Under Obligation

Text: Romans 8:9-27

In the news this past week there has been a story of a man who made himself debt free by paying off his $114,460 student loan in cash.  He is a ventures capitalist in Toronto and happened to make enough profit from the sell of a start-up company to make paying off his student loan possible.  So, he thought that it would be funny to pay it all in cash; not the banks.  His went as far as to threaten to make him pay for any extra armoured vehicle deliveries involved.  Oddly, it took his bank three days to get that much cash.  Then, with cash in hand, actually a half-full canvas grocery bag, he walked three blocks to the lender bank where after nearly three hours of interrogation they finally accepted the withdrawal receipt from the other bank as proof that the cash was not ill-gotten.  It makes us wonder if banks remember what they're here for.  

On a CBC radio show Friday they interviewed this man and then took calls from people about their experiences of paying off debt.  One woman shared that she had owed over $50,000 on a small business loan which she paid off in a lump sum with money she received from a bequest.  I am assuming the loan was actually on a line of credit because within hours of the payoff VISA called to let her know that they were unhappy she had paid them off.  These companies who profit from extending credit love to keep us in debt even if it means they never get the principle paid back. 

Debt has become a fact of life these days, especially credit card debt.  The Vanier Institute of the Family reported in February 2011 that the average Canadian family is dealing with $100,000 in debt and owes far more than it earns.  They also said that the debt-to-income ratio is about 150 per cent.  This means that for every $1,000 in after-tax income that a Canadian family earns, it owes $1,500.   That was a year and a half ago.  Average consumer debt fell in 2011 by 3.4 percent.  Yet, the average adult Canadian person not household owes $25,960 in none mortgage related debt – credit cards, automobiles, student loans, etc.

 Centuries ago if you owed somebody and couldn't pay, you went to debtor’s prison.  That doesn't happen anymore.  Now if you can't pay your debts, you declare bankruptcy which requires you to tighten the belt a bit and endure a bad credit rating for a couple of years and then you're back in the game hopefully having learned something.  Not to long ago there was a stigma placed on debt.  It was shameful to owe somebody anything.  If there was something you wanted, you saved your money and paid for it outright.  But now debt is just something everybody has.  Going into debt is simply a tool for getting what you want right now, but where does it end and it will end.  The collapse of the banking industry in the States and its residual recession are proof that reckoning does happen.  Debt is a horrible, parasitical evil we too readily allow to persist.  We seem to thrive on it like flies on a decaying corpse.  I shudder to think what it's going to take to break the global economy ourselves included from this addiction.

Having said all that, I find it interesting that Paul uses the language of debt to describe life lived in accord with the Holy Spirit.  Here in Romans chapter 8 Paul indicates that we are under obligation to live life led by the Holy Spirit.  At least that is the way the NIV says it.  Most other translations use the stronger wording that we are debtors to God to live life led by the Holy Spirit because of the new life he has given us in Jesus Christ through the presence of the Holy Spirit with and in us leading us to live faithfully.  The Trinity has given us the Holy Spirit by whom, through whom, in whom we participate in the resurrected or New Creation life of Jesus Christ now as the real and living hope that we are heirs with Jesus to life in the New Creation when the day comes.  Because the Holy Spirit is in us we will be raised from the dead just as Jesus has been.  Therefore, we are under obligation.  We owe the Trinity for our lives to live according to the Holy Spirit's leading. 

We are debtors Paul tells us, not to the flesh, not to the sinful nature.  We are under no obligation to live our lives solely for the benefit of the unholy trinity of me, myself, and I.  We are under no obligation to let ourselves be controlled by greed, lust, pride, power, fear, shame.  We are under no obligation to be controlling and manipulative.  Like debt is in our society that way of life leads only to death and we owe it nothing.  Jesus paid off all those debts to which we were slaves.  We are free.  He bought us.  Our lives are no longer our own to do with as we please.  As the answer to the first question of the Heidelberg Catechism states: "…I am not my own, but belong--body and soul, in life and in death, to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven; in fact, all things must work together for my salvation. Because I belong to him, Christ, by His Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me whole-heartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him."  The question for that answer is “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” 

We do not belong to ourselves.  We belong to our faithful Saviour Jesus Christ.  I don’t know about you folks but I quite often find myself with no recourse in this life other than just having to step back and remind myself that my life is in Jesus’ hands and let go of whatever it is I am trying to control, whatever it is that has hurt me and left me stewing in anger to the point of depression, whatever it is I am inordinately thinking I am in need of other than simply being grateful.  If I don’t let my life be in my Lord’s hands, I go insane.  Our only comfort truly is that we belong to our Saviour Jesus Christ and he is indeed faithful.

Paul says there that all who are led by the Spirit are children of God.  Probably the first work of the Holy Spirit in us is getting us straight in the head by causing us to know that we are children of God and leading us to be able to step back and let go and let our lives be in the hands of our Lord.  The earliest theologians of the Christian faith described sin as a problem of the mind.  We are insane in that we do not know ourselves to be beloved children of God.  We cannot know this until Jesus has brought us together with himself before the Father by encountering us with the Holy Spirit.  The word repent means quite literally to be with-minded.  It is to be with-minded with Jesus in the Holy Spirit knowing that the Father loves us each as much as he does his own only-begotten Son. 

This with-mindedness, though initiated in us by the gift of the Holy Spirit, also requires work on our part.  We must use this personal knowledge of God given us by the Holy Spirit to put to death the ways we have become accustomed to acting in this world that are in accordance with the insanity of not knowing we are beloved children of God.  The bank we owe our lives to is the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Paying our debt to the Trinity will not have us healthy, wealthy, and well-adjusted.  Quite the contrary, we will suffer as Christ Jesus suffered.  Yet, the sufferings are nothing compared to the glory that will be revealed in us.  The Holy Spirit is the foretaste of this; so also the comfort.  Therefore, may you know him now.  Amen.

“The Eleventh Dimension according to Theological Science”

Text: Luke 24:44-53

As I was doing a little background work on these passages from Luke (and Acts 1:11) earlier this week, one of my favourite resource sights sent me to a blogger who was having a bit of trouble with the idea that Jesus’ Ascension into heaven was actually a real; i.e. physical, event as opposed to some spiritual thing where Jesus the ghost just disappeared.  He based his argument on a problem he had with Christians using the preposition “up” to describe wherever it was Jesus went.  Our belief is that Jesus ascended into heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father.  His point was that physics has successfully demonstrated that in the universe in which we live there is no up or down.  This is particularly true of planets.  Planets are round like a ball, there is no “up” on a ball only an “away from”.  Therefore, his conclusion was that there was no way we can talk about Jesus’ Ascension knowing what we know now about the universe.  I beg to disagree with him.  I tend to think that the more we come to know about this universe in which we live at both the cosmic and the sub-atomic levels the more plausible and truly beautiful Jesus’ Ascension becomes.

The thinking of the blogger erred in its narrow-minded-literalness, the same narrow-minded literalness that he accused the church of having in its thinking about heaven being “up”.  He never gave another way of understanding Jesus Ascension.  Had he done the work of stepping into the Hebrew concepts that the New Testament writers were trying to find Greek words to convey he would have found that “up”-ness in those words are related to worship, of lifting up prayers and burnt offerings.  Luke wasn’t trying to say that Jesus went “up” to go to heaven; and we are being narrow-minded if we think heaven is “up”.  He was trying to say that Jesus went to God the Father as do prayers and the smoke of burnt offerings.  In essence, he was taken up to be enthroned in the heavenly arena of worship which is part of the spectrum of creation.  Jesus, the Incarnate Son of God, was taken into the part of physical creation known as heaven where God’s presence first contacts creation and creates the effect the Bible writers call his “glory”; the place where the Father is hidden behind indescribably beautiful light; the place where Jesus the Son sits in the authority of God as High Priest leading the worship of creation and interceding on our behalf and as King sending forth the Holy Spirit to heal, renew, and recreate this diseased and broken creation in accordance with the Gospel.  The apostle John and several of the Old Testament prophets describe having seen such a place which telescopes and microscopes are unable.  What they saw, they understood to be just as real as you and I sitting here.  A physicist might consider calling it an unseen dimension of creation.

Let’s think about unseen dimensions for a moment.  The science off physics tells us that for our universe to exist, there must be ten levels or dimensions to it.  Humans are only aware of four: horizontal, vertical, depth or volume, and time.  Where are the other seven?  The best way to describe how they exist is to think of what happens to cigarette smoke in a room.  When it’s fresh off the cigarette we can see it.  So these dimensions were at the Big Bang.  Yet, the nature of smoke is to dissipate until it permeates the entirety of the room so that even though we cannot see the smoke, we can smell it anywhere in the room.  So it is with the other six dimensions, they permeate our existence.  That being the case, who is to say that there isn’t an eleventh realm of creation in which it can be described as Paul writes in Colossians.  “He (Jesus) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.  For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities - all things were created through him and for him.  And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.  And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent.  For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Col. 3:15-20).  What Paul describes here is a dimension of our reality reflecting its relationship to its Creator something physical science cannot see but theological science certainly can describe because God who appears as hidden to us has and does reveal himself.  The ten dimensions of our universe cannot exist apart from its relationship to the Trinity, the eleventh dimension.

Well, I’ve mentioned the word relationship and in the world of physics this means we should talk about forces.  A force is a relationship or a capacity in which one object can cause another to change.  Think attraction and resistance.  Our physical reality as it presently is has four fundamental forces.  At the moment of the Big Bang there was only one, but as things began to cool that one force stabilized into four.  (Incidentally, there is a growing consensus among physicists that the universe came into being out of nothing.  Chalk one up for their being a Creator.)  Anyway, these four forces begin with gravity which causes objects to attract from a distance.  According to Einstein gravity is like pulling a bed sheet tight by its four corners and setting a bowling ball in the middle which would make a depression that causes lighter objects to roll to it.  Next there’s the electromagnetic force.  That’s the push and pull that happens with electricity and magnets and throw light in there as well.  Moving on there are two nuclear forces.  The weak force is what causes nuclear decay, decay in the nucleus of an atom.  Although it is the weakest of the forces, the sun could not burn without it.  Finally, there is the strong force.  This force is what holds the nucleus of an atom together and is the stuff atomic bombs are made of. 

There’s another something like a fundamental force that physics doesn’t deal with because it is biological in nature: life.  Things live and grow and procreate.  That’s life.  Life happens and we haven’t the slightest idea how.  Similarly, sentience or consciousness and the ability to have relationships are forces as well and once again, we don’t know the first thing about them.  Although the universe could exist without life and sentience, it would be lacking its reason for being.

Let’s talk about a force of a spiritual nature.  Our universe and our Creator have a relationship that involves attraction and resistance and change.  It is inappropriate to say as some do that God is a force within his creation, but there is force involved here.  At our very core we are attracted to our Creator, but sin turns that force into resistance and like a nuclear explosion it causes relational radiation and death.  (This would be a good place to say that nuclear weapons are the epitome of human sin.)  God the Son became human as Jesus and by taking sin upon himself, dying with it, and being raised set in motion the negation or reversal indeed the healing of our resistance to God restoring the Life-giving relationship we are supposed to have with him as his beloved creatures made in is image.  This force is salvation and is powered by God the Holy Spirit.  God’s very self, the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is behind it.  This force of attraction involves communication, the proclamation of repentance and forgiveness in Jesus name.  This proclamation is also empowered by the Holy Spirit, the Loving communion of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit  so that it is God’s very self that is bringing forth or causing salvation.  This salvation is evident in repentance which is the force of being drawn in by the attracting love of God in Christ Jesus and learning to live worshipfully meaning prayerfully and gratefully according to the Law of Love.  This salvation is experienced as knowing oneself accepted and loved by God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit something Paul calls reconciliation.  There is a healing that comes from experiencing this which compels us to live life compelled by the force of salvation being proactive about forgiving those who have hurt us, damaged us and making amends with those we know we have hurt.  This is life in the name of Jesus. 

I challenge you to wrap your mind around this thought that our lives and the totality of this physical universe are wrapped up in the eleventh dimension of relationship with the Trinity through Christ Jesus in the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit.  Nothing can exist and live apart from this dimension of reality.  The science of theology which is rooted in prayer and praise tells this and the day is coming when physical science will demonstrate this as well.  Amen.

Who Is Able to withhold the Water?

Text: Acts 10:44-48

The baptism of Cornelius and his household is the moment in history when the kingdom of God crossed the boundary of just being a matter of the Jewish people to being for all people.  The event challenges us, the church today, with respect to how we build boundaries within Christ's body with theological differences, racial and ethnic prejudices, social issues, personality grinds, etc. to the end that our unity in Christ is marred and the Church no longer reflects the image of the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit falling upon Cornelius' and his household as the direct result of Peter preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ to them and apart from any response of their own is a brutal reminder to us that salvation is God's business and we have no right trying to set boundaries around his kingdom.  Our work is to proclaim the Gospel and through that God will be gracious to whom he will be gracious and merciful to whom he will be merciful.

Having said all this, in the course of my ministry this passage has rarely come up in matters having to do with how we exclude people from Christian fellowship and even salvation because we've decreed that they do not meet the criteria we in our limited understanding think the Bible spells out clearly.  Oddly, the place this passage has most often come up for me is in conversations about infant baptism.  Apparently, the welcoming of the babies of God’s people into the into the Kingdom of God, into salvation is one of those places where some Christians have built a boundary around God's grace and mercy and set a criteria or condition upon it which we misname as faith.  Their point is that babies should not be baptized because they are unable to understand and profess faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour for themselves.  Oddly, with infant Baptism being such a widespread practice this passage is probably the only Scripture where one could argue that infants were baptized in the early church.  It portrays that the practice of the early church was to baptize whole households on account of the faith of the head of the household.  Peter baptized Cornelius and his entire household which would have consisted of Cornelius’ immediate family, some extended family, his staff, and his slaves.  Among that many people there is high likelihood there were infants and small children among them baptized that day notably not on the basis of Cornelius' faith but on what the Holy Spirit had done.

In the Bible Baptism first appears with John the Baptist as a ritual of preparatory cleansing from sin in readiness of the coming of the Messiah and his Kingdom.  At some point baptism into the Name of Jesus Christ came to replace circumcision as the mark of belonging to God's people as well as became the sign of citizenship in the Kingdom of God.  In Romans 6 Paul emphatically declares that baptism is our real participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus and is thus our entry point into New Creation or new life in the Spirit.  In essence Baptism was/is the earthly expression of salvation that is coming from heaven and if I might sound controversial here, in the Bible faith is the aftermath of Baptism/salvation more than its prerequisite.  It is living life lead by the Spirit. 

Saying more on the relationship between faith salvation and Baptism let’s have a look at Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians where he wrote what undoubtedly must be the most misunderstood passage of Scripture in the Bible.  He writes, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph. 2:8-9).  This passage from Ephesians contains North American Evangelicalism’s trifecta of misunderstood words – grace, faith, and salvation.  If these three words are misunderstood, one no longer has biblical Christianity but rather a heretical form of the faith in which the possibilities for spiritual abuse abound.  So let’s take a moment to define these words properly.

In North American Evangelicalism grace is usually presumed to be God’s loving disposition to us expressed in his willingness to forgive our sins and to wave sin’s penalty of death on account of Jesus’ death in our stead.  But if you do a broad survey of grace in the Bible we find that it isn’t so much a courtroom acquittal thing but rather a royal court thing.  It is primarily being in God’s presence enjoying his favour and his acting for us to deliver us from sin, death, and evil.  Unhindered and unconditional access to God’s grace is what Jesus the Incarnate Son of God gained for us by his faithful life, his death, his being raised from the dead, and his ascension.  The presence of the Holy Spirit is proof of this.  God’s free gift to us of access to his very self in, through, and as the Holy Spirit is God’s grace.  My you know him now.

Faith in North American Evangelical circles tends to be defined as the opposite of scepticism.  Having faith begins with making a rational decision to believe something to be true in the face of the lack of experiential and/or empirical evidence.  Thus, the faith through which a person is saved begins with a decision to believe there is a God and this God can be trusted in the face of the lack of experiential or empirical evidence.  Next, comes the rational decision to believe that Jesus died for our sins and that the decision to believe this and to publicly confess it will get a person saved.  Biblically, faith is faithful participation in a personal and communal covenantal relationship with God; or rather, participating in God’s grace.  Covenantal means the basis of this relationship with God is not a contractual.  Contracts are conditional.  Our relationship with God is not conditional where we say “God I will accept you as my God, if you do this for me.”  Nor does God say, “I will only be God to you, if you do this for me.”

Our covenantal relationship with God begins with God’s acting to save us.  God said to the people of Israel after acting of his own initiative to save them from slavery in Egypt, “I will walk among you and will be your God and you shall be my people” (Lev. 26:12).  Basically, God is present with his people actively being their God by extending his favour to them and acting for them in their best interest.  God’s covenant with Israel and with us is established by his initiative to save by extending grace.  Even when Israel did their best to not be God’s people, he still was faithful to his covenant.  Faith came to the Israelites in the wake of the Exodus from Egypt, crossing the Red Sea on dry land and the drowning of Pharaoh’s army, be fed and watered in the wilderness, being given the land of Canaan, and his presence with them as a cloud and pillar of fire.  It was God’s saving by grace that created the relationship of faith between God and Israel.

So it is with our covenantal bond with God through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit.  God has acted in, through, and as Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit to save not only humanity but his whole Creation from sin, death, and evil.  There are those who say because I believe that Jesus died for me, I am saved: my sins are forgiven and I will go to heaven when I die.  I covered this in a sermon two weeks ago.  That’s not what we find salvation being when we actually read our Bibles.  Salvation is a present reality where the future New Creation Life filled with the unhindered knowing of God breaks in upon us through the Holy Spirit who unites us the Christ Jesus so that his resurrected and glorified Life is at work in us now transforming us, healing us, changing us to be as he is in his relationship to the Father.  Paul also writes in Ephesians: “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ - by grace you have been saved - and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus…” (Eph. 2:4-6).  Salvation is God by his grace making us alive together with Christ and seating us with Christ Jesus in his presence. 

That’s what Baptism is all about: being made alive with Christ Jesus and dwelling in God’s presence with Christ Jesus through the grace of God’s presence with us in, through, and as the Holy Spirit.  That’s what happened to Cornelius and his entire household when Peter proclaimed Jesus to them and the Holy Spirit fell upon them.  When we baptize infants we in the very least proclaim that God in faithfulness to his covenantal promise to be our God which he initiated answers our prayers for our children to know him.  Our God, the God who loves us loves our children too and will indeed act accordingly to save them by grace and awaken faith in them.  Who can withhold the water for baptizing these?  If God is not faithful to our children, then he is not faithful to us.  Amen.

“What prevents me from being baptized?”

Text: Acts 8:26-40

A eunuch, a eunuch from Ethiopia, and a powerful man at that, out in the middle of nowhere in the desert wilderness of Gaza is surprised by a rather disheveled looking man running up to his chariot, a man who’s on a mission from God and wants to talk about the Bible passage that the eunuch just happens to be reading.  The lengths God will go to lift us up at our weakest moments by showing us who he is.

So, who is this eunuch?  Unlike his new found friend, Phillip the Evangelist, Luke doesn't give us his name only that he's a eunuch and the overseer of the treasuries of the Ethiopian queen Candace.  Why was he an ethnic Ethiopian worshipping in Jerusalem like a Jew?  I assume that he was what was called a "God-fearer", a non-ethnic Jew who practiced the Israelite faith but didn't go the full Monty of circumcision (not that this man hadn't had enough done to him down there as it was).  Yet if he had underwent circumcision, the Jews would have considered him to have been fully one of them and thus, fully one of God's people.  But, we don't know whether he had gone the full Monty or not.  He could have...gentlemen, commence cringing.

Nevertheless, the fact that this man was a eunuch is crucial to this story, a story which revolves around the question: "what makes a person one of God's people?"  Being a "God-fearer" didn't do it nor was being a "full Monty" Jew.  Rather, the answer to that question involves where one finds oneself situated with respect to Jesus Christ.  What we find in this story is that God went way more than the extra mile to show this Ethiopian eunuch that Jesus knew exactly what it was like to be him and this Ethiopian eunuch got it.  This eunuch was most likely an outcast among his own people having the faith of a Jew and disgusting in the eyes of "God's people" for being a eunuch, but after his encounter with Philip he knows he's got a friend in Jesus who understands what it is like to be him and who accepts him as he is. 

On a side note, I think Luke doesn't give us this Ethiopian eunuch's name because he is representative of us all.  We would not be human if feelings of being outcast and ashamed of ourselves and not good enough for God did not form a core component of the package we call "me".  But a core element of faith is God bring us to know that Jesus knows what its like to be "me" and that his death was to heal us of that.  After all, that Ethiopian Eunuch left that encounter rejoicing, did he not?  As Paul says, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21).”

It was through his commonality with Jesus that this eunuch discovered he was one of God's people.  It was in discovering that Jesus knew what it was like to be him in his shameful outcastness that he found himself to be accepted by God as he was; no dressing up, no putting on the good, no mutilating of his self to try to please God or meet up to the standards that “God’s people” quite often have.  God knew him and accepted him as he was because Jesus, the Son of God, the Jewish Messiah was just like him.

This eunuch was an outcast among his own people, the Ethiopians, because of his shared faith with the Jewish people, God's people.  For some reason he would have included himself among the stories of the Jewish people.   Being a "God-fearer" would have had its liabilities there in Ethiopia.  Believing in the one true God, the God of the Jews, prevented him from being involved in most social functions in his community.  People were very religious back then.  They believed in many gods and nothing happened that wasn't in some related to a god.  Everything from a feast to a business transaction to simply entering someone's house involved a god and abstaining from all that would have drawn attention, negative attention.  From since forever the Jews and those associated with them have suffered persecution in one form or another for not playing the reindeer games involved in idolatry.  So, his association with the Jews would have made him an outcast among his own people.

Nevertheless, he was a powerful man in Ethiopia, a powerful man in the service of the queen.  Unfortunately, that had its liabilities.  The leaders of Arab and North African lands used to make eunuchs of the men that they put in charge of treasured things like treasuries and harems to keep them from being "otherwise minded".  But, and it gets worse, this mark of higher status in Ethiopia was a mark of shame among the Jews, the people of God for whom he had suffered being an outcast. 

So, it was in the wake of an attempt by the eunuch to acknowledge his place among the Jews that we find him.  In an attempt to be faithful to his God, Israel’s God, he did as a Jew would do and went up to Jerusalem to worship there at the Temple, to offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving and present a tithe, and remember from where he had come.  But, I don't things turned out the way he had expected.   Being a eunuch he would not have been allowed to go anywhere near the Temple.  The Law at Deuteronomy 23:1 spelled it out quite clearly, “No one whose testicles are crushed or whose male organ is cut off shall enter the assembly of the LORD."  That seems an odd sort of statute to have in your arsenal, but they had a reason…kind of.  If a man was unable to procreate then he was unable to participate in God's mandate to humanity to be fruitful and multiply.  Therefore, this eunuch could not be host to God's blessing upon humanity.  In the minds of the Jews, a man willingly undergoing castration was a detestable affront to God.  They would not have allowed him into the Temple to worship and would have sent him packing thinking “Who does this castrated fool think he is?”

Well, he thought that because of his faith in the God of the Jews and his suffering faithfully for their faith, he should have been allowed into the Temple.  Instead, he was denied his right to worship because of the humiliation he suffered in being made a eunuch.  Isaiah speaks of Jesus in this same light.  Jesus, the crucified Messiah, suffered humiliation and being an outcast among “God’s people”, all the while being so faithful to God that we believe he was faithful for them and for us.  Due to his life being cut short, Jesus also had no biological posterity to pass anything on to.  This person about whom Isaiah writes was a waste as a person just as this eunuch would have been stigmatized to be.

Philip finds the eunuch reading a verse from Isaiah that describes a person who was very similar to himself: due to the humiliation of being made a eunuch he was denied his right to worship at the Temple denied the opportunity to have children.  So he asks Philip, “Who is this person?”  Philip proclaims Jesus to him.  It was there in his humiliation and his outcast-ness that the eunuch discovered that he truly is one of God’s people simply because Jesus knows who he is and has shared in his suffering.  So it is with each of us.  Seeing some water, he asks Philip, “What prevents me from being baptized?”  Nothing.  So it is with each of us.  If Jesus himself has anything to do with it, then nothing.  Amen.