In honor of the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, and in recognition of the many ways that equal rights for all people are being fought for all over the world today, I am sharing the text of a sermon I preached two Sundays ago.
The text being referenced is
Acts 8:26-40, where Philip meets the Ethiopian eunuch on the road.
For the audio of this sermon, see
Episode 7 of The Truth As Best I Know It Podcast.
Annual Conference begins today in Brentwood, and we have a lot of work to do over the next few days. The 2008 General Conference approved a number of amendments to our Constitution, and kind of like amending the US Constitution, these amendments have to be ratified by a majority of the Annual Conferences to take affect.
One of the amendments that is being voted on changes some of the language about inclusiveness in our denomination. The change would state that all people are eligible to become members of the United Methodist Church. Sounds like a no brainer, right? All people are welcome in the church! The thing is, though, that there are a lot of people who are opposed to this amendment, but their argument is a bit hard to understand. The folks who oppose the inclusiveness amendment say that stating that all people are eligible to become members of the church would change the church’s stand on homosexuality. That’s not even remotely true, but that’s what they’re arguing. The amendment saying nothing about sexual orientation, and our social principles remain the same. They’re doing this not because they actually think that the amendment has anything to do with issues of sexual orientation; they’re doing it because they know by brining up the gay issue people will get very emotional and they’ll be able to trick them into voting the way they want.
Recently I received a letter from the Clarksville Ministerial Association inviting me to a meeting where a speaker would be informing of how a hate crimes bill that is now before Congress would supposedly make preaching about homosexuality a hate crime. In case you’re wondering, I didn’t go to the meeting. But once again we see someone bringing up the gay issue as smoke screen to scare people into agreeing with their position. These are just two examples of the way we see dialogue in Christian circles devolving from actually talking about issues into misinformation and fear mongering. And as a pastor I’m forced to ask myself why this is.
Now, before I go on, let me say that I’m not here today to tell you what you should believe about issues of sexual orientation. Good, faithful people who love God and consider the Bible to be authoritative come down on all different sides on these issues. There are those who read certain passages in the Old Testament and believe that the Bible teaches that homosexuality is a sin. And there are those, myself included, who read those same passages, and looking in light of the historical and cultural circumstances in which they were written, conclude that the Bible doesn’t really say anything about what we currently understand as same gender attraction. Like I said, my goal today is not to tell you what to believe, so I bring this up only to say that there are good and faithful people on all sides of these issues.
Since there is genuine disagreement among Christians about these issues, we should have honest and open dialogue about them. What we can’t do is keep things going the way they are now, because it’s absolutely killing us. We’ve retreated into our mutual camps and lob rhetorical bombs and hollow soundbytes at one another, and a lot of people are getting hurt in the process. People who are gay have suffered tremendous emotional abuse at the hands of the church, and many people who see this kind of stuff go on want to have nothing to do with Christianity.
There was a book that came out two years ago called un-Christian, and it talked about the results of a massive study that the George Barna group conducted about people’s perceptions of Christianity. They found that 91% of non-church-goers and 80% of church goers under 40 perceived Christianity as hateful towards gays and lesbians. The perception wasn’t that Christians had a respectful disagreement, it was that they hated gay people. Of course, there have been a lot of people who have been quick to point the finger at the media, saying that the media is liberal and anti-Christian, but you remember what grandma used to say when you pointed the finger at someone else? You’ve got three more fingers pointing back at you. We can’t blame our image problems on anybody but ourselves.
Now I realize it’s a bit strange for me to say “we” and “us” in this conversation, because I’m largely preaching to the choir here. In the two years I’ve been your pastor I’ve never heard anyone engage in any bigoted or hateful speech against any group, and I proudly tell my colleagues that. Not participating in the evils of bigoted and hateful speech is certainly a good start, but we can’t stop there. Again, I can’t tell you what to believe about these issues. What I can say is that the way we as Christians talk about these issues has to change. We have to take a stand against hatred, because hated has no place in the church that bears the name of Jesus Christ.
Since the very beginning, the church has, in its best moments, been able to transcend the differences and misunderstandings that divide us and show us that our common unity as children of God is what really matters. That’s what is happening in the passage we just read from the book of Acts. Here we see Philip being led by the Holy Spirit to a place where he will encounter someone who needs him. This man is a eunuch from Ethiopia, and he’s a very important administrator for the royal family. A eunuch is somebody, probably a slave, who was castrated at a very young age so that he could have this administrative position. In many ancient societies it was believed that a eunuch was able to be trusted around women unsupervised because they wouldn’t have any, let’s say, “improper” motives. The thing about being a eunuch, though, is that while that status enables him to have such a powerful position, it also makes him an outcast to everyone else. In ancient societies that placed a lot of emphasis on male virility, a man who couldn’t reproduce was something less than human. And according to the Laws of Moses, someone who was less than a whole person, someone like a eunuch, couldn’t be fully included in the covenant community of Israel. So even though this Ethiopian man is passionately searching for God, even though he’s deeply immersed himself in the scriptures, even though he’s taken the time and expense to come to Jerusalem to worship, he’s not allowed in. Because of his sexuality, or lack thereof, in the eyes of others, he can at best stand on the sidelines and hope that God’s grace is much bigger than what he has been told.
That hope is answered in his encounter with Philip. Philip explains the scriptures to him, tells him about Jesus, and he believes. So the question the eunuch puts to Philip is a very important one. “Look, here is some water. What is to prevent me from being baptized?” He knows that the answer is probably “because you’re a eunuch, and if I did that I’d be violating the commands of scripture”. But Philip knows that the grace of God made known to us in Jesus Christ is a whole lot bigger than all of these divisions and misunderstandings that keep us apart, even divisions that end up getting codified in religious purity laws.
Philip baptizes the eunuch- an act that would be unthinkable to most Jews, and probably most followers of Jesus at the time. And in doing so Philip proclaims that all of God’s children are welcome in this family. He doesn’t resolve the questions about what he might need to do differently as part of his new life in Christ. Those are questions we see dealt with in great detail later on in Acts. But in this moment, Philip encountered a man who has been told all his life that because of his sexuality he was unacceptable and something less than fully human. So by baptizing this man, Philip says to him, “you are a child of God. You are acceptable. You are loved. You are welcome in this family.”
Today, just like two thousand years ago, we don’t all agree about what constitutes right and wrong actions in many areas of life, sexuality and sexual preference among them. We can and should talk about these issues, but the way we do it has to change. Instead of dialogue full of fear and hatred, half-truths and outright lies, we need to remember that no matter what our differences, each and every person on this earth is a beloved child of God, created in God’s image and that absolutely nothing can change that. I pray that this church will continue to be a place where everyone feels welcome, and that we will have the courage to take a stand against hatred and fear. For when we do that we are truly being the body of Christ in this world.
In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, Amen.
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