God. Real. Right.

Here’s a devotional I obtained from the recent national Episcopal Convention in Los Angeles. I have also inserted (double-indented) a couple of comments for, shall we say, “clarification”:

Baptism is the foundational ritual and sacrament of the Church. In baptism we recognize and convey our essential identity as God’s own children, members of the Body of Christ. In Baptism we are filled with God’s Holy Spirit, renewed and cleansed and empowered for ministry. Everything flows from Baptism. The Prayer Book speaks of our tradition: “Holy Baptism is full initiation by water and the Holy Spirit into Christ’s Body the church. The bond which God establishes in Baptism is indissoluble.” (BCP, p. 298)

In our story today from Acts, an angel tells the apostle Philip to travel the wilderness road between Jerusalem and Gaza. Along that road he meets a foreigner, a eunuch who serves as a treasurer for the queen of Ethiopia. The text says that he had “come to Jerusalem to worship.” Now that phrase gives me pause. The Torah makes it very clear in the laws guarding community purity that a eunuch shall not be admitted to the assembly of the Lord. (Deuteronomy 23:1) It may be that this unnamed eunuch has experienced some form of exclusion or discrimination in Jerusalem, where he would have been barred from entering the worship assembly. Maybe he is a Jew who was kept outside in the Court of the Gentiles.

The leap from exclusion to discrimination is unwarranted at best. Others were excluded along with those who had their genitals “crushed” or cut off, as the passage in Deuteronomy says. So were women who had recently given birth, descendants of Moab, and, oh yes, there are those “sodomites” in verse 17 (of Deuteronomy 23). Either the exclusion is proper and provokes the right sense of a need for holiness now missing, or it is improper and the OT is nothing more than a record of ancient discrimination. The latter view is an Antinomian error. It is only the former option which leaves open a need for grace, regardless of the cause of exclusion, whether moral (as in the case of Deuteronomy 23:17), or covenantal/ceremonial (as in the case of Deuteronomy 23:1).

Returning home, the eunuch is reading scripture. (In ancient days, silent reading was unusual; people spoke the words as they read.) When Philip joins him in the chariot, Philip hears him read from Isaiah, “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 is taken away from the earth.” The words are Isaiah’s, and they seem to evoke something in the eunuch. Maybe when the eunuch was excluded from the assembly he experienced humiliation and injustice, and seemed powerless to protest. He asks Philip, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?”

Regardless of what the eunuch feels, the passage itself is about a Holy Servant, Jesus, taking the uncleanness—the reasons we ought to be excluded—of unholy and unacceptable people onto Himself, a now Suffering Servant (e.g., Isaiah 53:6). So the point is not going to be that someone ought to be included and overcome their sense of exclusion, but that someone ought to be excluded by their guilt, failure, or shortcoming, but can be included by propitiation or even substitution, not the merit of being as acceptable as a self-righteous crowd.

Philip tells him about another who was excluded from the assembly; another who experienced humiliation and injustice; another who was silent like a lamb. He tells of Jesus whose “life is taken away from the earth,” and about his resurrection, the life restored and empowered. Philip gave the eunuch the good news about Jesus.

Again, Jesus’ exclusion is improper because He is not in violation of the guidelines established in the OT. The Ethiopian’s exclusion is proper since he is in violation of the guidelines. (And again, it does not matter whether the exclusion is moral or otherwise; the exclusions are created in the OT so everyone can become aware of their failure to measure up to God’s standard, and His provision through Christ of a means of forgiveness and redemption. (Romans 3:19.)

The eunuch must have been deeply moved. He could identify with Jesus. He wanted to be connected with one who had been humiliated and restored.

Then comes the question. “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” That is a loaded question.

I am about to leave for the General Convention of the Episcopal Church. This question from the Ethiopian eunuch is the kind of question that could provoke great debate from our assembly. The scripture says very clearly, no eunuch shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord. That has been our tradition for all of these centuries. But, this eunuch has heard and received the living Word. He has a deep spiritual desire to be baptized, and he has compelling gifts of the spirit to offer to God and to God’s people. Shall we bar him from the community? Shall we reject his being and his ministry?

Philip did not ask the General Convention. Philip stopped the chariot and baptized the eunuch, and God’s Holy Spirit filled Philip with rejoicing.

The last two paragraphs are a profoundly clear example of the “fallacy of analogy.” “Look”, says the fallacious, “these things are alike in some ways, so they must be alike in every way.” On this reasoning, no ongoing serial rapist could be excluded from the assembly either. There is a difference between how the morally excluded were received (through repentance and sacrifice, if their moral failure did not merit stoning) and how the covenantally or ceremonially excluded were received, through passing of time and/or ceremonial cleansing. So the leap in the last two paragraphs is nothing short of rhetorical equivocation. It may not have been deliberate. Perhaps the author did not know what he was doing. But it is an egregious violation of biblically respectful hermeneutics and of sound reason.

Years ago when we were asking whether women could be ordained, there was much debate. Many raised up scriptures that gave women a secondary place in community and family life. Others spoke of the tradition of centuries, going back to the apostles, all males, like Philip. But some spoke of the foundational sacrament of Baptism which identifies us as children of God, fully initiated into the Body of Christ. Is the Body of Christ to be represented only by maleness? “If you won’t ordain us, then stop baptizing us,” said women, whose compelling gifts and spirit were being offered to the church.

It is no surprise that gender issues run together. The elimination of gendered roles and the advocacy for homosexual inclusion do follow one another. The mistake in this paragraph is the presumption that the body of Christ can only be represented through the priesthood (“maleness”). Do lay members not serve to represent Christ in their service as well? It is a logical equivocation similar to the one mentioned in my last comment.

Our General Convention followed the path of Philip. We recognized the presence of God’s empowered spirit in women, and we honored the theology of baptism which makes us children of God, members of the Body of Christ, empowered for ministry.

We are still debating. Now we are talking about the descendants of the Ethiopian eunuch. Shall gay people be barred from the community? Shall their ministries be denied to them? Shall they be denied access to the sacraments of marriage and ordination? Shall their gifts and spirit be rejected?

Can there be any doubt what Philip would tell the Church if he could?

No doubt at all.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 13th, 2009 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Culture, Theology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.