"Talking to Strangers" - May 3, 2015

Acts 8:26-40

            There were a number of people in the first century who were interested in Judaism but not ready to commit.  They came from all across the Roman Empire, and were drawn for a variety of reasons.  Some of them admired the ethics of a religion that turned its back on the gladiatorial games that were part of the Roman way, where human life was less important than entertaining, and thus controlling, the crowds.  Some of them saw the value of the Jewish Law, that taught that the widow and the orphan and the resident alien were all to be treated with kindness and honesty.  There were others who heard about Judaism’s insistence that there is one and only one God, and they struggled with that concept but in the end it made sense to them.

            There was an outer courtyard of the temple of this God in Jerusalem that was open to such people.  It was called “the Court of the Gentiles”.  Such people were also welcome in the synagogues that had appeared in cities far away from Jerusalem, considered places of study and community centers more than places of prayer.  The Gentiles who took part in these activities were sometimes called “God-fearers”.

            They didn’t take the step of actual conversion for a variety of reasons.  For the men, the prospect of circumcision was a big part of it.  So, too, were some of the requirements put on everyone, men and women alike.  Avoiding work every seventh day could lose you your job.  Turning your back on the worship of pagan idols meant no longer taking part in the civic life of your town and sometimes cutting yourself off from the closest people in your life, because if you no longer worshiped the family gods, what did that say about what you thought of your family?  So the God-fearers kind of straddled the line as well as they could.

            It would be easy to think of people like that as folks who were hedging their bets, and perhaps there was some of that going on.  After all, there have always been people who have looked at participation in the community of faith as a good thing – it teaches morals to the children, gives structure to the week, supports the arts, encourages charitable giving, and can be a stabilizing influence on individuals and society – but who may not necessarily have any commitment to the community’s specific beliefs.  It’s the sort of outlook that Eisenhower expressed one time:

"In other words, our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is."[1]

I would say, however, that it really does matter what we believe as well as what we do.  If our actions and hopes and expectations are rooted in anything else, they will take us in the wrong direction.

            The God-fearer who is waiting on the edges of commitment knows that.  That’s why they hold off.  They know that to commit will mean making some changes, so meanwhile they want to weigh whether or not it is worth the risk, and if they will be risking so very much on the right beliefs.  This is a person who is gathering a lot together within himself or herself.  You and I know people like that.  The God-fearer is someone who is trying to make sense of things and has the courage to ask the questions that the people already settled in their faith have overlooked and the people with no interest in faith don’t care about.  The God-fearer is someone to whom God is reaching out in his or her heart and to whom God may send helpers in odd ways.

“Then an angel of the Lord said to Philip, ‘Get up and go towards 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.”  [Acts 8:26-31] 

Now, I am not saying that God is going to put someone like that in your own path, but what if he did?

            The Ethiopian official already had a sense of what he was looking for.  He was on his way back from Jerusalem, and he was reading the Bible on the way.  What he needed from Philip was someone to explain to him his own understanding of who the Messiah was, and someone to encourage him to make a commitment when the moment was right.  It didn’t have to follow any prescribed script.  In fact, when this man knew the time had come

“He commanded the chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him.”  [Acts 8:38]

Conversion is the work of the Holy Spirit, who is out there in the world already, working within all kinds of people.  Evangelism, carrying good news, is helping people make sense of what the Spirit is already telling them one way or another.  As often as not, it’s just a matter of talking to strangers (or maybe people who are not strangers) and hearing the questions that they are already asking: “What does this religious language mean?”  “How can there be forgiveness in a world like this?”  “If there is a God, does he even care, and how can I know that?” 

It would be phony of us to say that we have all the answers to every question, but it would also be wrong to say that the good news of Jesus doesn’t speak directly to them, because it does.

“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.” [Acts 8:32-35]

Right there is much of the content of Christian faith. 

I’ve been talking about the people who were God-fearers in Jesus’ day and people who are on the edges of faith in our day as if they were interchangeable.  In many ways they are, because human experience is, at base, constant.  The prophets spoke of the sufferings of the people of Israel, which were not unlike the sufferings of the peoples of the earth today: driven from their homes by war or wandering on the face of the earth, so desperate to find a place of safety that they die trying to reach one.  The Psalms describe how

“Some wandered in desert wastes,
   finding no way to an inhabited town; 
hungry and thirsty,
   their soul fainted within them. 
Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble,
   and he delivered them from their distress; 
he led them by a straight way,
   until they reached an inhabited town.” [Psalm 107:4-7]

That speaks to the immigrant from Central America trying to get across the U.S. border and to the Sudanese refugee stuck in Libya, to the Syrian Christian family driven from its home by Isis and to the North Korean risking life to get away from oppression.

The Lord who spoke to Israel in its own exile through a prophet like Isaiah would also be the one who speaks now, with the assurance that the Savior would not be someone who sat back in a palace and felt badly for them.  He would be one who was in their midst.  That direct involvement in their lives – in our lives – would be the way that God would intervene in a lasting sense, not just fixing the problem of the moment, but touching on human nature itself, because what the Lord touches, he heals.

            There was good news in that for Philip, and for the Ethiopian official, and there has been good news in that for millions of people ever since.  That needs to be said.  God gave Philip this gift of talking to strangers, and he kept on using it.

“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.” [Acts 8:39-40] 

May God give us in our own day and in our own place the same kind of gift to listen, to have people ask what we know, and to share what has been shared with us.

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[1] Address at the Freedoms Foundation, Waldorf-Astoria, New York City, New York, December 22, 1952.