This morning's story in Acts is a dramatic treasure. I invite you to savor it with me this morning and share its richness! Though this story happened two thousand years in the past, imagine that its characters are on a stage before us and speaking to us in the present.

First on stage is the stranger from Ethiopia. Acts gives him no name, and that frustrates us, because names are part of what make us human to each other. Perhaps this omission reflects prejudice against foreigners. "Those people all look alike -- how can you tell them apart?"

I believe this stranger before us has black skin. Some people believe he was Jewish, part of the group that had been scattered to the winds, and had just been back to Jerusalem for a visit. I don't think so, because he was a eunuch. Unlike the peoples around them, the ancient Jews had few eunuchs, if any. Biblical references to eunuchs involve those in the courts of foreign kings. So I think that this eunuch, a high official of the Ethiopian queen, is African.

Since he is a eunuch, we know this stranger before us is the survivor of a great trauma. Imagine being a boy of 8 or 9, and one day some of the adults who are responsible for raising you, perhaps your parents, perhaps other relatives, whether out of poverty or greed, sell you to a slave trader. You find yourself in chains, and before you know what is happening, you are held down while someone cuts off your testicles.

From your owners' perspective, you now have a particular value. You will grow up different from other men. Your voice will not change, your face will remain smooth and hairless, your shoulders will not broaden, any excess weight will accumulate on your hips. You will have little sexual interest in women, and so you will make an excellent guard for the women in a king's palace. If you are bitter or angry, so much the better. A rough disposition is fitting for a guard.

At the age of nine, you don't know this. All you know is that you have been betrayed by the people who took care of you and on whom you depended, you have been physically violated, you are terrified and great pain, and you may die. Faced with this much trauma, some people might heal better than others, but anyone would be changed. In today's story, we know this stranger from Ethiopia survives. As his physical wounds heal and he grows up, we can imagine him remembering his trauma as the moment his life changed. Before it happened, his future may have seemed full of promise. Afterward --

As he grows older and realizes the full implications of his mutilation, we can imagine him experiencing loss and grieving over and over as he realizes he will never father children, will never take his expected place in society, and will always be viewed by others as sexually abnormal.

I don't know how difficult it was to grow up sexually different in the culture of the Ethiopian stranger. I do have an impression of how difficult it is in ours. A month or so ago, on behalf of the Howard County Human Rights Commission, I attended a meeting, in this building, of Howard County PFLAG -- Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. The Human Rights Commission had been asked to send someone to meet with and listen to their teenagers. I spent two hours in our conference room listening to what it is like to grow up gay or lesbian in Howard County. I heard accounts of anti-gay name-calling by both students and teachers. I heard about shunning and ostracism. Some of the kids in the room were straight, and felt it important to stand up for those who were being persecuted; they too experienced the insults, and there was an assumption that if they were friends of gay people, they were gay too.

At a national United Methodist church meeting, I met a woman from Texas who is studying for the ministry and who has struggled with the discovery that her daughter is lesbian. She shared with me something her daughter Anne wrote:

• "What a lot of people evidently don't think about is how homosexuals feel....Why in the world would anyone choose to be homosexual? Let's see, I would like to be discriminated against for the rest of my life and be told by half the people around me that I am going to hell because of who I am, be told by more than half of the people around me that I am not allowed to marry the person I love because our love is not real love.... I wish I was straight. It would make my life a [whole] ...lot easier. But it would be worse for me to pretend I could be straight and live a lie. If no one you have ever loved has been gay, just wait, you'll come across someone sometime. and then if you can still look that person in the face and tell them that who they are is a lie, you'll know that homosexuality isn't the problem, your own humanity is at stake. Homosexuality is no more a choice than eye color or height. If it were, I'd be straight and two inches taller.⁽¹⁾
  

When people are different from us, we have a tendency to imagine that they choose to be different, so that if we blame them enough perhaps they will see the light and choose not to be different. Or we have a tendency to see their difference as contagious, and we had better avoid them or we might catch it and become different, too.

But now on stage before us, growing up is part of this stranger's past. He is among those who have survived trauma and sexual difference with some success, and now he is a high official in the court of the queen - called the Candace - of Ethiopia, with freedom to come and go and make trips to places like Jerusalem. But as a trauma survivor, he will spend the rest of his life trying to make sense of the hand that life has dealt him. And so, as his travel-chariot plods southward on the wilderness road from Jerusalem to Gaza, he is reading from the book of Isaiah.

I don't think this book of Isaiah is something new he had picked up in Jerusalem. I think that it's from the Queen's library, that this man has already read it several times, and that curiosity about the people who wrote Isaiah was what brought him to Jerusalem to worship. I'm pretty sure he has already read Isaiah's 56^th chapter, which talks specifically about God's inclusiveness reaching out to foreigners and eunuchs:

Do not let the foreigner joined to the Lord say,

"The Lord will surely separate me from his people";

and 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.⁽²⁾

On the day Philip encountered him, the Ethiopian was reading three chapters earlier in Isaiah about another stranger. The 53^rd chapter talks about a servant of God who "had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him,"⁽³⁾ someone who "was despised and rejected by others, a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces he was despised, and we held him of no account."⁽⁴⁾

Surely this stranger from Ethiopia, bearing his life-long wounds of body and soul, reading these words from Isaiah while on his continuing quest to make sense of his life, would have thought, "I don't know who this suffering servant of God is, but I think I understand this man, and I know he would understand me."

Now onto the stage comes Philip.

Philip's life has been like a roller coaster ride lately. Stephen has just been stoned to death by an angry mob. A zealous rabbi named Saul from Tarsus has appeared and begun a persecution of the church in Jerusalem. Philip has gone north to Samaria to tell people the good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ. He's just urged repentance on a magician named Simon, who has seen the power of God and wants to buy that power for cash. And with barely a moment to rest, he hears from a messenger of God that he should go south to the wilderness road between Jerusalem and Gaza.

Philip goes. And there in the wilderness he sees, seated in a travel-chariot, a well-dressed African eunuch reciting Isaiah out loud in his high-pitched voice.

Perhaps Philip is so full of fervor for the Gospel that he has no hesitation about what comes next, but I think Philip is more complicated than that. Who is this Philip who is now on stage before us? How can any of us escape having to deal with our childhood conditioning? When I put myself in Philip's place at this moment, I imagine that his instincts are to turn around and go home this minute. Despite all the commandments of God in the Old Testament to be good to strangers because once the Jews were strangers in Egypt, Philip, if he is like others of his time, still has a strong impulse to keep himself pure from strangers. On top of that, this man is physically defective. Surely Philip remembers all the injunctions from the book of Leviticus that one must not sacrifice to God an animal that is blemished in any way⁽⁵⁾, and that a human who is blemished or physically imperfect in any way must not approach the altar of God.⁽⁶⁾ And on top of that, this man's different sexually. Our sexuality seems so tied in with our feelings about how the world is supposed to be and what keeps the world right side up, that we can find it very threatening to be in the presence of someone who is sexually different from us. Run, Philip, Run!

But Philip feels the Spirit telling him, "Go over to this chariot and join it." In his reading of Isaiah the Ethiopian has gotten to the part about a sheep led to the slaughter, a lamb silent before its shearer; and a suffering servant of God who is humiliated and denied justice.⁽⁷⁾ "Do you understand what you're reading?" Philip asks? The Ethiopian is puzzled by this writing that touches so much on the wounds of his own life. "How can I understand this, unless someone guides me?" he asks.

Now on stage we see Philip leading the Ethiopian through the book of Isaiah, showing him how to see the presence of Jesus in the words of Isaiah. Because these words are about oppressed people being free and eunuchs who won't be dry branches, Philip is also describing, therefore, how we can see the presence of Jesus right in our own world, even the world of a eunuch. "Jesus can make sense of Isaiah," I can see Philip telling the eunuch, "and Jesus can make sense of your life."

As Christians we know that Christ is present at every time, every place, every interaction, but often there is a film over our eyes that keeps us from seeing that presence. As this play unfolds on stage before us, I see Philip, looking at Isaiah through the eunuch's eyes, seeing Christ in a new way. I see the Ethiopian, looking at Isaiah through Philip's eyes, seeing suffering from the perspective of crucifixion and resurrection. As each shares not only his experience but himself with the other, Christ's presence among them becomes clearer to both. It is the presence of the love we heard described in this morning's lesson from 1 John. It is the presence of the love about which St. Paul said, "For I am convinced that neither death, not life, not angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."⁽⁸⁾

Several years ago, the importance of that love was a deciding factor when our church joined the Reconciling Ministries Network. We studied the issues for over a year. We talked about homosexuality and what it means. Some of us visited other Reconciling congregations. We talked to gay and lesbian people about their experience. When all the conversations had taken place, we still were torn between a sense of what God seemed to be saying to us, and our own natural reluctance to welcome people with whom we felt strange.

What convinced us to say yes was our children, the little ones who fill our congregation and come up front before Sunday School. We love these children and we know God loves them. And we know the statistical likelihood that sooner or later, as they grow older, we'll discover that one of them or two of them are gay or lesbian. Our pledge as a welcoming, reconciling congregation is that they will know that whatever their sexual orientation turns out to be, they are loved and accepted by God, and by us as well.

Each encounter with Christ is unique. For our children, we hope the Christ they meet in childhood will be a constant companion as they grow up. For many in Christian history, meeting Christ has been an experience of release from the burden of their own sins. For trauma survivors like this sexual-minority African man from Ethiopia, the encounter with Christ surely involves healing from the sins of others. Encountering Christ, the Ethiopian stranger finds the love and acceptance he has been denied since childhood. And now, suddenly, at just the right time, beside the roadway appears a body of water.

No matter how innocent we are, trauma can make us feel dirty. Many New Yorkers felt covered by the awful grey dust of 9/11 days after they first washed it off. Rape victims feel soiled. Old people who have been scammed out of their life savings often make no report because of their feelings of shame. It's not unlikely that the Ethiopian eunuch has endured a lifetime of open insults and strange looks reminding him of his defect and making him feel somehow dirty because of it. The wounds that make us feel dirty are wounds that separate us from God.

"Is there anything to stop me from being baptized?" the eunuch asks Philip. The question is a recognition of all the impediments that get placed in peoples' way. He is clearly asking, "Will the fact that I'm foreign be an impediment? Will the fact that I'm black be an impediment? Will my sexuality be an impediment? Will the fact that I'm different from other people be an impediment? Will the fact that I can never have children be an impediment? Will the fact that I've been physically mutilated be an impediment?"

Miracle stories are told to emphasize the presence of God. In this story there are three miracles - the angel's command to Philip at the start, the body of water that miraculously shows up just when it's needed, and Philip being transported away at the end. The tellers of this story want to make sure we know that none of this is coincidence - this is one where God is calling the shots, and Philip - as well as we who read this account -- had best get the point. This African eunuch from Ethiopia is asking to be baptized. If Philip says anything other than "Yes" to him, he'll have God to answer to.

And with the baptism, the story of the Eunuch ends. The spirit of the Lord snatches Philip away and as the writer of Acts tells us, "the eunuch...went on his way rejoicing." He has been accepted. He has a new understanding of Isaiah and a new relationship with Christ. He has a new understanding of God's love for him. He is baptized. And so he goes on his way rejoicing.

Christians have told this story again and again over the centuries because the story speaks to us and God speaks to us through the story. Let each of us hear what God wants us to hear from this story, and let nothing stop us from responding to God with our own unique "Yes."