A sermon for April 28, 2024, 5th Sunday after Easter, at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church – Buffalo, NY.
To watch the sermon, click here (video starts with the gospel reading).
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
I’d like you to notice something about our first reading from Acts. In verse 26, the angel of the Lord simply told Philip to “go south.” Not to a specific region or town … just “go south.” What was Phillip’s response? Verse 27 – “so he got up and went”.
This is a call and response pattern.
Verse 29. The Spirit said to Philip “go to the chariot” … the one carrying the Ethiopian Eunuch. That’s a “call”. What’s the response? Verse 30 … Philip didn’t linger or mosey … Philip RAN!
I think there’s another call. This time from the eunuch in verse 31. He invited Philip to get into the chariot and explain the scripture he was reading. The response? Philip got in and explained.
There’s one more call and response. Here also the eunuch in verse 36 said “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” Phillip’s response? He baptized the eunuch.
Thank you for looking at this text a little more closely with me.
In each of these calls, whether from the angel of the Lord, the Spirit, or the eunuch, Phillip did the thing. Whatever was asked … he did … and, from what we read, it looks like it was pretty immediate. The response seems to be a natural flow from the call.
You may not know much about this Ethiopian Eunuch. He’s not named. We just have two pieces of information about him. He’s Ethiopian … so darker skinned that most other people around Jerusalem, and he is a foreigner … a non-Jew … an outsider.
And he’s a eunuch … a castrated male. Not to be indelicate … but this is a person with crushed or missing parts. And, according to Deuteronomy 23, such a man was not allowed to enter the assembly of the Lord.
Socially, eunuchs were seen as “outside the norm” because they were considered neither male nor female.
AND YET … when he asked Philip “what is to prevent me from being baptized?” … in other words, what is to prevent me from entering into the assembly of the Lord … because that’s what baptism is, right?
According to the Bible … according to Deuteronomy 23, should Philip have baptized the eunuch? Probably not.
But he did anyway.
You see … Jesus welcomes the outcast and lifts up the lowly … right?
I’ve thrown a lot at you this morning and I want to give you something else to frame this text.
If you were to throw a baseball out in the front parking lot, how far could you throw it? 10ft 30ft. How far is it from the pitcher’s plate to home plate? 60ft 6 inches. Could you throw it that far?
Much beyond that … what happens to the ball? It drops … falls to the ground.
Why? Gravity.
What if you were able to throw that same baseball out in space? How far could you throw it? Who knows? Pretty darned far.
Why? Absence of gravity.
Gravity acts as friction … friction slows things down. Whether it’s a baseball, a train … where there is friction, things slow down.
What we’re talking about here is the law of inertia, also known as Newton’s first law of motion. An object in motion has a tendency to stay in motion unless another force acts upon it. In our conversation this morning, that force is friction.
If you were to imagine the Holy Spirit in the text we just analyzed like that baseball, the call is the throw. Do you see any friction? Is there anything you see that slows down or stops what the Holy Spirit was throwing? Nothing we’re told about in the reading.
It seems like there’s no friction for Phillip. The Holy Spirit calls or moves and so does Phillip with seemingly no delay.
Everything we do in the church … worship … Bible study … Sunday School … First Communion classes … welcoming new members … spiritual practices … spiritual direction … upkeep of the facilities and property … evangelism, stewardship, social media, coffee hour … and on and on … EVERYTHING we do in the church is about recognizing spiritual friction … recognizing where in our church and where in our lives friction exists that slows down the work of the Holy Spirit in, with, and through us.
The Holy Spirit has inertia. The Holy Spirit is in motion and has a tendency to stay in motion unless another force acts upon it. And that force is spiritual friction … and that spiritual friction can be anything in us that hears the call of the Holy Spirit and causes us to think we can’t or shouldn’t do something for some reason.
That day, the Holy Spirit wanted to show the Ethiopian Eunuch that – even though he was a foreigner, even though he was considered a social oddity – outside the “norm”, and even though the Bible itself kept him outside the community of God and God’s people … in spite of all of these things, the Holy Spirit was moving … the Holy Spirit had inertia … Philip recognized it and didn’t slow it down.
Our work as Christians is hear the call of the Holy Spirit, to recognize the inertia of the Holy Spirit so we can respond in faith, and, where we see spiritual friction, work to minimize it to the glory of God and in service to the world God has called us to love.
In the name of Jesus. Amen.
Epicurious Lutheran 