Here is Water

Gospel

Acts 8:26–40 NRSVue

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, the 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.

Sermon

Good Evening everyone. Thank you for coming out in support of LGBTQ+ youth of faith on this balmy summer evening. Thankfully the heat has begun to let up. Welcome to those from around the synod and our ecumenical partners that are joining us this evening as well. It is such a joy to be with you to worship and pray.

Here IS water! We are here this evening, braving the heat of Summer not because we love it. There is perfectly good air conditioning just up the path and accross the parking lot. But we are here in the outdoor chapel, steps away from American Legion Park to make known publically, in full view of the world, that here, God is for EVERYONE, especially queer youth. We are here to say to the world that there is a place for them in our churches because THEY TOO are beautiful children of God. That indeed there is NOTHING to keep them from being baptized.

Did you know, according to Beloved Arise, ONE IN FIVE LGBTQ youth say that their faith is important to them? ONE IN FIVE.

Did you know, according to the Human Rights Campaign, that 70% of LGBTQ+ youth report being shamed or bullied because of who they are? As much change as we have seen in the world, in a post Will & Grace world, in a post Don’t Ask. Don’t Tell world, it is tempting to think that we have moved passed all that, but today, still 70% are bullied and/or shamed for nothing more than them doing them.

Did you know, according to the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, that RELIGIOSITY is associated with significantly HIGHER rates of suicide attempts among gay, lesbian, and questioning youth? RELIGIOSITY! Just by being invested in seeing the world through religious eyes puts our queer kids at risk! By just showing up at church, how many queer kids have been subjected to the hateful bad theology of their church leaders, their pastors, youth leaders, Sunday School teachers; confirmation guides and mentors. What does that tell us about how the church does church?

Did you know, according to Suicide Facts and Resources, that most states still allow conversion therapy and that 27% of LGBTQ+ youth who attempted suicide had been sent to conversion therapy? Conversion therapy that so often tells those kids that they can just “pray the gay away” and if it doesn’t take its because their own faith is deficient! As Dr. Sam Giere at Wartburg Seminary says often, “Bad theology, kills!”

Oh, people of God, what have we done? Where are we? How did we get it so wrong? How is it, that, one of the greatest risk factors for teen suicide IS EXPOSURE TO THE CHURCH?!

Oh SINNERS, Let’s go down. Let’s go down. Come on down. DOWN to the RIVER to PRAY!

And yet… And still… despite all of that, one in five queer kids, one in five queer teenagers, one in five questioning young adults STILL despite everything the church has put them through, despite how the church has failed them, sees faith as important in there lives, still cry out to the creator God of the universe for help and comfort, Holding their heads up high and saying, ‘Here I stand. I shall not be moved. How can THAT be? When we have failed them so badly?

Because God shows up. God shows up when God says God will show up. God does God even when we are too small and broken and prejudiced to do God’s work.

The Ethiopian Eunuch. Who is this person? This figure is one of the giants for the queer faithful. He was undeniably African in a way that prevents the diminishing of his skin color by those that wash those details from the bible. He was also truly a sexual minority, also in away that cannot be erased from the text. Eunuchs were essential to statecraft in the ancient world because they were seen as unwaveringly loyal because without families of their own they were thought never to have split loyalties. Sometimes people were made eunuchs later in life for political retribution or punishment, but eunuch’s essentialness made them valuable enough to be created in steady supply, often before the boys had reached puberty. This physically queered them, made them physically somewhere between the sexes. One can look to the Italian Castrati singers of the late middle ages and the renaissance as physical examples of what effects this had on their bodies. The sheer otherness of their lives, whether you resist equating them with today’s sexual minorities or not, still makes this eunuch an easy icon for the LGBTQ+ community.

What must his relationship to the church have been like. He was devout. He traveled all the way from Eithiopia to Jerusalem so he could worship at the periphery of the Temple, the one true place to worship YHWH [Adonai as he would have called God]. He was learned. He was reading from a scroll in a time when very few people read. He was well-to-do. Scrolls were not cheap and Half -priced scrolls was still a couple of Millenia away. He was important, he chief treasurer of Ethiopia, no slouch to be sure. BUT, he was also a eunuch. A well read eunuch who would have known Deuteronomy 23:1 which disallows eunuchs to come into the assembly of the Lord.

It is doubtful that he had any choice about who he was made to be, but none the less he was in the outer realms of his faith community. when he encountered Philip, he was reading Isaiah 53:7–8, one of the Isaiahan servant songs. This one in particular, Having long been scene through the lens of Christ since the earliest days of the church. But what was just a few rolls of the scroll below this passage that SURELY he had also read? Isaiah 56:3–5 “do not let the eunuch say, “I am just a dry tree.” For thus says the Lord: To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.”

Here in the very scripture itself GOD SHOWS UP. God shows up to say, “ NO, feeble humans, you got it wrong. I didn’t need protection from your physical imperfections, I’m God!” Isaiah is proclaiming an open validating inclusive love for the faithful queer who has continued to love the lord despite what the world says.

When Philip asks, “Do you understand what you are reading,” and the eunuch answers, “How can I unless someone guides me,” one can imagine him trying to reconcile Deuteronomy with Isaiah and saying, “Philip, help me understand. How do I reconcile these two passages.” And Philip brings the two together in Christ through Isaiah 53 and says Christ makes away. Jesus the Christ, the suffering servant, blesses, endorses, and makes possible Isaiah 56.

Today people STILL use scripture to keep the strange ones away from God, to make people less, to raise THEMSELVES above another in a way that God just can’t support. People love to trot out all kinds of scriptures to clobber us over the head:

Genesis 1, because God made only a cis gendered man and woman

Genesis 2, because those cis gendered man and woman are fitted as one “perfect” flesh

Genesis 19, Sodom and Gomorrah ( which was never associated with same gender sex until around the first century BCE

Leviticus 18 & 20, where men are told not to lay with one another. (Women aren’t given the same warning?? So I guess there’s that?)

Deuteronomy 22, which makes SURE that drag is a no no, for men and women.

Romans 1, which Paul actually writes to emphasize that in Christ there is no condemnation

1 Corinthians 6, and 1 Timothy 1 which are actually critical of EXPLOITATIVE sex rather than same sex.

People point to these passages today to keep LGBTQ+ people out of the church just as they did to the eunuch with Deuteronomy 23:1. But just as then, God says today, “No. I’m bigger than that.” I’m the same liberating restoring God that occurs in Isaiah 56. WE are here TODAY to claim our place in God’s kingdom, to stand up and say “What is to keep me from being baptized?”

Baptism is a beautiful wonderful event. It is a time and a place where God Shows up because God says God will. In baptism God enters our life through the enveloping love of the holy spirit, mingled with water. God then goes with us, in, around, and through us guiding us into the doing of Kingdom just as the Spirit guided Philip all along his journeys that took him to all the lesser places and all the lesser peoples; just as the spirit went with the newly baptized Eunuch afterwards filling him with Joy.

Despite the bent misguided worldly attempts of the church to keep the church clean and square for God, God always says, “Mess it up! Bring in the weirdos, bring in the strange ones that don’t fit in, bring in the people that love the wrong people. Bring them in and show them the water!”

Here is the water. The waters of Baptism by which we are infused into the divine story God continues to create everyday in spite of all the ways that we humans try to get in the way.

Here is water. What is to stop me? What is to stop you? What is to stop anyone from being baptized? NOTHING. In Jesus Christ, God came to earth and died so that we could all be apart of this amazing baptismal mystery. The trinity is eternal and these baptismal promises are for all and forever. Praise be that God is bigger than all of our failings and makes away for us all, oppressor and oppressed, to find love and forgiveness enveloped in the the all-encompasing embrace of the Holy Spirit.

Amen.