5 EASTER, YEAR B
SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, NORWAY, MAINE
THE REV. ANNE G. STANLEY
10 MAY 2009
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Acts 8:26-40; Psalm 22:24-30; 1 John 4:7-21; John 15:1-8
What a wonderful story: the Ethiopian eunuch and Philip (Acts 8:26-40) . A story about two ordinary lives, two people going about their business; and suddenly their lives intersect and something extraordinary happens.
Philip and the eunuch from Africa.
This is a story about two kinds of time. There’s ordinary time, the kind of time we live every day, clock time, chronological time, chronos time, horizontal, straight-line time. Our-daily-lives time.
And there’s extraordinary time as well--sudden event time, kairos time, the vertical interruption of God’s time into ordinary time.
One day, not too long after Jesus’ death and resurrection, two people set out on two separate journeys. The one was Philip, a follower of Jesus. The other was the chief financial officer in the government of the Queen of Ethiopia. We don’t know his name, but we know he was a foreigner. He was a long way from home. And we know that he was a eunuch, a castrated male who, despite his government job, had a lowly social status. It was always easy to replace eunuchs---or to kill them.
So there they were, at noon that day, the eunuch not too sure about the worship he’d just attended in Jerusalem. But eager to know, so he was pouring through the scriptures in search of answers as his chariot moved along the deserted road towards home. He needed a guide, he said a spiritual director. And suddenly there was Philip, just in time to fill the bill.
Two strangers on a wilderness road, and in this lovely encounter, their lives intersect. The chronological, straight-line, horizontal directions of their lives are interrupted for a time in a sudden moment of vertical God time, a kairos event.
The Holy Spirit was there, too. The main character of the story. It’s the Spirit who inspired Philip to take this deserted road in the first place, and he probably had had no intention of doing it when he woke up that morning, but he responded to the Spirit’s call. “Sure, I’ll go!”
It was the Spirit who prompted Philip to go over to the eunuch’s chariot on the road. It was the Spirit who gave Philip the courage to ask the probing question: “Do you understand what you are reading?” It was the Spirit who emboldened the Ethiopian eunuch so he dared admit to a perfect stranger that no, he DIDN’T understand. It was the Spirit who gave Philip the words then to guide the eunuch and teach him the good news about Jesus. And it was the Spirit who opened the Ethiopian’s eyes: “Hey, look, there’s a stream over there! You can baptize me right now!”
One man’s hunger met another man’s willingness to share what he knew. It happened in a sudden kairos moment. No forcing, no cajoling. The right two people at the right time for them both. Both of them primed and ready and touched at the same time through the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Have you known a time like that, when you were in the right place at the right time and, surprise, something interrupted the normal progression of things and you were given the ability to notice it? For some reason you were open to noticing, you were given an awareness? You saw something you’d never seen before or you saw some old thing in a brand-new way? You were hungry, and ready to see? Or maybe somehow, you found yourself able, like Philip, to feed someone else’s hunger in a moment of exquisite timing? And you realized later that it must have been a kairos moment. It might have lasted awhile---like the time Philip spent with the Ethiopian eunuch—or maybe it was a fleeting moment that brushed you by in a flash.
I like to think of our lives laid out like a row of seeds, radishes, for example. The seeds have been planted according to the directions on the seed packet, one seed per half inch. After awhile, some of the seeds push up a sprout. But some seeds don’t make it so there are empty spaces of dirt where there should have been sprouts. Gaps in the line.
The gaps are the moments we miss, when the timing isn’t right or we aren’t paying attention and so the opportunity to notice passes us by. “Maybe next time,” we can hear God saying. What if Philip had rejected the idea that he take a trip on that wilderness road instead of spending the day in the city? What if the eunuch had folded over the parchment he was reading in embarrassment when the stranger, Philip, had the gall to ask, “Hey there. Do you understand what you are reading?”
I’ve sat in the Maine House of Representatives chamber four times now after delivering the opening prayer, as I did again last Tuesday. I’ve heard many debates. But I’ve never heard one like what evolved last Tuesday. Never once during the 3 ½ hour session did the Speaker have to gavel people into polite listening. You could have heard a pin drop--onto the carpet! Maybe legislators’ minds weren’t changed by the stories they heard their colleagues telling; but they truly listened to each other, as if they really were hungry for what their colleagues had to say. And what they heard were stories their colleagues told about themselves or their families, some of the stories revealed for the first time publicly. Often with tears. There was eager listening, with legislators seeming to be hungry to hear each others’ presentations. It was, I believe, a kairos moment when hunger and opportunity intersected, chronological time stood still and people were available to the interruption. I’m convinced that the energy in that large room could only have been the windy touch of the Holy Spirit.
It was as if a sprout had emerged in the straight-line of ordinary time, and everyone in the room paid attention to it.
God gives us these sudden interruptions, these God-time moments. And God gives us the ability, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, to be available to them. We often pass these opportunities by, not noticing, not grabbing hold and using them. But when we do grab hold, and let the moment help our next steps, it is very good!
The eunuch reached out to Philip and Philip reached out to the eunuch, the foreigner whom Jewish tradition had declared unworthy even to be included in the religious assembly (Dt. 23:1, Is. 56;3-7). Philip brought him back into the fold.
What happens with the marriage equality bill remains to be seen. Most of you know that I believe that same-sex couples must be included to the full extent under the law that their married opposite-sex couples are. I believe that this is a matter of justice under the law, quite apart from what individual churches and religious houses of worship choose to do. My hope is that if this thing is drawn out in an expensive referendum process, it will at the very least be conducted the way the House debate unfolded last week. That kairos moment must have legs!
Each day we wake up to new possibilities. In the forward movement of our chronological lives, there are little invitations to notice something, little invitations that come, not from our own to-do lists that keep many of us so busy but from the ever-present, wafting, lurking, hovering, waiting Holy spirit of God, for us to notice and respond to, for us to celebrate and then go and make a difference in the name of Jesus.