April 25, 2021
Joanna Harader

You can watch a preached version of this sermon on YouTube and see the accompanying worship playlist on the Peace Mennonite website.

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I know that “all scripture is God-breathed” etc., but some parts of scripture are definitely more fun to preach than others. And this is a great story—with the Holy Spirit sending Philip on the wilderness road, and then Philip running alongside of the Ethiopian’s chariot, and the baptism, and the Spirit whisking Philip away. It’s all very exciting.

And for progressive churches like ours, for churches concerned with justice for lgbtq people, we have the affirmation of a eunuch—a sexual minority—as a full member of the early Christian community. We can fit ourselves nicely into the role of Philip here—graciously, and sometimes with great effort—reaching out to include people that others might prefer to keep on the margins.

While I certainly think that broad inclusion is one teaching this story offers, I also think this reading of “Philip as inclusive hero” may be a bit problematic. We can put so much emphasis on Philip following the Spirit and Philip baptizing a queer person of color that we miss how incredible the Ethiopian eunuch is. His faith, even more than Philip’s, is an inspiration for us all.

We should understand that the eunuch navigates a complicated identity, serving in a position of power in the queen’s court and yet having been castrated in order to obtain that position. Despite holding power, eunuchs were second class citizens—physically different from other men, both in terms of their genitals and also in terms of their public appearance—lacking facial hair and having a generally “softer” appearance. Though some eunuchs did marry and adopt children, they were unable to establish the all-important traditional family structures.

So in his home nation—probably actually Nubia rather than modern-day Ethiopia—the eunuch is marginalized, in-between, privileged but oppressed. In a YouTube conversation I watched, Alfredo Valentin and Adam Coleman compare the eunuch’s situation to LeBron James—as a famous basketball player he has access to all kinds of people and places most of us couldn’t get into, and yet someone will still come to his house and spray paint the “N” word on his gate. As a black man in the United States, LeBron James is privileged, but . . . Just as the eunuch’s physical features allow him positions of privilege, but . . .

So even in his home nation the eunuch is in a precarious, a tricky, position. But in this story, he’s not in his home nation, he is on the wilderness road, having been to Jerusalem. We are told that he had gone to Jerusalem to worship, which means he had been to the temple.

So for a bit of context, here’s a fun verse for you, from Deuteronomy 23: “No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord.”

It’s unclear exactly what Temple practice was at the time, but it is very likely that as a eunuch and as a foreigner, the Ethiopian eunuch would have been relegated to one of the outer courts of the temple, not allowed into the central inner courts. And that spatial marginalization was a reflection of the way that he did not fit neatly into the religious structure—people weren’t quite sure what to do with him.

But even though he knew he would be marginalized, he went to Jerusalem anyway. He went to worship anyway. He made great efforts to be part of the community anyway.

Can you imagine? All of that time and emotional labor and even monetary expense just to be allowed to hang out on the margins of a faith community. Can you imagine?

Well. If you happen to be a queer Mennonite, you don’t have to imagine. You’ve been there and done that.

For me, as a cis/het person, I’m in awe. That someone would love God so much, would want so much to be part of God’s community—even as unjust and messed up as it is—that they would go to Jerusalem knowing that there were those who would prevent them from being “admitted to the assembly of the Lord.” That they would go to a Mennonite convention knowing . . . knowing . . .

God bless those who go anyway. It is a deep witness to and a needed challenge for the church.

Because as uncomfortable as the eunuch must have felt at the Temple, his presence also surely made others uncomfortable as well. And their discomfort was a gift the eunuch offered to the community. Probably a gift most of them didn’t want, but a gift nonetheless. It makes me think of the people in pink at Mennonite conventions. Physical, solid, in-person reminders that God is in relationship with people whether our human systems admit them “to the assembly of the Lord” or not.

The Ethiopian eunuch’s presence at the temple was a dismissal of Deuteronomy 23 and a reminder of Isaiah 56:

Do not let the foreigner joined to the Lord say,
    “The Lord will surely separate me from his people”;
and do not let the eunuch say,
    “I am just a dry tree.”
⁴ For thus says the Lord:
To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths,
    who choose the things that please me
    and hold fast my covenant,
⁵ I will give, in my house and within my walls,
    a monument and a name
    better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name

That shall not be cut off.

To my mind, the Ethiopian eunuch is definitely our model of faith in this story. He’s a model because he goes to Jerusalem anyway. He’s a model because he claims the sacred texts as his own, despite the ways people tried to use scripture against him. Even if the eunuch lived among generally inclusive, loving people, I can guarantee you that someone, sometime, had quoted Deuteronomy 23 at him—had told him that “scripture is clear” that he is to be excluded from community.

And yet, Philip finds him studying scripture! And I should point out that the fact that this guy has a scroll of Isaiah in his chariot with him is a definite sign of wealth. Not everyone had their own copies of scripture to carry around with them. But for this eunuch, the scriptures were important enough to spend significant money—not to mention the hassle of lugging around a scroll—so that he could learn from the holy texts. He does not let those Deuteronomy 23 quoters have the last word on what the scripture means.

Finally, the Ethiopian eunuch is a model for faith because he is willing to ask questions—sincere questions and challenging questions. “About whom does the prophet say this?”—a true desire to understand scripture and learn from the community. And the ultimate question: “What is to prevent me from being baptized?”

Listen. The fear of rejection is real. It’s deep. It can be debilitating. Especially if you have been rejected before. Asking this question could not have been easy for the eunuch, because he knows that plenty of people would answer with a long list of things that prevent him from being baptized: his queer gender identity, his status as a foreigner, his lack of insider status on so many levels.

It’s easy to read this as a rhetorical question: “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” But it’s not. When he asks this question, I imagine the eunuch is prepared to hear Philip’s list of why the eunuch is an outsider to the faith.

It would have been easier to just not ask about baptism. Easier for the eunuch, because he wouldn’t risk rejection. Again. And certainly easier for Philip. Because when we practice exclusion, it’s so much easier when people don’t question it. It’s really awkward to have to articulate the exclusion, to say out loud that we will not permit certain people in—and why.

But O, thanks be to God for the faithful ones who will ask the challenging questions; who will not quietly accept the status quo; who will hold people accountable for their bad theology and unfaithful structures.

What is to prevent me from being baptized? What is to prevent me from officiating a wedding for these two women? What is to prevent me from being ordained?

These are faithful questions. More gifts the church may not want but definitely needs.

In her book Queer Virtue, Rev. Elizabeth M. Edman asserts that “authentic Christianity is and must be queer.” She clarifies that she does not necessarily mean sexually queer, but “’queer’ as something that has at its center an impulse to disrupt any and all efforts to reduce into simplistic dualisms our experience of life, of God” (3).

If we who are comfortable, centralized, catagorizable, want to understand the Divine spaciousness, the holy paradoxes, the reality of our eternal God in this temporal world, we need the perspectives–the questions and teachings—of lgbtq people, of people of color, or people who have been uncomfortable and marginalized; people who don’t fit into tidy categories.

The Ethiopian eunuch–along with other queer people and people of color and queer people of color–lives in the both/and, the fully/not quite. And this is the space where God—our God who is both divine and human in Christ, our God who is fully present with us in the Spirit, but not quite within our realm—this queer space is where God shows up.

With all due respect to Philip, it is the eunuch I most appreciate in this story. And with all due respect to progressive, white, cisgender, heterosexual Mennonites who wouldn’t hesitate to baptize the Ethiopian eunuch on the wilderness road, I’m going to agree with Rev. Edman that “authentic Christianity is and must be queer.”

So for those who show up to worship despite being marginalized, for those who claim scripture as their own despite having it used against them, for those who ask the challenging questions despite their fears of rejection—I say, and let the church say, thanks be to God.