The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
In today’s world, it has become immensely easy to be isolated, one person from another. For those of us who grew up before personal computers, the internet, and social media, we remember a time when our mothers and fathers sent us outside to actually interact with other human beings, to get out from underneath their feet and go out into the world and to play and explore and take risks. During that time, we would meet a multitude of different people, kids our own age usually, engaged in a variety of activities. As we grew up, most of these activities involved another human being, usually of our age. But today that seems to be a rather rare occasion. Today loneliness and isolation are commonplace, and often bring about deep clinical depression.
We were created to be with one another and with God. The Lord God said in Genesis 2:18: “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” We were created as social creatures, to be with one another, and from the very beginning it was a triangular relationship: human being to human being, and the human beings to their Creator and their loving and caring God. People to people, and people to God, and God to people.
At first, when the technology age dawned in Western civilization, there was an optimism about technology’s ability to bring people together and to foster understanding, kindness, and generosity to one another. But increasingly we find that it has, and continues to, divide people into tribes and to put them at odds one with the other, without understanding, conversations, or kindness in between the two parties. It tends to drive people further apart and isolate individuals, even those nearest and dearest to us in our own homes. The answer now being given to solve this problem of loneliness and depression and animosity is artificial intelligence: a relationship with yet another machine and another kind of algorithm.
When we live isolated lives, we miss great opportunities to deal with our neighbor, to get to know our neighbor, to get to love our neighbor, to get to serve our neighbor, to talk to them about big things and small, and to talk to them about church and religion and Christ Himself. And that’s the idea behind the text, our first reading this morning in Acts chapter 8. In fact, all three readings show us how important it is for us, first and foremost, to be connected: a part of Christ, and Christ a part of us, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit part of our family, and we God’s family, and a part of one another, a community, a congregation.
God works through means. That’s a good, solid, and biblical principle. God works through means. Means are ways, instruments, tools that He uses in order to accomplish His work. He attaches His Word of promise to physical elements, and through the Word and the elements, God forgives sins, gives the gift of faith, and connects the believer to Himself, as the branch is to the vine and the vine is to the branch. You’ve heard me preach time and time again: God works through means. And we see that time and time again in the Bible itself.
God works through means. The Holy Spirit, contrary to some of Christianity’s doctrinal teachings, does not float around in the spiritual realm seeking to zap people with faith and epiphanies of understanding. That’s not how God generally works. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit work together through ordinary means to produce faith and understanding and all the gifts of the Gospel. The spoken and written Word involve and require human agents. Somebody had to write it, and somebody reads it and preaches from it. In Baptism, God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit bestow the Gospel and all the benefits of the Gospel on the one being baptized, when He joins His Word, His audible Word, to the element of water, thus creating the sacrament of Holy Baptism. It’s through the element of bread and wine that Jesus comes to us and delivers to us His body and blood for the remission of our sins. He is present in the Sacrament in a way that He is not present anywhere else in the universe.
There’s another means by which God forgives sins and gives life and salvation too. It’s the most common method, though unheralded. And the first reading this morning takes us to a place where that happens. It’s in the office of public ministry, the teaching and preaching of the church. See, by Acts chapter 6, the New Testament Church had grown spectacularly, and it was so big that the apostles couldn’t manage all the work. They were so busy doing secondary work that the primary work was being neglected. In Acts chapter 6 we read: “It is not right that we should give up preaching the word of God to serve tables. Therefore, brothers, pick out from among you seven men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we will appoint to this duty. But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.” And what they said pleased the whole gathering. So they chose Stephen, a man full of faith, and Philip, and Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicolaus, a proselyte of Antioch. These men were then ordained as pastors and deacons to take care of other kinds of work in the congregation.
And among these seven, one of them, Philip, was sent to Samaria to preach and teach to new congregations in that territory. But while there, Acts 8:26-27: an angel of the Lord spoke to Philip, saying, “Arise and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” Philip was told to leave Samaria with its many people and to go to a particular road, a road that went through a barren part of the country, a desert land. Philip was being sent for one purpose: to evangelize one particular man. So he arose and he went. And behold, there was an Ethiopian, a eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all her treasure, and he had come to Jerusalem to worship.
So I want you to picture Philip walking a little bit behind the chariot, the chariot moving so slow that the court official could read a scroll from the prophet Isaiah sitting still. The Ethiopian, discernible by the very dark color of his skin, and a court official, obvious by the wardrobe, the uniform that he wore. The scroll of Isaiah was out, the eunuch reading it. Luke tells us that the man was a court official of the queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all of her treasure, and he had come to Jerusalem to worship. We learn three fundamental things about this eunuch. Number one: he’s a learned man. He can read, and he can do math. He’s in charge of the queen’s wealth. That means he’s a trustworthy man. He’s returning from Jerusalem after worshiping there at the temple, which tells us he’s a proselyte. Well, not a Jew, a Gentile. He’s one who believes in the God, Yahweh Elohim, of the Old Testament. And like most believers, as he’s going through the Scripture, he’s struggling to understand specific Bible passages. They just don’t make sense to him.
But look at how God addresses the problem of a lack of understanding. He does not grant the Ethiopian eunuch an epiphany, a sudden understanding out of the blue. He uses an ordinary man, a means, by the name of Philip. The angel had told Philip where to go, and now the Spirit presses him to run and to catch up and walk along the side of the chariot. “Go over and join this chariot,” Philip was told. It means to join it, or stay near to it, or stick to it, be right there, so that when the occasion arises, Philip can fill the need. And that’s what happens. Philip gets close enough to hear the Ethiopian reading Isaiah chapter 53. In that day, if you knew how to read, you wanted to demonstrate you knew how to read, you read out loud. Very few people read silently to themselves. It was simply the custom and the practice to read out loud. So Philip hears the Ethiopian reading, and it was no accident that the Ethiopian was reading the section about the promised Messiah: “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter and like a lamb before its shearer is silent, so he opens not his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.”
Being close to a person, as we all know, usually sparks conversations, and sometimes conversations of significance. That doesn’t happen much in our day and age. People are filled with trivial and silly things to talk about and to argue about, while forgetting the consequential questions of human life and of fellowship with God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Well, they’re about to have a consequential conversation. Philip walks along the side of the chariot. He speaks. He creates a friend. The friend invites him into the chariot, and Philip prepares for a conversation of significance. Philip knows the text and he knows its meaning. He asked the man, “Do you understand what you are reading?” And the man shares his confusion over the passage. That means he’s a wise man. He doesn’t try to figure it out on his own. He looks for someone to help him. He says, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to come and sit with him. And the eunuch said to Philip, “About whom, I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” The door is open. The opportunity is presented. And the Greek word translated here “guide” is the same word that Jesus used in John 16, namely that the Spirit will guide us into all truth.
Isaiah 53:7-8 is a passage rich in detail: the prophecy that Jesus would be silent before His accusers, in the midst of Isaiah’s overarching message that the suffering, silent servant would go forth to die as an atoning sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. Philip explains to the Ethiopian, in simple language, the good news about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. He shares with the eunuch what he himself has been taught and what he himself has lived through. He knows personally what Christ has done for him.
Now there’s a connection between what Philip is doing in Acts chapter 8 and the Gospel lesson this morning and the Epistle reading. When we are part of Christ and Christ is a part of us, the true vine, Jesus Christ, and we the branches, we bear much fruit, John 15, because we’re connected. We’re in Christ and Christ is in us, and His Word dwells in us, even though we sometimes have a difficult time remembering it or understanding. Now Philip and the Ethiopian are connected. They’re friends now. But they’re connected now more deeply too, by the Gospel of Jesus Christ, one Christian speaking to the other Christian. The relationship we have to Christ is made tangible through acts of love and service from the Christian to the neighbor. And that’s what happens here. And that’s 1 John: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” Love does nothing harmful to another person, but love always serves another person. Love is the most selfless act that any human being, and Christians, can do. It puts the other before ourselves, leaving ourselves completely in the hands of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Ethiopian eunuch came to understand how Isaiah’s prophecy was fulfilled in Christ and what the Gospel was giving to him. And as the Holy Spirit guided him into all truth, faith was created in his heart, and his heart’s desire was to be baptized. I use this in my baptism class and seminar. We didn’t read anything at all about Philip speaking about baptism specifically, yet it’s fundamental to the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, in the simplest language. When you preach the Gospel, why, baptism is there. And immediately the Ethiopian eunuch knows two things. Number one: he hasn’t been baptized in the Christian faith. Now that he’s a Christian, though, he wishes to be baptized and sealed in the Christian faith.
But God wasn’t finished, see, with that moment of baptism for the Ethiopian eunuch. The Ethiopian took with him the message, doctrine, faith, and love of Christ. He found others to tell. Church tradition, oral tradition, tells us that the Gospel of Jesus Christ was brought to the continent of Africa by this very same Ethiopian eunuch. He went back to Africa and he proclaimed the Gospel to those to whom he had a relationship. And God wasn’t finished with Philip either. There was more to come. He took Philip up and away, several miles away to the town of Azotus, and then beyond. See, God isn’t finished with us, with you, either. Whether we are aware of our own expressions of faith and love to a neighbor or not, God is always at work in us and through us to serve the other. As God works in and through us, we learn to express our faith, our doctrines, our beliefs, the truth, in interactions with others. And the more you do it, the easier it gets to be, the more confident you grow. And if you happen to stumble and make a mistake, you’re forgiven.
The love of God was unexpected and undeserved when it came to the eunuch, when it came to Philip, and when it came to you. The love of God came to you with the Word of God, which was likely spoken to you first by another human being, maybe a parent or a pastor or a dear friend. When that happened, your life became one that is lived out in true Christian faith, also another way of saying lived out in the life of the church. It’s why you’re here. Your faith brings you here each and every week. Your love brings you here each and every week. You know what Philip knows. You know about the suffering, silent servant, so you can speak to others about Him. You know about the crucifixion, the death, and the resurrection. You know about the atonement for your sins. You know what happened on the third day. Your whole life likely began with these words: “I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.” Your Christian life began when someone came up alongside of you and spoke the Gospel to you, whether as an infant or an old man.
Jesus is the true vine, and we are called to stay connected to the vine and to draw our strength and our answers and our understanding from the vine, so we too can share and to guide another, out of sheer Christian love, through our various vocations. God’s love meets the needs of our neighbor: as parents, neighbors, citizens, spouses, church members, all the things that we do. In befriending someone else, we come alongside of them, create a relationship, and speak to them, making the most of the opportunities presented to us. That’s Colossians 4:5: “Make the most of every opportunity.” And thus Philip did. Our whole life started because God came alongside of us through ordinary people, people who had a relationship to us, people who even loved us. Our sins were forgiven. We became connected to Christ. We became the branches to His vine. All tied together, all because God sent someone to speak to us and to say: in Christ, your sins are forgiven. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.