Upward

Acts 8:26-40

July 1, 2018 • Mount Pleasant UMC

One of my favorite professors at Asbury was Dr. John Oswalt, my Old Testament professor. He was fascinating to listen to. Most everything I know about the Old Testament traces back to his classes. He was not the easiest professor to get a good grade from, not by a long shot. We read extensively. We took exhaustive notes. I don’t think I worked harder in any other set of classes than I did in Dr. Oswalt’s classes. There were no quizzes, though, or papers to write. Our grade rested entirely on two tests: the midterm and the final. And both of those tests were essay tests. Three questions each, and we had an hour to write our answers to those three questions. Cathy did not like to be around me when I was preparing for those tests! No one did! The thing is, we knew ahead of time what the questions were going to be. Sort of. At the beginning of the semester, Dr. Oswalt would hand out a list of twenty questions. Ten of them would cover the class up to the midterm, and the other ten were for the final. He would choose three questions out of the ten and that would be the test. We had to be ready to answer all of them, even though he would only ask three. The questions were hard, but they were good because they forced us to learn and, more than that, to really think about how what we were learning mattered.

Good questions can do that for us. Good questions, asked at the right moment, will push us to become better than we currently are. For the last few weeks, we’ve been exploring our heritage as Methodist Christians, and a couple of times we have mentioned that the genius of the early Methodist movement was found in the small group system John Wesley and his brother Charles oversaw. Life and discipleship happened in small groups, much as it does now in our LifeGroups, Sunday School classes and other groups. But that original small group design had roots back in the college days of the Wesley brothers. In 1729, while a student at Christ Church in Oxford, England, Charles Wesley gathered together some like-minded students who wanted to grow in their faith by practicing simple spiritual disciplines. Their main goal was to see that their faith worked itself out in daily life, and as a part of that discipline, he and John developed a set of twenty-one questions the group would ask each other to help them grow in faith and holiness. Now, if you look at the historical record, some folks say there were as many as twenty-four, but for our purposes over the next three weeks, we’re going to focus on the most-agreed-upon twenty-one questions (cf. Folmsbee, The Wesley Challenge, pgs. 12-13). What we’re going to do in the first part of this month is to engage in what’s called “The Wesley Challenge.” We’ll take a question each day to meditate upon. The questions will be printed each week in the bulletin and available on the app. In addition, I’ll be blogging every day on these questions and how they impact my life, not for any other reason than to help spur you on in your own spiritual growth. Because good questions can help us become more than we currently are. And these twenty-one questions are good ones, deep ones, hard ones for us to honestly answer.

These twenty-one questions divide into three different categories of spiritual growth. Next week, we’ll be tackling those that help us be shaped personally, inwardly. The week after that, we’ll look at some questions that help us move outward to change the world. But this week, this first set of questions focus on moving upward, connecting with the God who has loved us first. As we ask these questions this week, perhaps we will want to become like the Ethiopian we read about in our Scripture today.

The book of Acts is the sequel to the Gospel of Luke, as Luke sets out to tell the story of the early church in the first half and the story of the Apostle Paul in the second half. In the story of the early church, we would expect harmony and unity in those first few days, wouldn’t we? Many if not most of them had seen Jesus, they knew him, and all they had to do was work together, talk about Jesus and share the good news. Yet it’s surprising how quickly the early church found itself having problems. Just in the lead-up to this morning’s passage, we have the disciples being accused of being drunks at nine in the morning (2:13), leaders of the movement continuing to have conflict with the religious leaders in Jerusalem (4:3), members of the church trying to appear more generous than they really were (5:1-11), arguments over whose widows were and weren’t getting their fair share of food (6:1-4), and a prominent preacher murdered by the religious leaders on a trumped-up charge (6:11). The church has been scattered, and in that scattering, one of the lesser-known disciples of Jesus, Philip, finds himself south of Jerusalem, along the road to an ancient Philistine city called Gaza. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where he was, but near the ancient city, the fifty-mile long road enters a desert-like area (cf. Longenecker, “The Acts of the Apostles,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 9, pg. 362). He doesn’t seem to know why he is there; he just knows that an angel of the Lord told him to report there, so he went.

Over the years, I’ve learned to pay attention to those little promptings and nudges that I’ve come to recognize as coming from the Holy Spirit. Several years ago, I was in my office working on an upcoming sermon when I had this prompting to go see John. I hadn’t been thinking about John or his family, and I had no real reason to go see him, so I argued a bit with that nudge. After all, I needed to get the sermon done and there were a million other things that needed attending to that day, but that impression wouldn’t go away. Go see John. So I got in my car and I drove the two miles to John’s house, knocked on the door, only to find out that no one was home. I was a little irritated and a little smug as I said back to God, “See there, I told you this was a waste of time.” But just as I got ready to back out of the driveway, John and his family pulled in. He greeted me, we went inside and sat at his dining room table and had a good visit. He hadn’t been feeling well and had just come home from seeing the doctor. We talked about a lot of things, prayed together, and I went back home. Turned out, that was the last time I talked with John. He unexpectedly died just a short time later at age 31. I officiated at his funeral, and as I prepared for that service, I found myself hoping that in some way I had made some kind of difference that day. Still, I am forever grateful that I have learned to pay attention to those nudges and whispers, just as Philip did. He didn’t have any idea why he was heading down toward Gaza, but God did. There was a man coming through there who would need him, and it was Philip’s chance to make a difference in his life.

The man in the chariot is a foreigner from the nation of Ethiopia, but he has just left Jerusalem after worshipping there. Luke describes him as a “eunuch,” which usually indicates a man who has been made incapable of fathering children, but there is other ancient evidence that the title was also used to describe those who were important governmental officials, “married” to their job, so to speak. Since the former were generally excluded from worship in Jerusalem, it’s more likely the latter is true of this man. He is a Gentile who has deep reverence for and interest in the God of the Jews, so much that not only has he made the long trek to Jerusalem for one of the festivals, he also has obtained a scroll containing the words of the prophet Isaiah. Now, this wasn’t like going over to the Open Door Bookstore and picking up a copy; to actually possess a Scriptural scroll in those days meant you were a person of some means. Copies were hand-written, so they were expensive and it was very unusual to have a personal copy of any part of the Bible for your own reading pleasure. Luke also tells us this man is someone important; he is, in fact, the minister of finance for the Queen of the Ethiopians (cf. Longenecker 363; Wright, Acts for Everyone, Part One, pg. 133). He has the ear of the Queen and influences policy in this far-away land. This is who God sent Philip to talk to. You never know just who you might encounter when you follow God’s leading!

So this man has great power and great ability in politics, but he apparently does not have the power and ability to understand the word of God (cf. Willimon, Interpretation: Acts, pg. 71). When Philip runs up alongside the chariot, he hears the man reading out loud to himself (a common practice in those days; Longenecker 70) from the book of Isaiah, so Philip breaks the ice with a good question: “Do you understand what you are reading?” Again, a good question helps us see what matters, and this question does that for this man. “How can I,” he says, “unless someone explains it to me?” Now, I want to stop a minute and highlight that question because it, too, is a really good one, especially in the world we live in today. We live in what many have called a post-Christian world, a culture that, for all practical purposes, sees itself as having moved “beyond” the Christian faith, Christian truth. When I was growing up, most people at least were familiar with the stories of the Bible, even if they had never been to church. The Christian story was part of the culture. But no longer. Many of your neighbors and co-workers don’t know the stories or the characters or the expectations of Scripture. When we get frustrated because the world doesn’t act like God wants them to, we’re betraying a lack of understanding of the world. The world doesn’t act like God wants them to because they have no idea, really, how God expects us to live. How can they know unless someone explains it to them? This culture calls for people who live consistently and faithfully, people who do live the way God calls us to and by doing so show a better way to live. How can the world know unless someone explains it to them? So what does Philip do?

Right there in the chariot, Philip has a Bible study with the Ethiopian man and helps him see Jesus in the midst of the Scripture. It’s a passage about what is usually these days called the “Suffering Servant.” When Isaiah wrote these words, he wasn’t necessarily thinking of a messiah. He was reflecting on Israel in exile, and he dreamed of a servant who would come and live out God’s will. This servant, Isaiah believed, would rescue Israel and the whole world—which is, of course, exactly what Jesus did. Isaiah wrote about more than he knew, but the early church was quick to see glimpses of Jesus in this passage, as well as so many other passages in the Old Testament. They could see Jesus on every page and they came to understand Jesus as the one in which the story God had been telling had reached its destination (cf. Wright 135). That’s what Philip helps this man understand. You see, this Ethiopian was like some people today, even some people who sit in pews and chairs in churches every week. He knew about this servant, so you could say he knew about Jesus, but he didn’t know Jesus. Knowing about someone and knowing them are two vastly different things, especially when it comes to Jesus. I know about a lot of people but that doesn’t mean I have a relationship with them. I follow people on social media I will never personally know but from their tweets and posts, I learn a lot about them. A lot of people today are like that with Jesus. They know about him, but they haven’t crossed the line to actually knowing him, to having a real relationship with him. A friend of mine, Jack, once told me that was his story. He grew up in church, singing the hymns of the church, even serving on committees and work teams. But he was busy with life and work and then he went through a difficult divorce. In the midst of that painful time, something softened in his heart. He told me of sitting in church one day and realizing he didn’t really know Jesus. He knew all about him, but he had never given his life over to him, to serve him, to be in relationship with him. Maybe that’s you this morning. Maybe when you come to the first question in our twenty-one day experiment today, you have trouble answering in the affirmative. That first question is this: “Is Jesus real to me?” The Ethiopian eunuch would have answered, “No,” and maybe some of us have to, as well.

But here’s the thing: he wants to be. He wants to be real to each and every one of us. He wants to connect on a deep level with each of us, just as he did with the Ethiopian. Now, think about this: God sent Philip all this way just to have Bible study with this man. Of course, we can get all missional (a buzz word in the church today) and strategic and say, “Well, he was an important man, and if he became a Christian, he would spread the faith all the way back to Ethiopia, even to the Queen of the country.” And an early church historian does tell us that this man became an evangelist back in his home country (cf. Willimon 72), though our Biblical text doesn’t say anything about what happens to him. But I don’t think that’s the point anyway. I don’t think God sent Philip to teach this man out of some sort of missional strategy. I think God sent Philip to him because this man had a soft heart, an open heart, a heart that wanted to know God on a deeper level. When he hears the good news about Jesus, he instantly wants to know him, not just about him.

You see that in his urgent request. When they pass a small area of water, the man asks Philip, “What can stand in the way of my being baptized?” (8:36). Scholars debate as to what, exactly, he was asking for at this point, because Gentiles who didn’t want to convert all the way into Judaism (which required circumcision) would often be baptized as a public sign of their decision, but of course it’s also true that from the earliest days in the church, baptism was a sign of public belief in Jesus (Longenecker 365). I believe, on a very basic level, he simply wants to do something to witness to and testify about his faith, even if it’s just with Philip and his chariot driver! Jesus is real to him now; is there some way he can demonstrate that? Yes, there is, and Philip baptizes him right then and there. There may be some of you feeling that today. Maybe today, maybe in the last year or recent months, Jesus has become real to you. You’ve opened your life to his working in your life and you want to know if there is some way you can witness about that. I have good news for you! Next Sunday afternoon is our annual outdoor baptism service. Now, we do baptisms all year long, but in our worship center here, we’re not able to do immersions. So once a year, we gather out at Helton Pond in the afternoon, have some baptisms and, since we’re good Methodists, enjoy a great carry-in meal. So if you’ve never been baptized and you’re realizing that Jesus is real to you in a brand new way, you’re invited to celebrate that in baptism next Sunday. If you have been baptized before and you want to celebrate a new beginning, that can also be a time where you renew your vows and rededicate yourself to Christ and his kingdom. You can see Pastor Rick or myself if you want to do that. And all of us can, like the Ethiopian man, go back into the lives God calls us to live and live out our faith. As we reminded the Bible School kids a week ago, we live like Jesus is alive, because he is. In everything we do, everywhere we go, all that we say and do should be a demonstration that Jesus is real to us, that he is alive and loose in the world.

Now, in just a few minutes we’re going to have a chance to experience another way in which Jesus can be real to us as we celebrate holy communion. But before we do that, let me share with you the rest of this week’s questions in The Wesley Challenge. You can follow along with me on the insert in the bulletin. We start today by asking, “Is Jesus real to me?” Tomorrow: Am I enjoying prayer? Tuesday, it gets messy: Do I insist upon doing something about which my conscience is uneasy? Wednesday: Did the Bible live in me today? Thursday: Did I disobey God in anything? Friday, we do to meddling: Do I pray about the money I spend? And then on Saturday: Do I give time for the Bible to speak to me every day? You can see, I pray, how each question pushes us upward, draws us closer to Jesus, and helps us know more and more his desire and will for our lives. That’s the direction this week: upward. And it will be an adventure; again, I invite you to join me as we tackle this together on my Facebook page or on the blog (the website address is in the bulletin). Let’s dialogue and work this challenge together.

So, as we begin this journey, we begin at the table. Jesus told us to do this, to come and share in the bread and in the cup, because in it we would remember him and we would find him. He told his disciples he would be lifted up (John 12:32), and he gave them this meal, this practice to help them remember. Do you remember what he said would happen when he was lifted up? He said he would draw all people to himself. He will draw everyone up to him—upward. So we take the bread and we remember. We take the cup and we remember. We receive this sacrament and know that Jesus is real to us. This morning, let’s come to his table and celebrate his presence with us.