“As They Traveled Along …”

A sermon based upon Acts 8: 26-40

By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

24th Sunday in Ordinary Time,  October 28th,  2018 

(10-14) Sermon Series: Church: Then and Now

Do you like to travel?  If you do, where would you like to travel to?  Paris, Rome, Hawaii, Jerusalem, or perhaps China?  I’ve been to a few of those places, but would have liked to have visited some others.  What would be your dream destination?  Maybe you just would like some time off in the mountains or at the beach?  But today is Sunday, and you are at church.  Could there be another way to answer this question.

Spiritually speaking, we are all on a journey.   This is part of what it means to be a human being, isn’t it?  Even for those who don’t think much about religion or about the meaning of life, but are more focused on the day to day matters of survival, your life is still a journey.  It is a journey because it has a starting place and a destination, which is the birth you had, and the death that still out there on every human horizon.  My job, as your pastor, is to help you keep your eyes on the ‘wheel of life’ so that you don’t get too distracted or don’t miss the view, but to also help you to keep focus toward the ‘horizon’ that is out there, somewhere, for us all.

Helping us to gain and keep our focus and perspective on what matters most in life, is what today’s story from Acts is all about.   It’s a rather strange, but also a very interesting story, giving us very specific details of the work of one of the very first Christian evangelists, named Philip.  It was Philip who gave the very first Christian directions for traveling down the road of life.

If you’re like me, you’re not fond of asking directions, but don’t we all have to figure this one out, whether we actually ask someone or not?  Don’t we all live such short, limited, temporary lives, that we need some kind of pointers or perspectives on what matters and what doesn’t, before we get so far down the road, that we miss the right turn, and end up lost? 

How I want us to take this ‘journey’ with Philip, is to follow three simple, but very important life questions which appear in this story.   We will take them one at a time, and try to decipher not just what they meant for Philip and the person he met on the road, but we will try to think about what asking the right questions and seeking good directions might mean also for us.

 

DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOUR ARE READING? (30)

The very first question that appears in this story, comes after Philip is instructed by ‘an angel’ to go ‘south’ to the ‘desert road’ that goes ‘down from Jerusalem to Gaza.”  It was while we was going down on this ‘desert road’ toward the costal lands, that Philip ‘met’ and sees ‘an important official in charge of all the treasury’ of ‘the Ethiopians’. 

Evidently Philip passes the man, since they are both going ‘down from Jerusalem’.  What is most important however, is not how they met but what the ‘eunuch’ was doing.  He was sitting in his chariot, ‘reading’ from the Book of Isaiah the prophet.  

The most important part about this ‘journey’ of life is that we learn to ‘read’ so that we can seriously consider some of the greatest thoughts and ideas the world has ever known.  While most of us will never read all the great classics of literature, most all of us have access to the most important book, The Bible.   It is the one book you don’t want to leave on the shelf. 

Now, of course, as your pastor, having studied the Bible all my life, I would advocate you learning it and learning from it, but this story reminds us that we also often need to reconsider what makes the Bible so important a book for living?  In a world with so much information, filled with video clips and moving pictures, what makes the Bible a book still need to understand?  

Well, right here is the main issue, right in this question which Philip asks this eunuch.  Philip asks him ‘do you understand what you are reading’.  No matter how good, how holy, or how historically or religiously important the Bible is, it really can’t speak to your life, and this journey we are all on, unless we all have some ‘understanding’ of it.  You can read the Bible all your life, know the verses and chapters from cover to cover, or from Genesis to Maps, as someone put it, and not fully ‘understand’ or ‘overlook’ the importance or the message being expressed.

You’ve known people like that, haven’t you?  People who know all the words in the Bible fairly well, even sometimes very well, but still miss the main message.  They are like the proverbial people who can’t see the ‘forest for the trees’.  They get hooked, confused, or misled by the little things, even interesting things, but they still fail to see the most important message that matters for both religion and in life.   

The other day I was speaking to someone about a childhood friend of mine was once mislead by a well-meaning pastor and left the church.  I don’t blame everything on the pastor, who was only speaking his mind, but I do think the pastor missed his opportunity preach want mattered most, when he once got side-tracked in his desire to preach the truth.  Instead of preaching the Bible, however, the pastor started making judgement calls about science, a field of study that was not his expertise, and he made some very sharp judgement calls about how the Bible was right, and Science was wrong.  Now, this may have been a message most of the congregation wanted to hear, but unfortunately, there were young minds, who were being educated in school, who were also learning other views of science at that time, which did not necessarily opposed the Bible, but this preacher thought it did and made it sound like they did. 

What happened after hearing that sermon, was that the young student, decided that since the Bible had to be right or Science had to be right, but they couldn’t both have something ‘right’ to say, he decided to go with Science, and he never looked back.  I tried to convince him otherwise.  But it didn’t work.  Unfortunately, from what I’ve heard, that young student needed the Bible, and the church too, which might have helped him overcome a lot that school couldn’t help with, but forced to choose, because of a zealous misunderstanding not only of Science, but through a missing of the main message of Scripture, that young man, now an older man, is broken and angry, and still hasn’t found his way back to God or to a church. 

 So, let me ask you, seriously, respectfully, and also importantly, as a matter of life and death: Do you know what you are reading?  You’ve been reading the Bible for years and years, but have you understood what’s it’s really about?  Don’t get me wrong, I know that many people get confused about the Bible, and many people make wrong conclusions about it and with it.  The existence of a man reading the Bible in that chariot, and us having the Bible in our world, still raises a most important question thinking people still need to ask:  Is the Bible worth reading?  Does the Bible really have something important to say in our world and for this time?

WHO IS THE PROPHET TALKING ABOUT?  (34)

The question helps to keep our focus.  It’s not the evangelist who is asking the right question, but it is reader: ‘Who?’  Who is the prophet talking about?

You never get to the right way to read or understand Scripture until to start asking about the question about ‘Who?’  “Who is the prophet talking about?.  Who will always take us in the right direction we read start to read this book.

To help us find our focus, let’s follow exactly what the eunuch must have been reading.  There is a lot in the words in the book and prophecy of Isaiah, just like there is a lot in the whole Bible, but we get to the point quickly when we get to the question of ‘who’? 

Here, the Eunuch was talking about someone ‘who’ was living and dying in ‘humiliation’ and ‘being deprived of justice’ and having his ‘life taken from the earth’.  Now, that’s the kind of ‘who’ who will always get your attention, isn’t it?  Most all the stories worth telling and stories worth hearing are told, whether in books or at the movies, are told about people who struggle in this world, just like most all of us do, in some way, shape, or form.  

Specifically, the ‘who’ Isaiah was writing about was about ‘who’ Israel, God’s people, had been all their history.  They had been a people who, like Jacob, had ‘struggled’ and ‘wrestled’ with God, but what did they really have to show for it?  Don’t you and I feel this way too, sometimes?  Don’t we all wonder why we are here, what’s it’s all about, and who we are supposed to be, as much as we try to be somebody, either by becoming who we are or by becoming better than we are?

The question of human identity is one of very important questions that has been answered by the Bible, not just for Israel, but also for us.  We are humans created in the image of God, and we are called to be God’s people, these are the kinds of answers the Bible gives, but why should we believe it?  Why should we take Isaiah’s picture of human suffering and struggle seriously in history, or for our own life?

This is the question the Eunuch goes on to become more specific about, isn’t it?  “Please tell me, he asks, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?”  Well, the true answer is that the prophet was talking about both, himself and someone else.   The prophet was talking about the unfairness, the injustice, and the suffering that comes with life for all of us, whether we consider ourselves religious or not.  But Philip goes on to help this Eunuch realize how the story of all our human suffering has been fully and finally answered in ‘the good news about Jesus’.

Here is where we come to the most important message in not only this story, but also the most important story in whole story of the Bible.  The Bible would have probably been a story forgotten many years ago, had the Old Testament not been amazingly and dramatically been fulfilled in the New Testament story about Jesus.  You simply can’t have one part of the story without the other.  You can’t understand the New Testament without the Old Testament, and the Old Testament, which is most of the Bible, ceases have any kind of lasting hope for the whole world, without the fulfilment it finds in the ministry, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  How can we grasp this story in a few words.  We probably can’t.  But we can discover the ‘who’ of the story.  The ‘who’ of God’s whole story is good news about Jesus, who is the Christ.  He is not just ‘the Christ’ or ‘Messiah’ for Israel, but he is, because God raised him from the dead, he is the rejected Jewish Messiah, who is God’s ‘who’, that is God’s Christ, for the the salvation of the whole world.

Now, I know you know this, at least here in this church, you hear this preached every Sunday, is some form or another, but what does it mean for me, for you, or the church, and for the world to know that the Scripture is not just mostly, but is only about the ‘good news’ about Jesus?  How can we dare explain this to a world that thinks it knows and has decided already what it wants to believe and what it thinks this means?

WHY SHOULDN’T I BE BAPTIZED (37)

When I follow this story, just as it was told, I discover something very important about learning the Bible and learning about Jesus.  According to the flow of this story, just like this Eunuch, you really can’t learn ‘what’ or ‘who’ the Bible is about, unless you ‘involve’ yourself in the story of Jesus in the Bible. 

Now, don’t misunderstand.  This doesn’t mean you have to become ‘Jesus’, but it does mean you have to find a way to explore the message and meaning of Jesus.  Answering the Bible’s most important questions and answers about Jesus in your own life, means that you are ready to follow Jesus with your whole life and for your whole life.  This is exactly what the Eunuch meant when he said, “Look, here is water, what stands in the way of me being baptized?”  By asking this third question, the Eunuch not only understands what he Bible says, he also now knows what the Bible means. 

In response to his ‘understanding’ the chariot was stopped (did you realize they were already riding together?) and both Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch went down to the water and he was Baptized.  They didn’t just, as the song says in the musical, ‘go down to the river to pray’, but the Eunuch went down to the river (or whatever kind of water it was), so that he could live a life with purpose, on purpose, living and dying with hope, because this is the what the Bible’s message about Jesus is about.   Amen.