Ready – for what?
May 14th
Jane Pritchard
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer (Ps. 19:14)
The four lectionary readings for this Sunday proved a challenge to weave into a sermon. Of course they all reflect in some way our proximity to the Easter events and the coming of the holy Spirit at Pentecost; they don’t have much to say about Mother’s day, and neither will I…I was in the process of mulling them over when Doug relayed Jan’s phone message to me-“have you chosen a sermon topic yet” ..to which I had to reply, ‘The sermon is about being ready ..but it’s not ready yet”.
It seems to me that in this multitasking 21st century which we inhabit we have to ready for a lot of things, all the time. We have to be ready for school; music lessons; church board and committee meetings; all the demanding aspects of our workdays whether at home or elsewhere, the voices clamouring for attention, the ones in real time that make eye contact or tug at our sleeves, and the disembodied voice mails, faxes and email . We have to be ready for income tax time; for getting to church on time; we have to be ready for Mother’s Day; and each has its own rewards if we are ready, and its own repercussions if we are not.
So here in Act 8 we meet two characters who meet each other with incredible precision. Imagine`- Philip gets the angelic call to head down the desert road to Gaza, where he comes upon this eminent African man in a chariot reading aloud from the scroll of Isaiah, right at the passage about the “suffering servant”, and gets invited aboard to explain the meaning of the text. Talk about an evangelistic segue way! So, we are told, beginning with that very passage of Scripture, Philip tells him the “good news about Jesus”.
But the Ethiopian eunuch was ready for this providential encounter. I am intrigued by the possibilities. What did it mean to be a eunuch in the court of the Candace, mother of the Nubian king? What did he endure among his own people for being emasculated? If it happened in childhood or adolescence, was he taunted by his peers or elders? But he had lost sexual power to gain political power, for he was in charge of the Queen mother’s treasury. What would lead him to undertake a chariot trip of several hundred kilometres to go up to Jerusalem to worship the God of the Jews? – for it seems clear this was more than a diplomatic visit, which would have been onerous enough. And what did he experience in Jerusalem? Evidently he had not been with the “God-fearing Jews from every nation” who heard the Galilean apostles preaching about Jesus “everyone in their own language”. Probably he came later to Jerusalem, and went to the Temple Court of the Gentiles to worship this God he was so determined to honour, and heard the Old Testament preached. He got a copy of the Greek translation (Septuagint) of Isaiah, and was poring over it in a state of puzzlement when Philip approached, not sure if the one who was “led like a sheep to the slaughter” was Isaiah, the prophet.
But Philip was ready in his own way. This Philip was not the apostle, called by Jesus to be one of disciples. Rather, he was one of the Greek speaking Jews appointed as deacons over the rapidly growing but restive church in Jerusalem, when the apostles were spending too much time distributing food to the impoverished widows in their midst., and needed to be free to pursue prayer and the ministry of the Word of God. How long had Philip been a dedicated follower of Jesus? Maybe just since the resurrection, a few weeks or months ago. But he was ready to follow Jesus into great uncertainty and danger. For Stephen had just been stoned to death, with Saul consenting. As some of us heard in last week’s performance by Pax Christi of Mendelssohn’s oratorio “St. Paul”, Saul set about to “destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off men and women and put them in prison (Acts 8:3)”.
The young church scattered – which is why Philip went to Samaria, where he preached the good news of Christ, and performed miraculous signs and healings, with great effect.
But he was ready to hear the voice of an angel. Now how does one do that? Despite the fear and elation in his fast-paced life at this point, he was practised enough at listening for God that he recognized the voice for whose it was, and knew to follow the instructions. (Even without Mapquest). He was ready to go – even into the desert. Personally I think he was pretty fit as well, since he ran right up to the chariot..though we don’t know the speed limit. We are not told his reaction on seeing who it was he was sent to serve: an elegant black man commanding a chariot. No doubt it was not lost on Philip that eunuchs were excluded by Deuteronomic law from the assembly of the Lord. Perhaps the Ethiopian in his perusal of Isaiah had already found the promise of 56 and read and reread it with pounding heart:
Let no foreigner who has bonded himself to the Lord say,
“The Lord will surely exclude me from his people”
and let not any eunuch complain,
“I am only a dry tree”.
For this is what the Lord says:
To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
who choose what pleases me, who hold fast to my covenant
to them I will give ..a memorial better than sons and daughters,
I will give them an everlasting name
that will not be cut off.
And to the foreigners who bind themselves to the Lord..
These I will bring to my holy mountain
and give them joy in my house of prayer”.
So there is Philip in the right place at the right time, ready to have this spiritual conversation with an unclean foreigner. And he was ready to interpret the Hebrew scriptures with authority. There is no reason to believe that Philip was any more learned or theologically trained than Simon Peter who astonished the crowds with his teaching in Acts 4 not long before. But Phili had done his homework; he knew his stuff.
Now the Ethiopian man was ready, in the space of time it took in the desert to come to a watering hole, to insist on baptism. Pretty condensed baptismal preparation class that was. And Philip, the Greek speaking Jew who had been primed by Samaritans to expect this sort of thing, was ready to do it. By immersion.
And then we are told – whether he was ready or not – the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the Ethiopian eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way, rejoicing.
What are we to make of this Spiriting away of Philip? Luke intends to convey that there was a suspension of the normal laws of space and time, for Philip appeared in less time that a 20 mile trip ought to take at Azotus, (no mention of the speed limit again.) Are we sceptical? A far greater transcendence of the laws of nature occurred a few weeks or months before when Jesus Christ died and came back to life in a visible and tangibly corporeal way that was witnessed by hundreds and recorded by several. A month ago we celebrated his resurrection at Easter. Our entire Christian faith is predicated on this fact. If this did not happen then, as Paul says in I Cor 15:, we Christians, we Anabaptists, are of all people most to be pitied.
Let’s turn from Acts to Psalm 22. For our Call to Worship, Jan read the last verses of the psalm:
All the ends of the earth
will remember and turn to the Lord
and all the families of the earth
will bow down before him.
(A powerful vision of the fulfilment of history when the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world will be one.)
Whenever I read Ps 22, I remember Robin. She was 40 years old when she died, homeless, of breast cancer. A night or two before she died, she spoke to the hospital chaplain, who did not know her, about the text she wanted for her funeral. She said she wanted Ps. 22; he said, Oh, you mean Ps. 23; she said, No, I mean Ps. 22.
My God, my God,why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me
so far from the words of my groaning?..
All who see me mock me;
they hurl insults, shaking their heads.
‘Commit your cause to the Lord, let him deliver-
let Him rescue the one in whom He delights!”
So says the Psalm, penned by David, but describing, in ways the writer never dreamed, the passion of Jesus Christ.
Robin grew up in an orphanage, abused. I knew her as a small, fragile woman, eyes always flickering toward an escape route. She was quick-thinking and independent. She kept her past and her lips tightly sealed. She felt, and she was, disbelieved.
She never knew her parents – and they had abandoned her- yet she meditated on this:
You brought me out of the womb
You made me trust in you
even at my mother’s breast.
From birth I was cast upon you
form my mother’s womb you have been my God.
Do not be far from me
for trouble is near
and there is no one to help.
When she died, her community bought her a frilly pink blouse and pearl earrings and lovingly dressed her, just as she had wanted. Welfare paid for the funeral, but her street mother made sure there was a marker for her grave.
Robin was ready. She lived and passed through anguish and went down to the dust in peace. Robin believed in the same risen Jesus as Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch.
Let us consider two readings from John:
(1 Jn 4:16-18)
This is how God showed his love among us:
he sent his one and only Son into the world
that we might live through him.
This is love: not that we loved God,
but that he loved us
and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
God abides in those that confess that Jesus is the Son of God,
and they abide in God. ..
Love has been perfected among us in this:
that we may have boldness on the day of judgment,
because as he is, so are we in this
world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.
From John 15: 1-2
This is the familiar passage on the Vine and the branches; usually comforting words to me.
Brought to life by the profusion of blooms around us – apple, cherry, forsythia, lilac, tulips.
But here is what disturbs me:
I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.
He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit,
while every branch that does bear fruit
he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.
Am I ready for …being pruned? By the One I love? Yes..if it doesn’t hurt too much..
Frankly this is where love unperfected and fear meet for me.
The recent evens of CPT have set me thinking about this very real possibility and this is where my faith falters. The worst thing that I could imagine for me personally is if Doug is killed n the course of his CPT work. We have a good and fulfilling life together and we both love life and ..well, everything would change . Tom Fox was ready to lose his life for the kingdom, no doubt about it. And I can see how his death has been used by God in many ways – to spread the good news that followers of Christ are nonviolent, to call out for the release of the prisoners, and that this has furthered the cause of peace in this very war-torn world. And I still believe that is what Christ is calling us to:
Jn 15:16
You did not choose me, but I chose you,
and appointed you to go and bear fruit-
fruit that will last…
This is my command:
Love one another.
Why am I in the Mennonite church? Because I believe I was called to put this command into action, and the Mennonite church is true to the gospel teachings of love for all humankind, friend and enemy, and in steadfast opposition to killing one another, and of supplanting the Lordship of Christ with allegiance to the flag.
You know, when I first felt this call I was pregnant with Paul, my youngest son, 21 years ago; the world was in danger of nuclear annihilation, and it was laser-bright to me to see I had to pit all my energy against the forces that were carrying us toward this dark future – even as we marched in the sunlit palm-lined streets of Sydney Australia on a smiling Palm Sunday. Now I feel as though I am being lured by the same dark forces dumbed down – you’ve done your share, time to take a break from this antiwar stuff and get on and enjoy life even if others cannot….But I cannot, and God willing, I will not.
So I look to you, sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers. Many of you have survived hard prunings. I look to the early Anabaptists whose courage and love for God inspired Bock Ki and the Korean Anabaptists as well as myself and Doug and God knows how many others through the centuries. And I look to Stephen and St. Paul.
Are we ready?