The Eunuch - Everything Has Changed!

John 3:16 - you know the verse, right? Here's the cool part: y'know where it says "whosoever?" Yeah? Let me let you in on a little secret: It means exactly what it says.

Here's the sermon audio.



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1 John 4:7-21

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.

By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So we have known and believe the love that God has for us.

God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. We love because he first loved us.

Those who say, "I love God," and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.

John 15:1-8

"I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.

Acts 8:26-40

Then an angel of the Lord said to Philip, "Get up and go toward the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza." (This is a wilderness road.) So he got up and went. Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, 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 it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, "Do you understand what you are reading?" He replied, "How can I, unless someone guides me?" And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him. Now the passage of the 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 is taken away from the earth." The eunuch asked Philip, "About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?" Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus. As they were going along 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 into the water, and Philip baptized him. When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing. But Philip found himself at Azotus, and as he was passing through the region, he proclaimed the good news to all the towns until he came to Caesarea.

This is the Word of the Lord.

Ask most folks what their favorite part of the Bible is, and you might hear “John 3:16,” “David and Goliath,” “The Beatitudes,” “Psalms”…

Well, this might sound weird, but this is my favorite passage in the Book of Acts, and it’s a strong contender for my favorite account in Scripture. It is an astounding message of freedom, acceptance, and hope in Jesus Christ.

Here’s what I mean. First, let’s look at this eunuch.

Like many other people in Scripture, blind men and lepers and maybe Thomas, we never get to know this man’s real name… we just know him by what makes him different from everyone else.

And believe me, this guy is different from everyone around him, wherever he goes… and not necessarily always for the reason you’d think.

First off, he is a devout Jew. This is no big deal in Jerusalem, but he’s Ethiopian, and while he is powerful and wealthy, he lives and works and serves in a polytheistic culture.

We’ve talked in the past about how strikingly different first-century Judaism was from every other religion in the known universe for its utter lack of gods. Polytheistic cultures, like the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and so on, had a multiplicity of gods for every conceivable purpose and action. Ethiopia was no different, except that its rulers and most (if not all) of its gods were female. And sitting smack-dab in the middle of the palace was a guy who insisted that there weren’t hundreds of gods zipping around doing any of a million different things all the time. There was just one God, the God of Israel.

So while he would have looked like every other male serving in the queen’s palace, this conviction that the Lord was the one true God would have made the eunuch stand out like a sore thumb.

He wouldn’t have prayed the way everyone else prayed, or worshipped in the same temples or eaten the same food or taken part in the same festivities. His refusal to acknowledge the same deities as everyone else in his culture meant that he was always just one military defeat or natural disaster away from being accused of atheism and tortured and killed to appease the angry national gods.

Yet he stubbornly insisted on believing.

As we meet him, he’s on his way back from worshipping in Jerusalem. How bittersweet this experience must have been for the eunuch. Imagine being able to travel to the epicenter of his faith, to the very place where Jews believed that God resided on earth – the Temple. Imagine the excitement of walking the noisy streets, of at last being surrounded by thousands of people who shared his faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of mounting the gleaming steps of that majestic Temple… only to be turned away because he was different.

You see, while he prayed the way everyone else in Jerusalem prayed, and ate the same foods and kept the same holy days as everyone else, the fact that he was a eunuch meant that he could never, ever be allowed in the Temple to take part in the worship and sacrifices. The Law insisted that a man who had been castrated, no matter when or how or for what reason, could never be included in Temple worship. The fact that he was a eunuch meant that, as far as the Law-with-a-capital-“L” was concerned, he would always be on the outside looking in. Excluded.

Amazing, isn’t it? No matter how much he prayed, no matter how devoutly he read the Scriptures, no matter how much of his fortune he gave to the poor, no matter what he did or refrained from doing, no matter how hard he tried, God would always be just the other side of the barrier for him. Inaccessible.

Yet he stubbornly insisted on believing.

The fact that Phillip finds him in the chariot reading from Isaiah shows that this eunuch had invested a significant part of his fortune on being able to read the Holy Scriptures.

In the centuries before the printing press, books were copied by hand, and the Scriptures painstakingly so, making them comparatively rare and outrageously expensive. This eunuch stubbornly insisted on getting to know the God he worshipped, on learning all he could about this God, on growing closer and closer in relationship, even if he was different, even if he was excluded, even if it cost a fortune, even if it meant he had to do it all by himself!

But something the eunuch didn’t know was that everything had changed.

You remember that in the Gospel’s accounts of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, we’re told that at the moment of his death the Temple veil was torn from top to bottom. The veil the Scriptures are talking about there is the thick curtain which separated the Most Holy Place from the rest of the Temple. That Holy of Holies was where the Ark of the Covenant had originally rested, and the only person who was ever allowed to see behind that veil – to approach the point of direct contact with the Creator of the universe – was the High Priest, and only once a year. The priest would go behind the veil annually, burning incense and saying prayers on behalf of all Jews everywhere.

But with the veil torn, anyone could see right into the Most Holy Place. With the barriers gone, everything had changed! The point of direct contact with God was wide open, for all to see!

The disciples were already learning valuable lessons about what “anyone and everyone” means. In the verses before our reading today, Phillip had gone into Samaria and had preached the Gospel, bringing these people, who had always been hated and feared by the Jewish population because they believed different things about God, and worshipped in a different place, into the ever-growing family of God!

And this man, this eunuch, who – despite being excluded from worship and endangered in his own home – insisted on pursuing a relationship with God? He had most certainly not gone unnoticed by the One who had raised Jesus from the dead! This eunuch could not reach God from where he was… so God reached him through Phillip.

And God was not done yet. In the tenth chapter of Acts, we meet a centurion named Cornelius, who was also devout, also deeply devoted to finding God. He is (as far as we know) the first Gentile to be welcomed into the Church.

If there ever was a circle draw around who was “in” the love of God, as opposed to those who could never be, every day that circle was being drawn wider, with more and more and more people – people who had long been thought to be outside of the realm of God’s acceptance, untouchable, unforgivable, less than, enemies –coming into relationship with the living God through faith in the risen Christ.

It is no accident that, when the barrier to the Holy of Holies was torn, anyone and everyone could look in and see that the room was empty. God wasn’t sitting there in an easy chair, or at his computer desk waiting to push the “smite” button. God didn’t live there. God, through the Holy Spirit, was actively participating in the lives of God’s faithful, widening the circle at a breakneck pace!

Men and women and children who had always heard “You don’t follow God in the proper way, you’re damaged goods, you’re imperfect, lacking, unacceptable. You don’t measure up, and never will,” were finding that, with the veil torn, the tomb empty, and the Spirit of God running wild on the earth, everything had changed.

The clear message, then and now, is that God’s mercy and love extend even to those who are different, who offend us with their odd belief or lack of belief, even to those who are told by people claiming to be Christian that God hates them. That circle which began expanding in the days after Pentecost grows still wider today.

And we, like Phillip, have been given everything we need by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit to reach out in love to the “different” and the “excluded,” to the marginalized and to those who have been told they can never measure up, to bring them beyond the barrier, through the torn veil into glorious relationship with Jesus Christ.

In our epistle reading this morning, John writes, “God's love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” This is the message that everyone – everyone! – must hear: God does not hate you! God loves you!

The veil has been torn. The barriers are removed. The way is clear. Everything has changed.