls,

a monument and a name

better than sons and daughters;

I will give them an everlasting name

that shall not be cut off.

This is unlike the teachings of the prophets Ezekiel and Ezra, which was, basically: get rid of the foreigners and pay attention to which people are impure - keep. them. out.

I hope you know by now that our scriptures have these contrasts, these conversations, these differing voices that all speak and give different, holy perspectives. All together, this gives us reality. We are influenced by the Bible… by our God, behind all the authors. And. as in today’s New Testament story, helpers, interpreters are needed.

The story of Acts 8 picks up on Jesus’ own way of breaking all the barriers the religions kept between people. And on the simple and profound reality that God is love. 1 John 4 riffs on this theme, and twice has this tiny synopsis. God is love.

God loves the man who is exploring faith, even though he is a eunuch with odd sexuality, unusual social status, and a privileged position working for a foreign ruler.

Including people who were excluded is not a new thing, in our Faith. We can see it was happening six hundred years before Jesus, and six months after Jesus. Not to mention with Jesus Himself. In the midst of talking with people about marriage and divorce and their Jewish traditions, we hear Him say, in Matthew 19:12 For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.

Jesus’ words on such things are still challenging to us. It takes time to ponder what He had said about men and women, divorce and marriage, right here. It takes study on our part. Working together.

I side with the voices who repeat, God is love. (1 John 4:) 20 Those who say, “I love God,” and hate a brother or sister are liars, for those who do not love a brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. 21 The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.

There is something very unlimited in this Good News we are to proclaim with our lives. This Gospel is, in one sense, the basic story of Jesus. In another sense, it is the experience of meeting and knowing the Spirit of Christ. In another sense, it is intentionally following the ways He taught us, how to live here and now in the Kindom of God.

This story, this experience, this following, is unlimited. All the stories we have of how Jesus met people can make this clear. How we live the Way of Jesus ourselves is so important today in our communities and our world. The struggle is real to sort out how to love one another. But it is beautiful how God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.