In his wild and crazy book Soul Tsunami Leonard Sweet introduced me to the term “chaordic zone.”   The definition of the “chaordic zone” is that unsettling boundary where chaos and order meet.  Interestingly enough the term was originally coined by the creator of the trillion-dollar Visa credit-card empire.  Leonard Sweet finds the boundary where chaos and order meet to be an appropriate way to describe the church because the church is, he says, “by its very definition a chaordic organism - an organic, free-form community driven by mission and responsive to its indigenous environments. [In fact,] the early church was almost a textbook definition of ‘chaordic’: fluid, flat, fast off its feet, and strong on its feet with control at the edges only.”  It is here in the chaordic zone where order and chaos collide that unfathomable possibilities for the church are to be found.

    You might say that when Philip left Jerusalem and then encountered an Ethiopian eunuch on a road out in the wilderness, he stepped into the chaordic zone.  Out there on that road Philip tripped over that fluid boundary of order and chaos where the common and exotic, the predictable and the unexpected, the old and the new collide in one cosmic encounter.

The story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch is in many ways a strange one.  On the one hand, we have Philip, one of the first “deacons” of the church.  He was one of seven who were set apart to look after the welfare of the elderly and widows of Jerusalem.  But both Philip and his fellow deacon Stephen quickly expanded their responsibilities to include preaching and proclaiming the good news.  Such boldness, however, very soon got Stephen into hot water, and a conspiracy against him brought about his eventual death by stoning.  Subsequent persecution scattered all the apostles, and Philip took refuge in Samaria where he continued his discipleship, preaching the gospel, casting out unclean spirits, curing the paralyzed and lame, baptizing many, and generally bringing great joy to many.  So on the one hand, there is Philip, the deacon and apostle.

    On the other hand, there is a eunuch from Ethiopia - a castrated male, to be sure, yet he is an important man, a minister of Candace, the queen of his exotic homeland that stretches far and wide south of Egypt.  He may be Ethiopian and a eunuch besides, yet this man apparently has just made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in order to worship God there.  Was he a Jew?  How could that be when the Hebrew law clearly prohibits castrated men from the covenant congregations?  Was he then a Gentile proselyte?  That seems unlikely, too.  Who was this man, who worships the God of Israel and whom we find stopped in the middle of nowhere, sitting quietly in his chariot, reading a scroll of the prophet Isaiah?

    Here they are, Philip and the eunuch, meeting in a forest of sycamore trees southwest of Jerusalem - an unsettling place at the baoundary of chaos and order.  The eunuch is beginning to make his journey back to what would have seemed to Philip like the fringes of the world.  And Philip, having thus far escaped the threat of persecution, promptly responds to a direct call of the Spirit and makes his way out this wilderness road.  And there he has this unexpected encounter with a castrated minister to a queen from a far-off land, sitting quietly in his chariot, reading a Hebrew scroll - an encounter certainly that pushes the boundaries of his wildest imagination and yet is a moment of unfathomable possibilities.

    Whenever I read this story, I find myself longing for the clarity of vision that Philip has, the absolute certainty of God’s call, the total willingness to go wherever and whenever.  Would that the Spirit always would speak so clearly and directly!  Would that the instructions were so definite, no room to question what direction to go!  Would that I could always respond so willingly and promptly!  Would that I could inspire such a passionate response that all for whom the good news is new news would want to jump immediately into the first pool and be baptized!

    But after a second look, the context of this strange story and Philip’s missionary efforts in first century Palestine seem almost as strange as the context of our discipleship today.  It quickly became evident that discipleship for Philip was hardly all that simple, and Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch provide good company for us today.  Living in the post-modern world, we are, like Philip, being sent out from all that seems safe and sure and predictable and decent and in order - sent out down a wilderness road where we cannot predict whom we will meet, what they will be reading, what they will ask, or how they will respond . . . down a wilderness road into a place of much that is uncertain, unpredictable, intimidating, unsettling, often disorderly, and even chaotic.

    According to Leonard Sweet, “One of the characteristics of postmodern culture is that opposite things happen at the same time without being contradictory.  Anyone who doesn’t feel pulled in conflicting directions doesn’t understand Heisenberg’s uncertainty principles, Pauli’s exclusion principle, and Schrodinger’s wave equation.  Where the modern age was predominantly either-or, the postmodern world is and/also . . . This is an in-your-face . . . get-out-of-my-face society . . . This is a culture of outplacing and replacing, deployment and unemployment, high fat and low fat, no fat and fake fat . . . This is a double-edged culture, a culture of paradox.”  The era of Newton and Locke, of law and order and hard facts and clearly defined structures has given way to a world of chaos and complexity theory and uncertainty.  Yes, we, too, are being sent out down a wilderness road into a place of much that is confusing, strange, different, and unsettling.

    Philip, a deacon from Jerusalem, and a eunuch from Ethiopia meet on a wilderness road.  But it is not these two, after all, who are the main characters in this story.  Our main character today is not the colorful eunuch from the fringes of the world nor the passionate young deacon preaching the gospel while dodging his enemies.  The main character today is even more exotic and more daring than either of these two.

    It is the Spirit that directs the lives of these two men.  The Spirit sends Philip out the wilderness road.  The Spirit sends Philip over to that chariot.  The Spirit snatches Philip up and whisks him away to his next mission in Azotus.  And we can infer from all this that it is the Spirit that inspires the eunuch to make this pilgrimage to Jerusalem, that it is the Spirit that inspires him to read the passage from Isaiah, that it is the Spirit that opens his heart to receive the good news about Jesus, that it is the Spirit that calls him to his baptism.  It is, after all, the Spirit that is not only front and center but the character without whom there would be no story at all!  No wonder it has been said that the book we know as the Acts of the Apostles should really be titled the Acts of the Spirit.

    Brothers and sisters in Christ, it is the Holy Spirit which spearheads and directs all Christian mission.  In our own way the Spirit is sending us directly out of our comfort zones where things seem clearly defined, structures are established, and life is predictable.  And the Spirit is sending us out instead into a world that often seems scary and even hostile, face to face with people of all shapes and sizes and from the farthest regions of the earth.  Are we ready with the same fearless zeal and passion for Christ, the same lack of self-consciousness and almost naive readiness to serve that Philip the deacon brought with him that day on the wilderness road from Jerusalem to Gaza?

    We can be almost sure the Spirit will not lead us down a straight road.   Rather it will blow us without any sympathy into the chaortic zone where perhaps maybe the only thing we can predict is that it will be unpredictable.  Order will be something always only at the edge where chaos is ready to greet it.  And the road we end up traveling may be the last road we ever thought we would take.  Those you meet along the way may be as different from you as night and day.  The changed and hybrid world into which we are being sent might be characterized by Temple United Methodist Church in San Francisco which took under its wing a refugee from the Ukraine who was employed by a German restaurant owned by an Arab whose wife was Chinese and who herself worked in a pizza parlor run by a man from Russia.

    Welcome to the chaordic zone - where God is calling the church with all its history, all its tradition, all of its wisdom, all of its faith to enter a world that may seem crazy and bizarre, fast and unpredictable, ever-changing, contradictory, and larger-than-life.  Yet God also promises that no matter how difficult or strange the “how” of Christian ministry may be, the story is always the same.  Let us not be afraid of the choardic zone.  Instead let’s be fluid, fast, and strong on our feet confident that the good news about Jesus on which we stand . . . and on which we stake our very lives . . . is firm and sure.