Acts 8:26-40
On Being the
Beloved Community
James Sledge May
2, 2021
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| Herbert Boeckl, Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch |
in Kalamazoo. He spoke and held a question-and-answer session with faculty and students where someone asked this question. “Don’t you feel that integration can only be started and realized in the Christian church, not in schools or by other means?”
Dr. King’s answer began with words that may be familiar to you. “We must face the fact that in America, the church is still the most segregated major institution in America. At 11:00 on Sunday morning when we stand and sing that Christ has no east or west, we stand at the most segregated hour in this nation. This is tragic. Nobody of honesty can overlook this.”[1]
That was nearly 60 years ago. In the meantime, America has become a much more integrated place. Much of corporate America has embraced diversity as an ideal to strive for. Some of you work in places that are a salad bowl of race, gender, sexuality, religion, and more. But Sunday morning stubbornly remains one of the most segregated places in our culture. Even among churches that are openly progressive or liberal, segregation stubbornly persists.
Tribalism in the human creature has deep, evolutionary roots. Early humans were able to survive only by living in groups that cooperated for protection and finding food. Such groups were likely based on kinship, and somewhere along the line, humans become genetically predisposed to seek comfort and safety with those who are like them.
Like fight or flight reflexes, tribalism was helpful, even necessary, for survival at one point in history. But such evolutionary adaptations work much less well in larger societies composed of different sorts of people. For our society to function well, these primitive tendencies need to be overcome. Yet even a church that holds a Silent Witness Against Racial Injustice every other Saturday stubbornly remains largely white.
When the Christian Church first began nearly 2000 years ago, it was made up of people who had much in common. Along with following Jesus, they were Jewish, all of them. We’re accustomed to think of Christians and Jews as different, but originally, the Church was simply a form of Judaism. They went to synagogue and continued to participate in festivals such as Passover.
When the Church first began, it was quite tribal. It recruited new members only from among fellow Jews. Being a follower of Jesus meant being a Jew, but Jesus had told the disciples to share the gospel with Gentiles, with non-Jews. And so the Church began, slowly, to reach out to people who were not like them. They began to “Go and make disciples of all nations,” or, more literally, “of all the Gentiles.”
There was a caveat, however. If Gentiles wanted to join the Church, they first had to become like those who were already in the Church. They had to become Jewish. Men would need to be circumcised, and everyone would need to follow Jewish dietary regulations. They would need to look and act and be Jewish. They would need to blend in with the tribe.
Such requirements posed an insurmountable hurdle for the Ethiopian eunuch we meet today in the reading from Acts. First of all, as an Ethiopian, he was a Gentile, not a member of the tribe. On top of that, he was not allowed to become Jewish. Eunuchs were forbidden by Jewish law from being admitted to the assembly of Yahweh.
And so when the eunuch says, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” there is a great deal to prevent it. He’s not Jewish, and he can’t become Jewish. And so he can’t be a Christian, a member of the Church, a part of the tribe.
But for some strange reason, presumably the Holy Spirit, Phillip throws aside the tribal boundaries and welcomes in someone one not at all like him, who is Black, who is a foreigner, who is Gentile, and who cannot become a Jew.
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On two Wednesday afternoons every month, hundreds of people come to our church for a meal and a grocery store gift card. Before the pandemic, they would come inside and spend much of the afternoon and evening here as they socialized while waiting for dinner to be served and as they sat down to eat.
This gathering looks a lot more like America than we who worship here do. They are White and Black, Hispanic and Asian, young and old, immigrant and citizen. Many of the same people attend from month to month, and I have gotten to know quite a few. And there is a community amongst them. They greet one another and hug one another, often people I can’t imagine have very much in common.
Yet in my nine years here at FCPC, I have seen a grand total of one Wednesday guest attend one of our worship services. No doubt some of them have their own churches. Some are not Christians, and some don’t speak much English. But a single, solitary soul?
I’ve thought a lot about that over the years, about why no one from these Wednesday meals ever shows up on Sunday. My tentative answer: Many of them believe, perhaps correctly, that our worship, our church, isn’t for people like them.
Maybe you’ve never thought about it, but our worship is pretty upper crust and White. Oh we may sing an occasional spiritual, but it’s mostly white, European or American composers. And some of us think that such music is the good, sophisticated, and serious music.
Now I personally like classical music and traditional worship, but at what point does it become a barrier to Jesus’ call to make disciples of all peoples, not just well-to-do, white ones? At what point does what we like and prefer keep us from “gathering those who fear they’re not enough, so we may experience grace, wholeness, and renewal as God’s beloved?”
In April of 1963, Martin Luther King was in jail in Birmingham, Alabama. While in jail he composed a letter, responding to a published statement from seven local pastors and one rabbi that expressed sympathy with the cause of civil rights but deplored the demonstrations that has disrupted life in Birmingham. In his letter Dr. King expressed great disappointment with white moderates who agreed with his goals but wanted him to go slow and avoid any confrontation. The letter also had these, perhaps prophetic, words.
But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.[2]
Dr. King was addressing how the white church remained largely on the sidelines in the civil rights movement, but his call to “recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church” speaks to a fundamental issue for the church, the question of why church exists and whether or not it matters.
What would it mean for the church to have a sacrificial spirit, for this congregation to have a sacrificial spirit as we lived into the call of Jesus? What would it mean for us as a community to deny self, to risk self for the sake of God’s new day?
To be honest, I’m not entirely sure. But one thing today’s scripture makes clear. When we allow the Spirit to guide us, rather than our own wants or preferences, amazing things can happen, and God’s beloved community can grow and move in ways we never imagined.
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