A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — August 22, 2010
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts:  Psalm 98;  Acts 8:26-40

Shout with joy to the Lord all the earth.  For you O Lord are coming to judge the earth with righteousness and the peoples with equity. — Psalm 98:5, 10

[Philip and the eunuch] came to some water; and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water!  What is to prevent me from being baptized?” — Acts 8:36

Psalm 98 is a rip-snorting song of joy, with seas roaring, rivers clapping, and hills singing to greet the Lord.  Joy supreme lies at the heart of the psalm, which Isaac Watts recognized in setting the psalm to music.  We all know the song:  “Joy to the world! The Lord is come…”  Not joy just because God comes, but because God comes in love to judge with equity and fairness all the peoples of the earth.  That plural “peoples” is crucial, because it is perhaps the most inclusive expression in ancient Israel.  Not just the Jews, not just “insiders,” but also Gentiles, foreigners, strangers, all peoples will be swept up in the circle of God’s love.

You’ve heard me quote Edwin Markham’s poem, “Outwitted,” before.

He drew a circle that shut me out—
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in.

We all draw circles.  But our circles are rarely so allembracing as Markham’s or as Psalm 98’s “all peoples.”  Our circles invariably take us in, but shut someone else out.  Maybe that’s why we so rarely hear the seas roar, the rivers clap, and the hills sing.  The Acts story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch suggests just how great a challenge it is to “have the wit to win” when it comes to who is out or in.

 

That eunuch could not have be more unlike Philip.  He’s a foreign traveler.  Ethiopia’s a long way from Jerusalem.  He may have journeyed long and hard to worship at the temple, but he’d have been forbidden from going closer than the outer courtyards because he’s not a Jew.  This man is an intruder in Philip’s world.  How can he possibly fit in?

One of my favorite preachers, Fred Craddock, is often listed as one of the top ten preachers in the U.S.  He’s also a great storyteller.  Craddock’s first church was a small, country church in East Tennessee near Oak Ridge just after WWII.  He tells how he experienced his first failure as a minister while serving there.

Oak Ridge was booming at the time.  Construction workers and their families were flocking to the area, covering the Tennessee hills with tents, trailers, and lean-to’s, wash hanging on fences, little kids splashing in the mud of campsites.  Excited in his first pastorate, Craddock called the board of his beautiful, white-frame church together and said, “We need to reach out to these folk.  They’ve come from everywhere, they’re fairly close, here’s our mission.”

And the chairman of the board replied,  “No, I don’t think so.”

“Why not?” Craddock asked.

And chairman of the board said, “They won’t fit in.  After all, they’re just here temporarily, living in trailers and all.”

“Even so they need the Gospel.  They need a church.  Why don’t we…”

“Naw, I don’t think so,” said the board chairman.

The upshot was a resolution offered by a relative of the chairman of the board, which basically said, “Members will be admitted to this church from families that own property in the county.”  It was unanimous, except for Craddock’s vote, and they reminded him he didn’t have a vote.  “They won’t fit in, they won’t fit in.”

Out?  Or in?  How wide a circle? The Spirit of God tells Philip, “Go over to this chariot and join it.”  He goes.  He runs!  Draw the circle wider.  Take him in.

There’s an added difficulty, of course.  The Ethiopian is a black man.  Actually, that’s probably more of a problem in our world than in Philip’s, for we are the ones with all the baggage of racial fear and prejudice from a history of two centuries of slavery and more than 150 years of segregation and discrimination.  And don’t think it’s all over just because we have a black president.  It’s not!  White power groups and hate crimes against minorities are both up since Obama’s election.  So while the Ethiopian eunuch is unlikely to be pulled over in his chariot for DWB (“Driving While Black”), his skin color does mark him as different.

Randy Taylor, one of the architects of the reunion of the southern and northern branches of the Presbyterian Church, was president of San Francisco Theological Seminary while I was a student there about 20 years ago.  He used to tell about a tiny congregation in the Carolina’s many years ago that was down to only 25 members.  They met to consider disbanding as a congregation, but a few of them suggested another course of action.  They should go on meeting for a month and everyone was to pray fervently that God might double the size of their congregation.  This they did.  They prayed hard.  And on the fourth Sunday, wonder of wonders, a group of 25 new people walked in the door for worship—25 people! …all black!  The 25 church members met later that afternoon and voted to disband.

Out?  Or in?  Draw the circle wider.  The Spirit calls him, and Philip joins the Ethiopian eunuch in his chariot.  He sits beside him.  He listens.  And he proclaims to him the good news about Jesus.  Draw the circle wider.  Take him in.

The worst thing about the eunuch, however, is exactly that.  He’s a eunuch.  Scripture explicitly excludes any eunuch from the assembly of the Lord—see Deuteronomy 23:1.  No matter that he’s journeyed from Ethiopia to Jerusalem to pray in the temple… no matter that he is still diligently pouring over the Scriptures, asking questions, seeking insight… this man is excluded by the very faith he longs to follow.  What he wants is illegal. His ambiguous sexuality frightens and disgusts people.  With no future, no possibility of children to carry his name on into a new generation, he is an object of pity.  And a literal, law-based reading of scripture, coupled with phobia and taboo, draws a circle that shuts him out.

Some of you may know that in Mormon Utah, to be a Protestant, to be a Presbyterian, to wear a cross in public, is to not fit in, to stand out, to become a target of the Mormon zeal to make converts.  And in Mormon Utah, to be gay or lesbian is almost beyond the pale.  Nevertheless, some years ago the people of Wasatch Presbyterian Church of Salt Lake City elected a young man to their Board of Deacons.  He seemed especially gifted with sensitivity, compassion, and caring.  So the fact that he was a gay man with a long-term partner seemed beside the point.  But the Presbyterian Church (USA), our church, had passed a constitutional change that limited ordination to married heterosexuals and celibate singles.  Our denomination says to gays and lesbians, “Come and join us.  Be baptized.  You are welcome at the Lord’s Table.  And yes, we will support your full civil rights in society… but no, you cannot be ordained.”  So the people of Wasatch Presbyterian Church decided not to ordain the young gay man as a deacon.  They didn’t want to put him at risk of attack from his own denomination.  Instead, they chose to leave that position on the Board of Deacons vacant.  At each meeting of the Deacons—of God’s servants—one chair remains empty—as a symbolic protest against a church law that excludes that young man from sharing his gifts in ministry.

Our church’s General Assembly has tried twice to change this church law.  But each time a majority of the church’s 173 presbyteries voted against the change.   Just last month the General Assembly once again voted to alter the rule, and once again the decision is in the hands of the church’s 173 Presbyteries.

Out?  Or in?  Draw the circle wider.  The Spirit calls, and Philip reaches out to a stranger, a foreigner who doesn’t fit into his world, a black Ethiopian eunuch.  Philip proclaims the good news about Jesus Christ to him.  And when the eunuch says, “Look, here is water!  What is to prevent me from being baptized?”  Philip, who knows all the rules, all the many “Book” reasons why not, goes ahead and baptizes him anyway, right then and there!  Draw the circle wider.  Take him in.

It’s a struggle.  The New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. is a large, upper-class congregation that maintains a vital ministry to the urban poor.  Out of their industrial kitchen they run a feeding program all day, seven days a week.  After doing this a few years, the church Session decided to open their Sunday morning fellowship hour to the homeless in the area.  The congregation launched an intentional campaign to invite these outcasts into their church parlor—the same formal room that Abraham Lincoln used to visit when he worshipped in that historic sanctuary.  Dozens of homeless people now come every Sunday for coffee, fellowship, and occasional impromptu hymn sings.  Indeed, “Joy to the World!”  Yes, some regular members stopped coming to coffee hour, but the congregation continues to try to draw the circle wider to take people in.

Out?  Or in?  Philip draws the circle wider for the Ethiopian eunuch.  Then the Spirit of the Lord snatches Philip away.  And the story tells us that the eunuch goes on his way rejoicing.  I like to think he could hear the seas roaring, the rivers clapping, and the hills singing along with him.

I’m going to stop at this point to ask you something.  Do any of you recognize or remember this sermon?  I preached it (or something close to it) ten years ago—July 30, 2000.  Were any of you here then?  That was the very first time I preached from this pulpit.  Since then I learned the ending to Fred Craddock’s story of that Oak Ridge church.  Years later he took his wife to see the little church because he’d told her the painful story.  The roads had changed because of how the interstate had cut through that part of the country, so it took a while before he found it, still bright white set back among the pines.  But it was different.  The parking lot was full—motorcycles, trucks, and cars.  And out front a great big sign:  “Barbecue, all you can eat.”  It was a restaurant.  Inside the pews were pushed against the walls.  And in the center of the room people were crowded around aluminum and plastic tables eating barbecued pork and chicken and ribs—all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds.  Cradock turned to his wife and said, “It’s a good thing this is not still a church, otherwise these people couldn’t be in here.”   Apparently God will draw the circle wider with or without the church.

Ten years ago, I preached as a candidate to become your pastor.  We didn’t really know each other yet, but I was much taken with the church’s Declaration of Inclusiveness that I’d first seen on the Indianola website.  It’s still on every worship bulletin cover and a sign outside the Waldeck entrance to the church:  “By God’s grace we strive to be inclusive in word and deed because we share in the unconditional love of Christ.”  So I focused ten years ago on how we might live out the Declaration together, how we might “have the wit to win” by drawing wider circles here in the life of the church. 

 

Now ten years later, the issues of exclusion I raised then involving classism, racism, homosexuality, the rejection of those who are different, they’re all still with us.  And new issues have come to the forefront—like whether we are able to accept and fully include Muslims in public life, when as many as one in three Americans believes that Muslims should be barred from running for public office, one in five equates Islam with terrorism, and a Congressional candidate in Indiana can says that Muslims are like Japanese Kamikaze pilots in WWII… like how our nation will decide to deal with the problem of undocumented immigrants as well as their children who had no choice in their situation (some would repeal the 14th Amendment to the Constitution to deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. to non-citizens)… and also like whether increasing division and polarization between political parties over these and other “wedge issues” will drive us (and our world) to destruction.

All too many people are endeavoring in all too many ways to draw circles that shut other people out.  In many ways the world seems to be a meaner, nastier, more divided place than it was ten years ago.  So as important as it is to draw wider circles here in the church, it is absolutely vital that we, as followers of Jesus Christ, seek to draw ever wider, more inclusive circles in the world outside these walls… reaching out to others in love… seeking for everyone the wholeness that is God’s shalom… and doing so in holy joy.  For “Joy to the world, the Lord is come”—come in love with justice and peace for all the peoples of the world.
Amen and amen. ¹

 

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¹ Several of the stories come from a sermon by Susan R. Andrews called “How Wide Is Wide?” in Lectionary Homiletics, Vol. XI, No. 6 (May 2000), pp. 22-23.