I hope to see you on Sunday at 10:30 am. Many will watch via livestream, Sunday or another day. We are grateful to our AV team: Barry Paton, Rob Steeves, Steve Morley, Glen Knapp, & Penny Allen. Here is a link to the service:
A reminder a) there is no Coffee Hour following the church service this Sunday because b) there is a funeral for the late Ross Lawley at 2 pm.
Our story this Sunday, Acts 8:26-40, begins with “the angel of the Lord” directing Philip to a certain "wilderness road". Wilderness meant “margins”. There Philip finds the Ethiopian eunuch, a man interested enough in Israel’s God to make a pilgrimage from Ethiopia to Jerusalem, but according to Hebrew law, he is not free to practice his faith in the Temple (Deuteronomy 23:1). It’s possible that he is a Jew, but in Philip’s eyes, he is a foreigner, a Black man from Africa. What is a eunuch? Most current scholarship reveals a first century a eunuch is one of two things. A eunuch could be a man who had been castrated. This Ethiopian could have been a castrated male, or he could have been a male who wasn’t like most males. According to the scholars, men who showed a preference for other men or displayed little or no interest in women, or who were in anyway effeminate, in the first century these men were called eunuchs.
Rulers trusted eunuchs with positions in the treasury because they wouldn’t need to amass wealth to pass on to their children. While rulers entrusted eunuchs with key positions, they were shunned (outcasts) by the rest of society. The passage the Ethiopian eunuch was reading was about the Suffering Servant, who was “cut off” from the people of God. In Isaiah 56 God declares, “eunuchs who keep the Sabbath and follow the covenant will have an everlasting name and blessing, a name that shall not be cut off.” The eunuch could identify with this Suffering Servant. The eunuch asks Philip, “What is to prevent me from being baptized?”
Theologian Willie James Jennings describes the story of the eunuch this way: “Faith found the water. Faith will always find the water.” Where there appears no way, God makes a way, especially for those who feel “cut off” and “in the wilderness”. Philip followed the Spirit. Will we?