Riviera Presbyterian Church

Acts 8. I John 4.

I John 4:7-21

Acts 8:26-40

There is a Chinese blessing—or maybe a curse?—that goes may you live in interesting times. I think we’re so blessed—as was the protagonist Philip in this morning’s story from the book of Acts; and as was the theologian Dorothee Soelle, who grew up in war-time Germany, and theologically came of age during war’s long aftermath in the lives, culture, and spirituality of the German people. In her book Not Just Yes and Amen, she tells a story about a woman of her acquaintance in the city of Hamburg; a widow who had been living alone since her husband had died five years earlier. She lived in a tidy apartment, two rooms of which she rented out in order to increase her income. The only people she knew were the two renters and the nearest neighbors on her floor. Her life consisted in keeping the apartment clean, going to the market, and cooking her meals. She seldom read books, or even magazines. She watched a little television in the afternoon. She had some minor health concerns, and worried about them. She was difficult to talk with, frequently repeating the same jokes, only becoming energized when relating stories of the homeland from which she had fled at the end of the war. She rarely spoke of anyone except herself. Though she was a confirmed and self-described Christian, religion meant very little to her in the small world which made up her life. One time, she told Soelle, she had become friendly with a former colleague from work, but I don’t let her in the house.

Regrettably, I can’t say this story is an unusual one. I know people like the woman in Hamburg, and so do you. There are thousands of women and men in our city alone, I would guess, living in exactly this way—except, as Dorothee Soelle says, to live in this way is not living at all: it is, rather, a kind of death. The woman in Hamburg marks her days alone, with no meaningful connection to other people’s lives, with no participation in the world of her renters and neighbors, without her life making any difference whatsoever in the living of anyone else.

No one matters to her: and so, says Soelle, she is dead.

The New Testament letter called 1st John echoes this seemingly harsh judgment. We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another. Whoever does not love abides in death. In other words, the person who does not love is dead, and those who want to know that they are genuinely alive, must live for and with others.

It’s tempting to read 1st John—obsessed with the idea of love—as a kind of feel-good script, eminently suitable for weddings, a kind of Bible-Barney: you know, that big purple dinosaur the very little kids watch when we are trying to socialize them into this hard world: I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family…with a great big hug and a kiss from me to you, won’t you say you love me too? It’s all soo soothing and benign, so sweet and tender and helpful. Great stuff—for two year olds, at least.

But the writer of 1st John, himself a victim of life in interesting times, has something else in mind altogether. When he is talking about love and community and God, he is not being nice, but rather, speaking about matters of life and death. Love that is something powerfully inconvenient, massively disruptive of life as we know it…something so important that it quite literally defines his world in terms that are as clear as darkness and light.

It is neither logical nor practical, and its demands are unavoidable. It is strong: strong as death, as the Song of Solomon puts it, strong as the grave from which the Christ arose on Easter.

In the story from the book of Acts, Philip, follower of Jesus, experienced this kind of love about which 1st John is speaking. Get up! yells the angel of God like some disembodied drill sergeant, go south on the wilderness road. See that foreigner? Run with his chariot and join it. Do it!

Ah, it’s always the wilderness road, isn’t it? No chance Philip could join with his neighbor for hot tea, with his buddies for a cold one at the local pub, with his beloved for a quiet dinner for two by the lake. No, to obey the dictates of love is to go out of his way. To expose himself to one who is the powerful agent of a foreign government. To place his own life and safety at risk, while upsetting most of what he believes about his religion and all of what he holds dear as a person of faith and a patriot. Listen: this is not a nice story about two buddies sharing faith and fellowship—I love you, you love me, we’re a happy… this is a story about rejection and doubt and risk, and love that is stronger than death…perfect love, that casts out fear.

The Ethiopian Eunuch was a threat to Philip’s way of life. He was a foreigner, an agent of a foreign power—a gentile, and a eunuch. He was in every way possible an outsider to Philip and what Philip held dear—and just like today, regulations governing, limiting, and defining the access of outsiders to Our Way of Life were inflexible and strictly enforced—for the good of the whole, of course. There were for such people, then as now, special possibilities and places—visas to permit them into the outside courts on the fringe of the Temple, protocols and procedures (even though they could take years to get through the process) for those who wanted to be naturalized, quotas and laws and lists of what made one “desirable,” or “undesirable.” The man the angel sent Philip was in all categories an undesirable. And Philip, a sort of immigrant-type himself, as a Hellenistic Jew—could ill afford to have his loyalty or patriotism questioned.

Within his own community, a battle was beginning to rage over the appropriateness of the inclusion of non-Jews in the community of Jesus. This was not primarily a matter of prejudice, but of, if you will, national security. Since Judaism was a protected religion under the imperial law of Rome, the attrition of homogeneity and shared culture was a threat to the privilege—limited though it was—Philip’s people enjoyed. To include Gentiles in the way of Jesus was to risk the loss of that protected status, to risk schism with brothers and sisters of like mind and long relationship, to wander off from the familiar landmarks and established shelters that make life in interesting times meaning-full and bearable, into a wilderness where nothing was sure and little was safe. Could it possibly be worth it to risk everything for the sake of one rich Ethiopian Eunuch, one boatload more of Haitians, of Mexicans, of Arabs, Pakistanis, gays, lesbians, undocumenteds, homeless, or whomever your in group needs to keep out? To even ask these questions seriously in times like those—or times like these—is a risk of love that may need to be stronger than death. And let’s be honest, it’s easier, as tired as we are of it all, just not to bother.

The writer of 1st John says there is no fear in love, for perfect love casts out fear. Philip had every reason to be afraid, every reason not to act: every cause and rationale to ignore or explain away the request of the foreign eunuch, here is water, what is to prevent my being baptized? Philip had every good reason to refuse, and only one good reason to act: whoever does not love, abides in death. And so, he chose, and acted according to the inconvenient and risky demands of his faith. He acted with no precedent, and no authority, and baptized that foreigner, that neighbor, that brother, even though he knew others would be sorting out the consequences of his actions for generations to come. And then, they both went their way: the one, having been welcomed against all odds, rejoicing because he was loved; the other, waiting and wondering, yet fearless in the wilderness of the love of God in Christ Jesus, whatever the cost might be.

The interesting times in which we live would have it that this kind of love of neighbor is a romantic notion, imprudent, foolish if not downright subversive—that love of country, of faith, of family, is about making everyone here (that is, everyone who is allowed to be here, an increasingly shrinking pool of potential neighbors) like ourselves, or, more accurately, like the idealized American selves we once believed we were. English speaking, middle class or better, similar looking, value sharing, always achieving and succeeding. The so-called War on Terrorism has made us as a people more xenophobic, selfish, and increasingly narrow in our religious, cultural, and social views that at any time previous in my lifetime, and most of yours. We dismiss most of what we don’t understand or don’t personally approve, as irrelevant to us, or worse, as a threat to what we have and intend to keep. We learn that, in order to keep us safe, the government is collecting our phone records, waylaying people who fit terrorist profiles, deporting people who have made mistakes but lived and worked in this country for long and productive years, restricting immigration, negating the rights of resident non-citizens, eroding our privacy….and we become mildly outraged, but do little or nothing—neither for the foreigner who is our neighbor nor, in the end, for ourselves and our common good. We worship a God of inclusive and radical grace…yet waste endless years on debating who can wholly belong, fully participate, in the offices of the church and at the Table that is not ours, but Christ’s own.

Sometimes it seems like we practice love as if it were going to Dairy Queen for dessert: a sweet reward for being lucky, or good…not a way of life that is risky, dangerous, enthralling: a continual adventure into worlds not our own, seeking the face of God in the stranger, the Other.

Sometimes, these interesting times seem too sad, too difficult to bear…and then I am drawn out again in hope by the ways you and I are being called—or ordered by angels!—to love, and I can go on. I see you, taking half a day of your few hours to yourself on a weekend to visit someone at the hospital, to drive another to a doctor’s appointment, to cook a meal for a grieving family, to write an impassioned letter for justice and send it to fifty friends so they can do the same, to get arrested for the rights of janitors and groundskeepers, to repair homes in Mississippi, dig deeper for yet another disaster offering, love even in the face of death. And I know that why we are together in this place, is to learn to do more of the same, and to celebrate that God in Christ calls us to reflect this path.

My friends Jack and Ruth have shared with me a couple of times during these past unbearable weeks, something a friend—maybe one of you—wrote them following their descent into what is surely one of the hardest places love can take us, into the wilderness of loss and pain after the death of a child by mischance. Jack was speaking of the idea of finding “closure”—as obsessed as our culture is with wrapping things up neatly, safely, securely—in matters of faith as in life. We spoke of how such losses, and even the threats of life in these interesting times, rip us open and place us, raw and writhing, in the path of danger and risk. Many people, it is clear, seek closures of varying sorts—just so they can get through the night. But we see that such ways of coping are not really life as much as they are a way of slow death. Jack and Ruth’s friend wrote: closure is for bank accounts. For Love Accounts, there is never closure, nor should there be.

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of God, and the courage of the Holy Spirit be with you, this day and always, amen.