Building Bridges, Not Walls
Announcements
Maggie: Good morning. Hello, everybody. Good morning. I'm Maggie. I'm part of the table team, and it's my delight to dismiss the third to fifth graders to go with Brielle and Rebecca. We'll see you back for communion, friends. Bye. See you. Have fun. Good morning, everyone. So good to be together this morning on this chilly day. If you're cold, you know, just kind of meet somebody new and snuggle up next to them.
I would love to tell you a little bit about our neighborhood partnerships, and the one that we'd like to feature today is this new partnership that we're developing. How many of you were here last week, and you heard Kevin Nye preach on the weekend to end homelessness? Great. It was knockout. I wasn't here. Listen to the recording. It was lovely. And Kevin is going to host an info night tomorrow night. This is kind of like a brainstorming, a listening session. There are, as Ben talked about earlier, there are moves of the spirit within this congregation about how we as a church can address homelessness here in Minneapolis. And Kevin brings a wealth of experience, but tomorrow night is about looking each other in the eyeballs and saying, what can we do? What is The Table's part to play? And so if listening to that message last week or hearing about it now has kind of pricked your heart a little bit, I believe that that's the Holy Spirit, and we would love to see you tomorrow night at the info night. So you can RSVP online, but at this point, we're trying to decide if we're going to be in one space or another. If there's a lot of you, we're going to be here. So RSVPs would be helpful. But if you forget to RSVP, just come anyways, and we will make room. So please be with us tomorrow evening for that. It's here at 6.30. There we go. All right.
We also have a bunch of stuff happening in our community. So men at the table, you are headed to Topgolf. Oh, I thought there would be more Woos than that. Okay. Well, yeah. Okay. So if you want to go to Topgolf, please, would you RSVP there, and Steve Manning will reach out to you about payment, etcetera. We'd love to see you there.
And then next is a next--no, two Sundays. Two Sundays from now is my favorite Sunday of the year because it's the Sunday before Halloween, and we're asking all the kids to wear their costumes. And then because it's a Kids in Worship weekend, it means that the kids are going to serve communion, and you just might get communion from Batman, and that's my favorite week of the year. And then--and then if you're already in your costumes, then you can just head on up to Loring Park because TC Pride is running this awesome trunk or treat. We brought our kids last year. It's a ball. And so if you guys want to go and get in some trick or treating, we wanted to let you know that. We're going to have a car there, aren't we? We're going to have a trunk. Look for the table trunk at the trunk or treat. What did I miss, Patti? Today's the 18th. I forgot. It's next Sunday. That's next Sunday. Have your kids wear their costumes next Sunday.
Okay, because then in two weeks, the day after Halloween when your children are all sugared up, we're going to come back together, and it's All Saints. And so we are going to be remembering the ones that we love and have lost in the past year, and it's our tradition to do kind of a photo slideshow to remember those loved ones. If you have lost a loved one this past year, and you would like to remember them in community, the opportunity there, you can scan that QR code, but it's just going to take you to Patti's email address. Send Patti your loved one's photo, their name, your name, your relationship to them, and we will put them into that slideshow, and we'll have a moment of remembrance on the first. And we'd love to remember your loved one with you. I think that's it. I'm done. Come on up. Marta, get up here.
Sermon
Marta: Parents and caregivers, I'd like to congratulate you on the fact that you get to send your children back to school on Monday, and fall break is over. I am a nanny, and the schmoozing kids were home, and they're very fast, and I am not. So that's where my voice is. I left it behind, chasing them. And then I went to a wedding. Someone called it a one-two punch. So we thank God for microphones this morning.
My name is Marta. I am the pastor of youth ministry, and I'm so happy to be here with you today. I was at a John Green book event last week for his newest book, Hollywood Ending, and he opened up by saying, this is the only moment in history where this specific group of people will be in the same room together. And the fact that we at no other time will this exact configuration of human beings gather together for the same purpose. And of course at a church we're a little bit different than a book of--I guess we are kind of a book event. (Laughter)
But it's different. We have members, regular attendees, and staff we hear from regularly. But even if every single one of us came back another Sunday and not a single new person arrived, we all would be different people, changed by time and experience. So I want to honor that today. Whoever you are, whatever you're carrying, we're here together at a unique moment in time. And we get to open this ancient text shared across generations and see if it has something to say in our context now. Our scripture today comes from Acts chapter 8 verses 26 through 40. I read through a few different translations in my sermon prep, which I will talk about later. But I'll be reading today from the NRSVUE. And if you'd like to follow along, they'll be on the screen:
"The angel of the Lord said to Philip, Get up and go towards the south to the road that goes to Jerusalem to Gaza. This is a wilderness road. So he got up and went. Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of Candace-- is how you pronounce that--the queen of the Ethiopians, and in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning home. Seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah. Then the spirit said to Philip, Go over to this chariot and join it. So Philip ran up to him and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. And he asked, Do you understand what you're reading? And he replied, How can I unless someone guides me? And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him. Now the passage of scripture that he was reading was this. Like a sheep, he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation, justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation, for his life was taken away from the earth. Then eunuch asked Philip, About whom may I ask you? Does this prophet say this, about himself or about someone else? And then Philip began to speak, and starting with the scripture, he proclaimed the good news about Jesus. As they were going along to the road, they came to some water, and the eunuch said, Look, here is water. What is to prevent me from being baptized? He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down to the water, and Philip baptized him. When they came out of the water, the spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away, and the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing. Philip found himself at Azotus, as he was passing through the region, he proclaimed the good news to all the towns, until he came to Caesarea.
We are currently in a sermon series called Woven, inspired by a Martin Luther King Jr. quote that says, We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
When Debbie and Justin shared this quote at a staff meeting this summer, I immediately thought of something I had just finished making. This is a quilt that I made together with my grandma Judy. There's grandma Judy. She taught me how to hand sew each individual hexagon, and then sew it into a flower, and then connect the flowers together. So I did the hexagons, and she stitched it all together into one piece. But I learned very quickly, I'm not, Justin asked me to do a sewing project for him once, and I was like, this is all grandma Judy. Like, I am a very messy seamstress, because when one mistake would happen here, it would impact everything that happened around it, all the way until the other end of the quilt, and so it was a lot of stitching and unstitching to get it right. Whatever happened in one corner made a difference elsewhere in the quilt. And every piece, every single color has a different history. These are all scraps from other quilts that my grandma has made throughout her life. And she could tell you exactly what quilt store she bought every fabric from and what piece that she originally intended it for. But now they're all connected in something new, whether they started off next to each other originally or not. They're in this inescapable network of mutuality, and it makes me wonder, how often do we realize that someone else's story is becoming part of ours, that our lives might look different because of someone we never expected to meet?
In today's passage, we meet two people who probably wouldn't have crossed paths under ordinary circumstances. Philip, our main character of sorts, is an early follower of Jesus. This takes place right after Jesus' ascension. The church is growing quickly, and they need to add more to their leadership from the 12, and so they elect seven people from the community to help serve, and Philip is one of them. Earlier on in this chapter, Philip had been sharing the good news in Samaria, and things are going pretty well. People are responding, and there's a lot of excitement about what God is doing. Honestly, there's a lot of instant gratification in this early part of his ministry, which, as you know in long-standing work with other people, is pretty rare.
But the angel tells Philip to head to the road from Jerusalem to Gaza, and Luke specifically calls this a wilderness road. Last summer, we spent a whole entire sermon series talking about different times when God calls people into the wilderness, and here's what I know when Scripture calls attention to being in a wilderness area, something unexpected is going to happen. And unexpected doesn't necessarily mean exciting or like gleeful and cheery, because the wilderness is exposed, unpredictable, and lonely. It's not where you expect to see a thriving new ministry heading next, but Philip goes without knowing who he's going to meet or why, and somewhere along the way, he's no longer alone. There's another traveler, and Luke gives us a surprisingly detailed introduction to him. Just like every piece of fabric in my quilt had a history before I sewed it, this Ethiopian official has an entire life before Philip ever approaches his chariot. We're given a lot of detail about this person. It feels like we learned everything except for their name, and every detail makes us reconsider what we thought we knew. It adds another foil or a wrinkle to a box that we could put him in. He's Ethiopian. Now, you might think, "Yes, this is the Bible territory that I know where that is." It's not Ethiopia where it is today. I know not most of us are imagining Biblical or even modern geography, but I've put it on a map for you. This is coming more from the region of contemporary Sudan, and he traveled up in some way, shape, or form to Jerusalem, traveling about 1,000 miles from the ancient kingdom of Kush to Jerusalem. This is one way 1,000 miles, weeks of travel potentially longer. And Jon Keller will tell you, "You don't travel 1,000 miles for nothing. Even when you've got air travel on your side, this man does not have air travel. He's got a bumpy chariot in a dusty desert." So what put him on this chariot to get to and from Jerusalem? It says that he had been worshipping in Jerusalem, but why was someone from Cush worshipping in Jerusalem? Was he Jewish? And scholars say, "Maybe."
Biblical scholar Wil Gafney argues that he probably was. Others suggest that he worshipped the God of Israel without identifying as Jewish. Luke doesn't tell us, but what we do know is this isn't the first time where this person is encountering the God of Israel for the first time. He traveled an extraordinary distance to worship, and now he's reading Isaiah on his way home. And he's reading it on an ancient scroll. Today we could head over to Goodwill or Target or any bookstore and pick up a Bible, or you could sit here right now on your phone and download 17 translations instantly. But ancient scrolls were copied by hand and enormously expensive to take care of. So this man has access to Isaiah not just in a library, but while traveling on the road. He's literate, engaged with Scripture, and he has access to something valuable because he's a court official and a treasurer. He's a treasurer for the Candace, which is a title similar to the title of Caesar or Pharaoh, except, ladies, it's a kingdom run by the women. It's used for powerful women in the kingdom of Kush, and this is a kingdom with a history of women holding significant political authority. So this man is in charge of all the money, not just the youth ministry snack budget, which I'm always sending receipts to Sarah and Patty. It's the entire royal treasury. This is someone with responsibility, influence, and power. We have a well-traveled, educated, high-ranking government official who's apparently pretty serious about his faith. And then there's one more descriptor. He's a eunuch, which is a word that doesn't exactly come up a lot in everyday conversation, but at least not in mine.
In the ancient world, it could refer to somebody who had been castrated, sometimes in connection with their service to the royal court. It also could just be a word that's used more broadly to talk about a royal court official. So we don't know this person's body or their experience, and I want to be careful here because I don't think it's fair to take someone who lived 2,000 years ago and assign him a modern identity and a label that he didn't choose for himself. But I also think it's important to pay attention to, and we can't pretend that gender was super straightforward 2,000 years ago. In the ancient Mediterranean world, masculinity was often tied to having children and carrying on your family name and exercising authority in that way. And so eunuchs often occupied a complicated place within those expectations. Their body, social roles, and relationship to masculinity didn't always fit neatly in the categories other people had created.
So he's got all these different categories that don't necessarily line up in one way or another. They all just kind of bump up next to each other, and we still don't know his name. But what we do know is people are always more complicated than the categories we use to describe them.
Oh, you're an only child? That explains a lot. You grew up in a small town? Oh, I probably know exactly how your parents are. You're retired? You must have all the time in the world. You're a woman? You must be so nurturing and love children. You're a man. You must be really tough and strong and want to be the provider. Sometimes people don't say these things out loud. They just make mental notes in their head about who they think you are, and everything gets filtered through that assumption. And sometimes the thing that they've noticed is true. You are from a small town. You are retired. These are real things about you, but they don't fill in the multifaceted part of all that makes you you.
And Philip is about to discover the best way to learn about this stranger isn't by looking at him from the outside. It's to join him in the chariot and have a conversation. After being prompted by the spirit, Philip runs over to the chariot and asks, "Do you understand what you're reading?" Which, depending on the tone of voice, could be either a perfectly reasonable question or a very rude introduction to someone you've never met. I would like to give Philip the benefit of the doubt. Rather than handing him an ancient version of whatever a religious tract might have been, Philip checks in with curiosity, almost like he's taking a temperature check of this conversation. In our middle school youth group, after we read our scripture together, they all have access to these little bookmarks which have our three questions that we ask in pairs together. What did you notice? What would you ask a Bible expert? And what does this passage say about our topic for today? And Philip's question feels really similar to me to these questions. He's not asking him to prove how much he knows. He's opening up a conversation about what he's reading. And this official has lots of questions. He's reading Isaiah's description of someone suffering humiliation and injustice, but who is Isaiah talking about, himself or someone else? So he invites Philip into the chariot. And I want us to notice that. The official invites Philip and not the other way around. Philip might have been sent by the spirit, but that doesn't mean he gets to assume that he's welcome in someone else's space. And Philip is entering a conversation that was already happening. This man was reading scripture before he arrived and was planning on wrestling with it the whole way home. He traveled to worship before Philip arrived. He already had his own questions before Philip arrived. And Philip doesn't suddenly give this person this person's life meaning. Philip joins a story that is already unfolding. And I wonder how often we forget that, especially when people like me, straight presenting, white, middle class American, Christian Americans, think that we have something to offer at someone else. Because I, like most of you in this community, I think, like being helpful. It's a good feeling to have. I like having answers. But the most meaningful conversations about faith that I've had happened because someone asked a question I never considered or understood God differently enough that I had to reconsider I thought I knew.
And I wish we knew more about what happened in this chariot. Luke tells us that Philip shared the good news about Jesus, but we don't get a transcript. Do they talk about the journey? Do they talk about the difference between their hometowns? Did they discover something unexpected about each other? I don't know. And I do wonder what Philip took away from this conversation. Because it's so easy to imagine Philip doing all the teaching and the official doing all the learning. But what's happening here is making room for someone else's experiences and questions to open ourselves up to being changed. And sometimes those conversations happen in unexpected places.
I was telling this whole story to some friends at a wedding reception on Friday night, which is where the rest of my remaining voice went. And these friends aren't particularly religious, but they were curious about my work and what I was preaching this weekend. And this is a weird text to explain to people who don't have a lot of background in the scripture story. There's surprisingly a lot to share in context to give. So there I am explaining Acts and ancient geography and what exactly a eunuch is or might not be. Well, Rihanna is absolutely blasting in the background going, "We found love in a hopeless place." And it's honestly a pretty incredible soundtrack that sets up these two strangers meeting on a wilderness road.
And what I appreciated was nobody was trying to convince anybody about anything. My friends weren't looking to become Christians. They were just curious about my work, and I was sharing something that's important to me. We're genuinely interested in each other's lives without deciding ahead of time what the other person is supposed to get out of the conversation. And that's different from simply welcoming someone into a space we've already created and expecting them to fit. It's recognizing that their presence might change something about us too.
And so Philip and the official continue down the road, and something happens that their conversation switches from just talking about Isaiah. They come upon water in the wilderness of all places. And the official asks another question, "What is to prevent me from being baptized?" Now, this is where I said we'd come back to translation. When I was putting scripture into my manuscript and making the slides, I noticed something strange. "Greyson, do you see what's going on here? What do you see?"
It's okay if you don't see it. There's chapter 36, or there's verse 36, and then verse 38. Weird, but I've made mistakes copy-pasting before, so no big deal. Go back to Bible Gateway and I'll go find it. It wasn't there. And so I pulled out my physical Bible. Also missing. At this point, I'm going in my office and pulling every textbook I've ever had from grad school and every Bible translation. It feels like the fairy godmother in Shrek 2, where she's like, "Cinderella on the end, happy, happy, happy, oh, no ogre." Except I'm like, "Oh, no, verse 37.” Like, I'm just like ripping books all over. They're still, sorry, Brad, they're all over the office right now. I'll clean it when we get home.
And finally, I found a translation that had it. In the New King James Version, after the official asked what's to prevent me from being baptized, Philip responds, "If you believe with all your heart, you may." And he answered and said, "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God." And then he goes on to be baptized. So what happened here?
The Bible wasn't originally written, as most of you know, I'm sure. It wasn't written with our big chapter and little number of verses. Those came a long time later. And the New Testament was copied by hand across centuries and communities. We have many surviving manuscripts, and oftentimes they differ. And verse 37 is absent from our earliest surviving Greek manuscripts of Acts. It appears in some later manuscripts in an early Christian tradition. A lot of scholars think that this was probably added in the copying process, perhaps reflecting the confession of faith people made before baptism. And that's why so many modern translations omit it or place it in a footnote while keeping the verse numbers unchanged.
And I find that fascinating because without verse 37, this is how the story unfolds. The official sees water and asks what prevents me from being baptized. They stop the chariot, they go down in the water, fill up baptism, and there is no verbal answer of what is preventing him. When I hear what is to prevent me, I don't hear somebody simply asking for next steps or the words to the sinner's prayer. I hear another question underneath is, is there anything about my long list of identifiers that prevents me from being part of this Christian community? Because we've spent a lot of time learning about this person. He's someone whose life doesn't fit into categories that other people have for him. And now on this wilderness road, he asks what prevents him.
One of our ground rules in middle school youth group, we have four of them, is right here, it says, "We build bridges and not walls." And I want students to look for ways to connect with people whose beliefs and experiences differ from theirs rather than arbitrary reasons to exclude them, as faith-based spaces so often do.
Because there's a difference between making room for someone and recognizing that they get to belong to the story we're telling together. Making room still can leave us deciding who gets invited. It leaves us with an attitude saying, "We're the host and everybody else is the guest." But mutuality asks us to recognize that community isn't ours to protect from change. The people who join us aren't simply additions to something that already complete. They bring their questions, experiences, and understandings of God. And I wonder if that's part of what happens on the wilderness road. Philip meets someone whose life is very different from his own. They sit together, they talk about scripture, and eventually stand together in the water. The official's question isn't answered with a list of reasons why he can or cannot belong. It's answered with baptism. And I think that's a powerful picture of what happens when we stop treating belonging as something we get to grant to other people and recognize it as something that God is already making possible.
Inclusion says, "We've made room for you," while mutuality says, "Your presence changes who we are." And I think about the person of Jesus whose life and ministry were so often shaped by the people he encountered. Jesus didn't spend his ministry keeping people at comfortable distance inviting them to observe how he was living. He sat at their tables. He ate their food and listened to their questions and entered into relationships with people whose lives looked very different from his own. He allowed himself to be interpreted, to be approached, and even be challenged. His ministry was incredibly and deeply relational, and the people he encountered weren't simply background characters in a story that was always going to unfold in the same way.
And I think that's part of what Philip is sharing with the official on the wilderness road. The good news of a God who didn't remain distant from humanity but became a person in Jesus Christ. A God who chose to enter into the complicated, beautiful, and sometimes painful experience of being in relationship with other people. A God who knows what it's like to be loved and to love others, to grieve and rejoice, and to sit beside somebody at a meal. And through Christ we're invited to that same kind of life with one another.
And I keep thinking coming back to this quilt, and when Grandma Judy and I made it, we weren't starting with brand new fabric. We were making it from something that already had history, from different projects and different moments in her life. But now there's something new. Not because they've lost those histories, but because these histories have become connected. And you can't pull on one corner without infecting the other. And I think that's what Martin Luther King Jr. meant when he wrote about our inescapable network of mutuality. We're not separate pieces of fabric laid next to each other. We're stitched together in love.
We're interconnected through the person of Christ, and it isn't something to fear or protect ourselves from. It's part of what it means to be human, and what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves. Philip and the official didn't start that day knowing the other existed, but for a little while their stories became part of each other. They sat together, asked questions, talked together, found water, and stepped in it together. And then they went their separate ways. We don't know if they ever met again. They probably didn't. But I wonder what either of them remembered in that wilderness road in the same way. I wonder whether either of them remember that wilderness road quite the same way afterward. So as we go from here, I hope we remember that following Jesus isn't just about making room for other people in our lives the way we've already arranged it. It's about following a Christ who entered fully into relationship with humanity and who continues to meet us through the people whose lives become woven together with our own.
We aren't inviting people into something we've already finished. God is still at work among us, still drawing us together, still weaving something that none of us could create alone. Amen.
Words of Institution
Debbie: I really love the quote that the question that the eunuch asks Philip, "What is preventing me from being baptized?" There are a lot of people in this sanctuary today who are here because you have been told that there is a barrier that is keeping you from faith. One of my really good friends, Rachel, who I was in a small group with back in Raleigh, she texted me the other day. Rachel had come out a few years ago and she married a beautiful person named Brittany. They started going to church together, which was a wonderful experience for them. But then Brittany decided that she wanted to get baptized. She went to church leadership to share her story and they refused to baptize her. It was devastating for her.
In our scripture this morning, there are a lot of perceived barriers up in place for this eunuch. He knows that, but Philip baptizes him anyway. I want you to know this morning that in this church, there is nothing keeping you from the love of Christ today. It is already yours. And so as we come to this table this morning, know that there is nothing standing in the way of you and Jesus knowing one another, loving one another. That's what this table is all about. You experiencing and remembering how deeply loved you are by God.
On the night that Jesus was betrayed, he took bread and he broke it.And he said, "This is my body given for you. Take and eat in remembrance of me." In the same way, after the supper, he raised the cup and said, "This is the blood of my new covenant poured out for you as often as you drink, drink in remembrance of me."
So as we prepare our hearts and our minds for the Lord's table today, just a few logistical reminders. There is an orange tape line that you'll see in the aisles. If you are seated in front of the orange tape line, you'll come down to this station for communion. If you are behind the orange tape line, you'll go to the station in the back. We do practice intention here. You'll take gluten-free bread, dip into the juice, consume it, and then head back to your seat. If you are in need of prayer today, I think Ann Herman will be in the back offering prayer today. And so if there are any prayer needs that you have, please feel free to stop by and have her pray with you and pray for you.
So at this time, embody, or in spirit, let's stand together. And we'll pray as Jesus taught us, saying, "Our God, our God."