4.28.24 "Circles" Westminster Presbyterian Church, Pasadena, CA

 Psalm 22.25-31; Acts 8.26-40

Once upon a time,

A long time ago,

In a land far away,

A most wonderful day.

The Spirit said to Phillip: Get up and go … 

And not just anywhere, but head down south,

The road to Gaza … a road in the wilderness.

Prepare ye the way of the LORD … a voice crying in the wilderness …

In the wilderness, the children of Israel wander for 40 years … to get some things figured out …

In the wilderness, 40 days of fasting … Jesus discerns his purpose.

In the wilderness, the Ethiopian Eunuch, advisor to the Queen.

He’d been in Jerusalem to worship.

Conducted some business, I’m sure … purchased a few souvenirs for friends and family, and now he’s on his way home.

Reading a scroll … like any one of us picking up a book while on vacation …  

The Spirit says to Phillip - Go over to that chariot and join it.

 

The chariot - more than the Ben Hur kind … it’s luxurious … room for a driver or two, seats for several occupants, covered to provide shade … like a carriage. 

Phillip hears the man reading aloud, and asks: Do you understand what you’re reading?

The man replies: Who or what is Isaiah talking about?

Phillip tells him about Jesus …  

The man stops the chariot by some water … What is to prevent me from being baptized?

Phillip and the man step into the water … a deep pool? a small stream? a puddle? … water it is, in the wilderness … and there the man is baptized.

No muss, no fuss, no problem at all.

What’s the point of the story?

How large is the love of God?

A hotly debated question for the people of ancient Israel - who’s in, and who’s out? … who’s welcome, and who isn’t?

In the Bible, books like Nehemiah and Ezra draw a small circle - other books, like Jonah and Ruth, draw a large circle … the Prophet Isaiah draws the circle even larger.

The Bible has more than one voice on the question …

Who’s in, who’s out … 

The early church faced the same questions.

The earliest Christians were all Jews … 

Circumcised

The material center of their faith, The Temple.

They honored the Dietary Laws.

The three essential elements: circumcision, temple, diet.

Those elements remained in place for the first Christians … with the addition of a fourth element: Jesus, the anointed one - who fulfills the prophecy of Isaiah, the very words the Ethiopian Official was reading that day in the wilderness.

Ultimately, the three original elements were modified … 70 years after Jesus was born, the Temple was destroyed … Paul the Apostle said: Circumcision is no longer required … and the Apostle Peter revised the dietary laws.

How large is the circle?

The man from Ethiopia is part of that story … the incoming of Gentiles to the Christian Community … should they be circumcised? should they obey the dietary laws?

Throughout Christian History, the same questions … conflicts often bloody, wars fought, people imprisoned, tortured, and killed … all in the name of Jesus.

Christians fought with Muslims and killed Jews … after the Reformation, Protestants fought with Catholics, and later, Protestants fought with Protestants …  

I remember growing up … if a Catholic attended a Protestant Church, it was accounted a mortal sin … Protestants thought Catholics were all going to hell … within each group, bickering, debate, denunciation, and fistfights … Lutherans didn’t like Presbyterians, Presbyterians didn’t like Baptists, and everyone thought Episcopalians drank too much wine.

Who’s in? Who’s out?

In America, many a religious conflict along racial lines … 

And then immigrants … 

White Christians from Europe defined who was in and who wasn’t, who could be a Christian, and who could be an American.

Women paid a huge price: they couldn’t joining the inner circles of the church, forbidden to offer the sacraments, and never to preach …

Presbyterians had strict rules about communion, who could come to the Table and who couldn’t … we had our ways!

During the Civil War, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, divided over the question of slavery … within each group, further in-fighting … just recently, the Methodist Church split over gender-identity.

Presbyterians have split repeatedly in the last 150 years over women’s ordination, how to read the Bible, dancing, card playing, theater attendance, the specifics of the Westminster Confession of Faith, and gender. 

Baptists have split over all sorts of questions, too, questions about salvation, heaven and hell, and how to be saved.

And always, the Bible is quoted, papers written, pulpits pounded. 

Who’s in, who’s out?

Over the years of my life, my circle has grown larger … 

It’s a lotta work to keep people out … to keep drawing lines in the sand, building walls, digging ditches … manning the ramparts to fight off the enemies … it’s a lotta work to draw small circles.

Who’s in, Who’s out?

I guess we all have to make our own decisions … I’ve made mine, and it’s been in process of all my life … 

Given who I am, even as a small child, I had a deep and comforting sense of God’s presence … little Tommy Eggebeen always had a friend in Jesus.

As I grew, matured, experienced the good and the bad of life, the good and bad of my own soul … the LORD led me into ministry.

I continue to read the Bible, consult with theologians, historians, … women and men of color, who are doing some of the best theological work of the day … women called by God to become outstanding ministers … gay and lesbian friends who serve the LORD  … trans-gender friends who love Christ and give thanks every day for finding their identity in new ways of joy, freedom and faith … 

Who’s in, Who’s out?

Who’s a Christian, and who isn’t?

Who’s going to heaven, and who’s going to hell?

Who’s an American, and who isn’t?

How do you answer the questions?

How do you read the Bible?

How do you see your world?

What do you believe? … and why?

I believe, with all my heart:

The LORD Jesus Christ whom I know and serve, has saved me, guided me, loved me … forgives me again and again, sees me through, challenges me all along the way, comes to me in the midst of it all.

The LORD Jesus Christ has been my faithful companion from the day of my birth, 

Jesus witnessed my baptism, 

my confession of faith, 

my education and ordination, 

my marriage, my home, my work, my life and prayers … 

this LORD … this Jesus … this Christ, 

Draws a very, very, wide circle.

Hallelujah and Amen!

May 6, 2012, "Quickly the Doors Open"

I didn't preach this text ... when I stepped into the pulpit, I went in some other direction, extemporaneously ... but I wanted to post the text I had prepared:

Acts 8.26-40.

Quickly the doors open.

God’s love reaches far and wide.

An angel sends Philip to a desert road, to meet a carriage, a man on his way back home …

The power of one … one person with a purpose … with a heart … with a vision … a willingness to go to a desert road, get into someone else’s carriage, spend some time with them.

How many of you have ever heard of John Wood?

I never heard of him either, until earlier this week.

He’s a library man.

12,000 libraries and 1,500 schools, all around the world.

[the following material comes largely from a New York Times article - see below; I’ve edited it to conform to preaching].

It began in 1998 when Wood, a Microsoft marketing director, came upon a remote school in Nepal serving 450 children. Only one problem: It had just a few books.

Wood offered to help and eventually delivered a mountain of books by a caravan of donkeys. 

The local children were happy, and Wood said he felt such exhilaration that he quit Microsoft, left his live-in girlfriend (who pretty much thought he had gone insane), and founded Room to Read in 2000.

He faced one challenge after another, not only in opening libraries, but in filling them.

There are no children’s books in many languages, so Wood became a self-publisher, with now more than 591 titles in languages including Khmer, Nepalese, Zulu, Lao, Xhosa, Chhattisgarhi, Tharu, Tsonga, Garhwali and Bundeli.

Room to Read also supports 13,500 impoverished girls who might otherwise drop out of school. 

In a remote corner of the Mekong Delta, reachable only by boat, one of these girls, a 10th grader name Duyen … her family, displaced by flooding, lives in a shabby tent on a dike.

When Duyen was in seventh grade, she dropped out of school to help her family. “I thought education was not so necessary for girls,” she said.

Room to Read’s outreach workers trekked to her home and convinced the family to send her back to school. Room to Read paid her school fees, bought her school uniforms and offered to put her up in a dormitory so that she wouldn’t have to commute to school, two hours each way, by boat and bicycle.

Duyen is back in school, a star in her class — and aiming for the moon.

“I would like to go to university,” she says.

The cost per girl is $250 annually. 

To give some perspective, Kim Kardashian’s wedding is said to have cost $10 million; $10 million could have supported 40,000 girls in Room to Read.

Education is a powerful tool to transform the world … the powerful nations of the world have yet to learn this lesson - the big powers of the world continue to believe that the world can be made better with missiles, soldiers, conniving treaties and billions spent on planes and warships.

Schooling is cheap and revolutionary … the more we spend on schools today, the less we’ll have to spend on missiles tomorrow.

Wood is only 47 years old - tireless, enthusiastic, emotional … when he talks about Room and to Read and the lives of girls transformed, he tears up.

“If you can change a girl’s life forever, and the cost is so low, then why are there so many girls still out of school?” he asks.

Room to Read now has fund-raising chapters in 53 cities around the world.

Wood tells supporters they aren’t donating to charity but making an investment: “Where can you get more bang for the buck than starting a library for $5,000?”

“There are 793 million illiterate people - the solution is so inexpensive …. 

No guarantee every child will take advantage of the opportunity, but if it isn’t provided, there will be no opportunity at all, and poverty will continue.

Wood would like to have a 100,000 libraries, in 20 years, reaching 50 million kids. 

Big plans … big ideas … and it all started with one man’s decision 

[The New York Times: “His Libraries, 12,000 So Far, Change Lives,” by Nicholas D. Kristoff, November 5, 2011].

Whatever we might learn from the story of Philip, this much we know for sure: God works through people, just like Philip, just like you and me, just like John Wood.

An angel told Philip: Go to the desert road between Jerusalem and Gaza …

Philip might have asked a millions questions:

Why?

How come?

What am I supposed to do?

How much will it cost?

How long will it take?

Isn’t there anyone else?

No questions … just obedience … call it faith … faith isn’t something we believe … faith is what we do with our hands and our feet … faith is life, action, decision, work … 

Philip went to the desert road.

And when a carriage came near, the Spirit told Philip, Approach this carriage and stay with it.

We know the rest of the story.

Dear friends, never underestimate your power to change the world … God works through people … great things happen when love is the power, when compassion is the goal, when someone says, I’ll do it!

Who knows?

Maybe there’s a John Wood sitting in the congregation right now … an idea … a project … a dream … it’ll unfold, and the world will be changed.

Maybe there’s a Philip here … one day, an angel will tell you where to go … because someone needs to hear your voice and guidance.

Who knows?

Never ever underestimate your place in the kingdom of God.

Never underestimate the doors you can open!

Amen and Amen!