SUNDAY, APRIL 28, 2024 | EASTER - Fifth Sunday of Easter (B)

Texts

Revised Common Lectionary 4-28-2024: Fifth Sunday of Easter

First Reading Acts 8:26–40

Psalm Psalm 22:25–31

New Testament 1 John 4:7–21

Gospel John 15:1–8

Acts

Gaza - identify relevance

A powerful eunuch came to faith under Philip’s guidance, wasn’t hesitating - to be baptized is not about having ALL understanding.

1John

God loved us, so we ought to love as well.

John

We are branches of the true vine, Jesus. We cannot survive without the vine and it is Jesus that enables us to grow.

Good morning,

Still in Easter? Yup! The secular world has moved on from Easter bunnies, eggs, and chocolates, but we are STILL in Easter. And the theme continues to be love! I wonder if anybody is surprised at this point...

We are branches of the true vine, Jesus, and we need this vine to do anything, to bear fruit first and foremost. And to bear fruit is to act in love, because God loved us first through loving actions throughout history. It is a blessed tautology, really. And one example of that is Philip’s preaching of the gospel to the Ethiopian official, who also happens to be a eunuch, which isn’t really what is that important about his identity, I think. Philip is encouraged by the Spirit to transcend class and ethnic differences and strike up a conversation about the scroll of Isaiah with the official. And that leads to the official’s decision to be baptized after hearing the Good News about Jesus Christ because to be baptized doesn’t require Bible classes or to somehow prove one’s “born again” status. Here’s water, so let’s do it!

Philip showed love towards God and his neighbor through commitment to God’s mission and attentiveness to the official’s needs. He could have just walked on and the Ethiopian would just continue to marvel fruitlessly about what he is reading in Isaiah.

One thing is to align oneself with a belief or philosophy and yet another is to seek to live it out. Y’know, I am baffled how university administrators and wider public in general are STILL surprised, when counter-cultural protests break out at university campuses. Maybe they expect that education only leads to conformity. News flash, it doesn’t, be it protests against the war in Vietnam or Black Lives Matter.

The latest iteration are students’ demands for the universities to divest from portfolios benefiting from corporate welfare, where the government uses tax money to essentially pay U. S. weapon manufacturers to send stuff that destroys and kills enemies of allies overseas and more specifically, they are targeting the army aid packages to Israel that continues their retaliatory war efforts resulting in an unimaginable humanitarian crisis in Gaza and more than 30 000 Palestinians killed, many of them children and youth under 18 given Palestine’s demographics.

The core message is not about support of Hamas, antisemitism, or violence against the Jewish (even though some choose to co-opt it with more radical views, unfortunately), so I think they are fairly reasonable demands - universities position themselves as champions of good causes and institutions of holistic education, so they ought to be consistent, right? Besides, a globally dispersed religion cannot be contained within one ethnostate and its actions, just like the U. S. is not THE Christian nation defining the rest of the global faith - Zionism is one of the strands, just like American evangelicalism is only one strand and not the whole. The opposition to the Zionist Israeli government and its actions does not equal antisemitism, just like the support of Palestinians doesn’t equal support to the actions of Hamas. But such nuances are lost on those in power and as in the past, the establishment’s response is to send in the militarized riot police to suppress the protests when they grow to be a nuisance and a bad look for the investors and legacy families.

Those students want to live out the values they were given and they ultimately adopted. And that is what Philip did and then what the Ethiopian official did. There was no widespread public acceptance of Jesus and his movement at that point, but it was only contained within the hearts and minds of a few believers. And then by a cascade it spread on and on, until it has grown to a global faith. And as we unfortunately know, even within Christianity there are those that seek to co-opt it with more radical views, but that doesn’t make the core message any less important. THat is what a commitment to your belief and values system looks like and that is what we are called to do! To radically love and care, even when the society disagrees and finds it unacceptable! Just like Jesus did during his earthly ministry. that all people are endowed with God’s image and thus To proclaim that prisoners should be treated humanely, we ought to love our enemies and that we cannot just go on a retaliatory rampage leaving behind rubble, suffering, and death and call it justice. All violations of God’s image should grieve us, no matter who is doing it! Amen.