But this is also true in church; for that matter in every community.  There always seems to be a surplus of those who will give their verbal wisdom to any issue and a dearth of those willing to give of their own elbow grease.   It’s easy to find those who will propose “if only X” – knowing full well that X isn’t in the realm of reality.

In this regard I think the biggest temptation (and most of us fight it) is the lure of grand abstractions which pose as easy solutions to our present problems.  But in reality many of our problems just need good old hard work.  When your yard needs to be mowed, your washing machine fixed, and your breaker box is tripped, you don’t call a real estate agent.  You get work mowing, fixing, and switching.   A new house is only new for a bit; its yard will need to be mowed as well.  My car is 9 years old now.  I have to fix this or that now and again.  But those mechanic bills are nothing when stacked next to a car payment – albeit a new car is tempting.

We live in a culture where few and fewer young couples go to church and when they do they go less often than their parents.  The stats are quite stark.  The precipitous drop in attendance is unparalleled.  In response to this (and to be charitable, with a desire to reach out) some have proposed doing everything possible to be “relevant” to a new generation.  Throw out the organ, bring in a band.  Get rid of the altar, create a stage.  Toss out the robes or ties and find a golf shirt.  The pastor might even (I’m not making this up) spend a week in a bed on the roof of a church in Texas – so that he can promote a book about sex.  (Only in Texas?)

If that’s getting “with it,” I’m happy to be without it.  As the Romans found out 1,000s of years ago, you can always get crowds with a circus and bread, bread and circuses.  But that seems to me like fixing your house by selling it.  We know (on this Bible and science are in evident agreement) that we are hard wired for true authentic belonging – community.  We also know that people long more for purpose than entertainment, for connection more than “networking,” and for truth more than today’s relevancy which will be tomorrow’s old news.  We know that a crowd is different than a community.

Seems silly to remind you, but we sometimes forget.  People are born, they are nurtured and educated, they need love and belonging, they participate in families and vocations, and then they die.  All this happens fairly quickly, if you ask me.  I’m all for entertainment, but churches are about the core of life, not whimsical fancy.   At every stage, at every stage, we need a loving community of those who will help and challenge us to love God and love our neighbors.  That is where the church must be engaged – which is to say, putting pastoral ministry at the center of its mission; which is to say by the call of God’s love we give ourselves to the hatch, match, patch, and dispatch business.

And with that at the core, we then go out and serve our broader community together.  We aren’t going to get everyone in our STL community to come to KBC, nor should we – nor should they.  We aren’t going to have a big ol circus crowd.  But we are going to do what KBC has done for over 140 years: care and reconcile in Jesus name.  It’s not easy work.  But its worthy work, worth infinitely more than a thousand castles in the air.

I was honored to have been asked, albeit a bit nervous about what I should do when I got there. I had been warned that he likely wouldn’t talk to me. When we arrived John was in a hospital bed. He was emaciated and clearly didn’t have too many days left. He sadly wasn’t much older than me.

When we walked in the room, John’s sister asked how things were going. She began a few seconds of small talk which John acknowl-edged, but offered mostly grunts. He was clearly suffering. She then introduced me as her pastor. I think she said, “he’s going to pray with you.”

The image of what happened next will forever be branded into my grey matter. He showed what can only be called revulsion at my presence. He crouched as far as he could on the other side of the bed, turning his face and body away from us. He closed his eyes and said not a mumbling word. I had never experienced that kind of rejection. I’ve never experienced it since – not that kind of revulsion anyway.

Though I was young, I knew immediately and intuitively that it wasn’t personal. He had never met me. He had not really even looked at me. He wasn’t rejecting me. He was rejecting the personification of the church. It was a church which had rejected him. I got it. Those who had condemned his person – not just for what he did, but for whom he was – had no right to pray at his bedside during his final days. He knew he was dying. He had no interest in dying a hypo-crite. The pain of that moment, my inability to do anything other than offer a few words from scripture to a man who hated what I repre-sented, is still very present.

I’m sometimes asked (implicitly and explicitly) why I feel it’s important to counter religious bigotry that categorizes and demonizes people who are minorities. I have a theological answer to that question which could fill volumes. It starts with Genesis (we’re all God’s crea-tion) and moves through Jonah (hope is for all) and arrives ultimately at the cross where the ground is level. But part of the passion that I feel for countering the hateful rhetoric of those of the “Westboro Baptist” fame comes from John. He did nothing more than give back what had been given to him.

Praise God there are now many churches who understand that the love of Christ is offered to all – that all means all. I’m glad we are one of them.

It isn’t just nutty preachers who are predicting “the end.”  One also gets the sense that journalists, columnists, and politicians are ready for the sky to fall.  Europe is in a financial crisis.  Global warming is causing visible effects and real damage.  Unemployment is at historic levels.  The Middle East is in an uproar.  Iran is on the verge of a nuclear weapon.  North Korea has an enormous arsenal and no food.  The United States has disproportionate wealth and a disproportionate number of people in prison.  People aren’t attending church as they used to.  Political leaders seem more infantile then they used to.  Good news is hard to find.

This is where it helps to read the Bible.  I don’t mean the passages about the end times (there you’ll be reminded that “no one knows!”), nor do I mean all the comforting passages about casting your anxiety upon God, about trusting God.  Those are essential.  They are great to read.  But what helps me as much as all of those reminders of hope are the reminders of history.  The long chronicle of human beings who’ve lived through much worse than anything we are likely to ever experience and who lived and died praising their creator.  Reading about the story of Esther or Ruth or the early disciples in Acts, reminds you that human beings are capable of being truly happy in almost any circumstance.  Assuming relationships of love and a life of purpose, we can be happy in a dungeon – as the Apostle Paul’s story reminds us.

The joke (not really funny) is that one of the most important classes you took in high school (possibly taught by a disinterested teacher!) is history.  To know about the 100 year’s war, the inquisition, the medieval period, the First World War, the Irish potato famine (etc!) is to know that ever period of human history has its challenges and we happen to be living in a relatively easy period.  This is important because without this perspective we overreact and live in unjustified fear and anxiety.  We also are then prone to bad decisions based on that fear and insecurity.  Our most immediate ancestors did not have disparate, nutty, poor, and ill-equipped enemies (current day terrorists), but Hitler, a powerful, very equipped, very rich, and nearly successful enemy.  Together people of the light conquered a great darkness.

Those who put dates or times on end-time predictions are a few bricks short of a load.  Why they claim to follow the one who said “no one knows,” I don’t know.   But I also believe there are some very bright people out there who’ve become quite pessimistic about the future.  I’m not among them (and indeed may not be all that bright!).  I think we are at a period in our history when we are seeing democracy break out in new places, technological advances in food production and delivery, unparalleled medical advances, a growth in the appreciation of other cultures, and a reasonable hope that real progress is being made in the developing world.

I am aware there is much to do.  Real progress needs to be made on a number of fronts.  But it can be done.  And so I’ll be about my part of it; not sitting around holding my breath in anticipation or fear.  The world will end, until then my end will be dedicated to its improvement, keeping my lamps trimmed and burning – for the need for light is certainly evident.

Oh boy.  One could hardly scream “false dilemma” louder if you used a megaphone.  You don’t compare, contrast, read, reflect, nor discern with the “heart alone.”  In fact the idea of mindless discernment is only for those who believe in blind submission to an authority – something we Protestants ostensibly gave up about 400 years ago.  If “heart” is the seat of the emotions and passions, then indeed it is the “job” of the mind, as the last 2,000 years of human history has demonstrated again and again, to test and see whether our feelings are based on fact.

“That education is gonna get you in trouble.”  This statement was made when I came home from college and told a relation that there was no good scriptural justification for why women couldn’t serve as deacons.  The only way to justify such exclusion was to quote some texts and ignore others.  Indeed my relation was correct.  Education has been getting me in trouble for 25 years.  Yes it’s a kind of trouble to refashion your thinking, but it’s less trouble than sticking your head in the sand.  It’s dark, hard to breathe, and awfully uncomfortable down there.  It’s why I left the Southern Baptists of my youth.  The prevailing direction of that denomination has been to emphasize one very literalistic interpretation of the Bible and ignore all amassing evidence to the contrary.

This is true in many areas, but for the last few decades a major hot button issue has been sexuality.  Recently I saw a play called “Southern Baptist Sissies.”  It’s written by Del Shores who tells the story of four boys growing up in Dallas, Texas in a Southern Baptist Church.  Three of the boys are gay, one is uncertain about his sexuality.  The play’s narrator takes us through the boy’s young lives, their rejection by the church, the lies told in and around the church, the implicit hypocrisy of so much of what is said about sexuality in the church.  And though the play is far from perfect, all this is done with a kind of appreciation for some of the aspects of Christian living within the church.  And as a former Southern Baptist from Oklahoma, it all rang quite true.

What struck me as the major issue in the play, however, was not sex.  It was the issue of “thinking.”  The narrator kept saying, sometimes in great regret and anguish: “I just couldn’t stop thinking.”  And when you start thinking, well it might just get you in trouble.  Or, as Jesus says, it might just set you free.

This is where I connected with the play and where I connect with the vast sea of ex-Southern Baptists which have flooded into other churches or into the ocean of those who are “spiritual but not religious.”  Thinking has made it impossible to accept all of the conflicting moral rules proclaimed as absolute truth.  Experience has ridiculed the authority of those who promulgate hate in the name of love, calling it “truth.”  Science has not only demonstrated that the earth is far from center of the universe, but also that there is no difference of intellectual capacity between males and females, and that sexuality is largely biologically determined.  Our minds AND hearts must come to terms with these realities.

I’ll risk a cliché: God gave you a head for more than a hat wrack.  We must approach all statements about morality, ethics, obligations, using our hearts and our heads.  You can quote scripture (every so “heartfully”) and condemn mixed fabric, fried shrimp, and homosexuality.  Or you can commend stoning disobedient children and taking neighboring nations as slaves.  None of this is good, nor acceptable for those whose hearts have embraced love.  God gave us reasoning skills to resolve conflicting moral rules by the love which frees us from old prejudices to live alongside those who are different with respect.

In the last couple of years I’ve been a part of two Baptist gatherings on the topic of sexuality.  One was a meeting of the Baptist World Alliance ethics commission where as a member I presented a paper on the topic.  Another was a workshop of the Cooperative Baptist Convention at their annual meeting.  In both cases I was overwhelmed with the presence of fear – even terror – among the leaders.  It was, of course, the fear of controversy and of division.  I understand this fear.   As a pastor, I’ve experience it often.  However, on better days my fear of ignoring the truth, and so condemn 10% of the human population because of superstition not science, is much greater than my fear of controversy. Here is where the head is rightly engaged: sorting out contradictory messages and communicating to the heart that it’s OK to love all of God’s creation.  Good people may differ on many of these difficult moral quandaries.  Those unwilling to employ their minds in the difficult process of discernment are, in my mind, the real sissies.

Sad, indeed, when the church becomes a place to hide from reality, rather than a place to gain courage for facing it.  And there’s no question that too often we Christians major on ethical trivialities when we live in a world calling us to face real issues of life and death.  I fear that too many Southern Baptist preachers (at least in my youth) talked about “beer drinking” at the expense of really issues like systemic racism or radical poverty.  Obviously alcoholism is a serious issue, but to intimate that the essence of holiness is to avoid “drinking and cussing” is to miss well over 90% of the gospel’s call on our lives.   When a church that has been systematically covering up the abuse of children calls the ordination of women a “moral evil,” you know we’re a long way from the ethics of Jesus.

That being said, we must also recognize the complexity of the conversation we need to have.  On the one side we risk being overly general with moralistic banalities (“we shouldn’t be violent”) and on the other side we risk getting into policy discussions without solid expertise (Better regulations of handguns?  A very good question, but one too complex for worship.  Ditto for the minutia of Health Care Reform).  On either extreme we come across as hopeless and harmless idealists or as political meddlers who are out of their depth advancing a partisan agenda.   Neither of those are a “mission match.”  Both do little to advance the conversation which needs to happen.

A true “mission match” is our priestly and a prophetic calling.  The former we exhibit as we pray and care for those within our power to do so.  We are a long way from Arizona, but we can remember those hurting and pray for the families who are grieving.  And prophetically there are things which we, as followers of Jesus, can say without equivocation and yet with significance.  In this case, for example:  no human being should ever be demonized, every human being no matter how different, demands respect.  And moreover, and this is a pill we often don’t like to swallow, even the opinions of those people we radically disagree with, often (albeit not always) have some kernel of truth.

This, it seems to me, is a central issue of our day and one that can not be repeated too often or too loudly.  Whether in political violence or school bullying or in the crazy extremist rhetoric we hear daily, a core temptation is the hatred based on a false sense of difference and an illegitimate perception of the views of others.   Political view-points, sexual orientation, partisan affiliation, are all ancillary to the fact that to be human is to be a creature with dignity and worth.

This leads me to something closer to home.  In Saint Louis we have a murder rate that baffles the imagination; young men, killing each other almost as if it were a sport.  This is a moral evil, one which we “close the curtains on” almost every day.  The gospel tells us that a 16 year old North City boy is as worthy of our concern as an Arizona representative.  Try thinking about that a bit.  It’s a truth anything but banal or easy.

Again, there are no easy answers to fix the issues of violence in our own city.  But we are called to speak with those who are suffering and to speak out against the mutual demonization of a generation of kids.   There are those in the middle – primarily members of African American churches – who need our prayers and support.  They need our “witness” for justice.  One of my plans for this year is to explore how to do that more effectively than we have.  As servants and followers of Jesus, let’s avoid being moralistic loudmouths while giving our voice to the truth of love and the love of truth, knowing that Jesus is the only perfect expression of both.  The rest of us are imperfect imitations at best.   But imitations we are called to be.

We sat in a warm room with windows beside the street.  We watched as a friendly young guy stood in the cold and parked the occasional car.  We enjoyed our dinner and as we were finishing desert Cecelia asked for some cash.  I knew what she was thinking, but I had to ask anyway.  “What for?”  “I want to tip the valet guy.”  “But he didn’t park our car!”  “But he’s standing out in the cold and I’m sure some people aren’t tipping!”  “You don’t know that!”  “And besides,” she said, “it’s Christmas time.”  “But…”  I handed over the cash.  I was later informed the young man received it with quite a smile.

That story says quite a lot about my wife: a little crazy upstairs but a heart always looking out for neglected and needy (both are reasons she married me, but that’s another topic altogether).  But it also says something about me.  I’m not the brightest bulb in the cardboard packing, but I do know when it comes to generosity there’s no trumping the Christmas card.  Once it’s thrown, the game is over.  All you can do is say “Bah Humbug,” let everyone laugh, and then hand over the cash.

On a slightly more serious note there is something glorious about this season.  It’s the expression of an idea so beautiful that at least once a year we let crass self-interest take an occasional back seat and we look around to see a kid standing in the cold.  He’s there other times of the year, but during this season we see him – really see him.  During this season we’ll extend our gaze a bit longer and wonder if only for a second we can warm his heart and bring a smile to his face.

I’ll leave aside the question as to why we don’t extend this attitude all year and instead I’ll reflect on the source of the very idea that giving sacrificially is essential to being a fulfilled human being.  Aristotle (300 years before Jesus) believed in generosity.  But his was the rational and calculated kind of generosity.  This is essential also, but it stops short of Christian giving.  Christmas starts here:  “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son…” (John 3:16a).

This kind of giving is more than a tip or a check of any size.  It represents a God who is love calling his children to a relationship of love.  This love changes everything.  For no longer are human beings seen as those who orbit in and out of our lives, useful for parking cars or bringing food, but as we embrace the spirit of Christmas people become … those for whom the God sent the babe in the manger.    This changes everything.   And ultimately it will lead you to do even crazier things than tipping a guy for not parking your car.

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“THE American clergy is suffering from burnout, several new studies show. And part of the problem, as researchers have observed, is that pastors work too much… But there’s a more fundamental problem that no amount of rest and relaxation can help solve: congregational pressure to forsake one’s highest calling. The pastoral vocation is to help people grow spiritually, resist their lowest impulses and adopt higher, more compassionate ways. But churchgoers increasingly want pastors to soothe and entertain them. It’s apparent in the theater-style seating and giant projection screens in churches…

Jeffery MacDonald is right that the trend toward consumer-driven religion has been gaining momentum for half a century. In 1955 only 15 percent of Americans said they no longer adhered to the faith of their childhood. By 2008, 44 percent had switched their religious affiliation at least once, or dropped it altogether.

In the midst of all this bad news there is, it seems to me, some good news for churches like Kirkwood Baptist Church.  It’s not that we are immune to any of the cultural currents which result from all this bad news, but it is that our history stands as a counter example.  As I’ve said recently in other contexts we have a beautiful, if imperfect, heritage of adopting: love over literalism, moral integrity over empty moralism, science over superstition.  Whether in sending our youth to Kenya or caring for those who are dying or adhering to a non-entertainment participatory worship style, we serve as a counter example.

Included in the good news is the reality that we have work to do.  We live in a culture that often associates “Baptist” with “bigot” and “Christian” with “hypocrite.”  I watched some religious television the other day, and certainly got an understanding (again) as to why.  But there’s nothing to do but continue to live out our faith in imperfect, but real, lives in a way that lets our light shine.  We are not here to be paragons of perfection, or expositors of all truth, or a local theatre where you come for a show every Sunday.  We are a community of those seeking to follow in the ways of Jesus.  We serve God and hence each other in his name.  All else is noise.  In this bad news world this is our good news: work to do.

It is a small world, and made even smaller by our capacity to travel and talk across large distances.  The BWA meeting was a reminder that though we are separated by oceans and languages, what we humans share is much greater than that which separates us.  There were 4,000 at this meeting, but the more significant figure to me is that over 100 countries were represented (and the sad figure of 1,000 that US immigration kept from attending).

What do all these Baptists, with distinct languages, cultures, expectations, share in common?   It isn’t agreement on every dot of doctrinal truth.  It isn’t agreement on musical tastes or how to dress for worship (I always appreciate the Africans and their bright, beautiful, flowing robes – quite a contrast with the Americans who show up in shorts and white tennis shoes).  But it is an experience of love and a belief that God was at work in Christ.

The author Ann Rice has been in the news this last week.  After a high profile conversion to Catholicism a decade plus ago, she has now renounced her faith.  She says she will never go back to her atheistic days, that she still believes in Christ, but that no longer – given Catholicism’s express views on social issues – can she call herself a Christian.  After making this public statement, she said it’s the first time she’s felt sane in a long time.

I’m sympathetic to Rice’s concerns, but am amazed that she is about 500 years behind.  Or at least 400.  The early Baptists understood that God’s truth was larger than any one person or any one group.  They believed that the Spirit was at work in persons individually and in the local church communally, and that understanding required a kind of freedom.  The early Baptists embraced a freedom for individuals to disagree and for churches to differ.  Starting in 1610 early Baptists made it clear that no church, denomination, pope, or potentate could compel the conscious or demand conviction.  Early in our nations history, Baptist fought for the freedom of religion, believing that all should be free to worship as their conscious dictated.

Ann Rice shouldn’t have rejected Christianity, she should have embraced being a Baptist.  There is room for her in this large, diverse, energetic, group of Jesus followers.  We don’t all agree, but we do all see the need to serve in the name of Christ – for God so loved this small world that he deemed it worth saving.  It isn’t saved by our submission to a set of beliefs, but our adoption of a big faith that puts a loving heart and working hands ahead of agreeing brains.

William Wilberforce, b. 1759, was a British politician, a philanthropist and a leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade. Five years into his political career he became a committed Christian… he was converted from a tepid lukewarm ambivalence to hot passionate commitment to the person and principles of Jesus.  Two years after his conversion he met a group of anti-slave-trade activists.  They showed him the chains, the smells, the bloods, the losses, the horrors of the slave trade.  He met a former slave, heard the stories, and became convinced that God led him to the cause of abolition.  He soon became one of the leading voices calling for the end to the slave trade.

For twenty-six years, often with bad health and very stiff opposition, he headed the parliamentary campaign against the British slave trade.  It was a long, arduous and even dangerous struggle until the passage of the Slave Trade Act 1807.  His movement was the world’s first grassroots human rights campaign, in which men and women from different social classes and backgrounds volunteered to end the injustices suffered by others.

His campaign eventually led to the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, which ended slavery in most of the British Empire.  Wilberforce died three days after hearing that the passage of the Act was assured.  Though sadly not a household name today, in 1856, the first black university in America was named Wilberforce University.  Frederick Douglass called him the factor “that finally thawed the British heart…”

That’s the true story we saw portrayed a week ago on Wednesday as we gathered to watch the movie: “Amazing Grace.”  If you didn’t see it, if you haven’t seen it, do it.  It’s one of the better films out there.  But here’s the rest of the story.   William Wilberforce, the great liberator of slaves, the tireless fighter of injustice, was opposed to the liberation of women.  He even didn’t like women’s involvement in the anti-slavery campaign. He believed that women had no place in politics.  I quote: “For ladies to meet, to publish, to go from house to house stirring up petitions – these appear to me proceedings unsuited to the female character…”  We all have our blind spots, but today I pray our ears are wide open.

Question:  How in a world where prejudice reigns so supreme in the hearts and minds of humans, did a small group of Jewish followers of a Jewish rabbi within a few decades grew into a multi-ethnic, multi-national, multi-continental movement which has touched every part of our planet.  How could this have happened?!  How could these Hebrew people, who were as exclusionist as any other race or group, have been transformed to those who embraced a world-wide gospel where even the former Pharisee Paul would come to say:  “there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, but we are all one in Christ”?

Well this is Luke’s task – to answer this question as he writes the book of Acts.  He is seeking to tell the story of the early followers of Jesus and like any historian he can’t write about every moment, but he picks out the great ones… the formative ones… the moments where ideas are shaped, minds are changed, crowds are converted…

Or where an Ethiopian eunuch becomes a follower of the Jewish Messiah.

What a story of barriers broken, of bridges built, of old prejudices being destroyed.  What a beautiful story of one person who came to know God’s love and of another person who came to know of the extent of God’s love… for this is not only a story of a saved African, but it is a story of a renovated, motivated, elevated Philip.

There are three marquee actors and one major prop in this story:

1)     The man who doesn’t fit in a standard definition of a man (what some today call a sexual minority).  The man who is also a pious searcher who doesn’t fit in anyone’s orthodoxy…  he was the wrong race to be reading Isaiah and the wrong gender to be in the assembly of God.

2)     Philip, who following the Jesus of the well, goes where the standard, where the rules, don’t permit him to go.  He’s been taught, by his religion to avoid people like this eunuch.

3)     The Spirit, who is unseen and unheard, but who is seen, felt and heard by both the seeker and the evangelist… who brings both towards the truth.  Part of Luke’s story is the Spirit.  Why the Spirit?  Because the letter of the law was clear:  Deuteronomy 23:1 “No one who is a eunuch… shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord”

4)     The chariot is the prop… they were both on a journey!

A show of hands.  How many of you have seen the show: Wicked?

Well for you unacquainted, let you tell you briefly how it goes.  The poor wicked witch of the west isn’t really wicked after all.  She’s just a misunderstood girl with a bad home life whose skin happens to be green.  And who happens to be able to conjure up wings on moneys and turn her true love into straw, but otherwise she’s a perfectly normal gal.

But of course underneath the fantastical elements in the story, the human element is why it’s so very popular.  Every one of us knows a bit about what it’s like to be green… or strange, or unpopular, or misunderstood, or out of whack with those around us.  This is the human condition… to feel at times as if no one quite gets you, or that most are very different from you… it takes a lot of maturity – or a deep abiding faith in God -  to finally get that the differences are part of God’s glory.  Your weirdness is God’s gift.

Some of these differences are genetic (the non-wicked witch was born with green skin) and some are chosen and some are chosen for us by others.   On your cover I put a picture from this last century of eunuch of the Sultan.   As recently as 75 years ago, boys were taken from particular regions of Africa and then brought to Upper Egypt, where they underwent the operation.  The mortality rate was high, which meant that those who survived were very valued and very expensive.  As you see until recently some were brought to the Sultana in Istanbul.”

Adding insult to literal injury, some religions forbade these men full access.  It was against the Hebrew law for the Eunuch to enter into the Assembly of God.  This is why the Spirit needs to tell Philip to do what he does.   Under the guidance of the Spirit Philip obediently overcomes the tradition of the Old Testament and engages the man in conversation about his reading – and shares Jesus with one who some believed unworthy.

And maybe the Ethiopian believed it himself.  Maybe he didn’t think himself worthy… possibly that is why he so readily identified with this suffering servant to was the victim of a cruel world which acted so viciously towards him.  This outcast could see in Christ his own outline… And Philip was able to get past whatever prejudice he may have had to share that this vision of Isaiah was incarnated in the person of Jesus.

Luke consistently tells us that correct spiritual understanding is a gift (Acts 8:10; 10:22).  We need to pray, as much as ever for that gift today.  Our hope for right engagement with others is not in literalism, but in the Spirit’s love.

I grew up hearing this story taught and preached.  It seemed as if the emphasis was always on the Ethiopian’s baptism.  But that’s only half of the beautiful story.  The other half is Philip’s transformation.  Luke tells this story to remind us that the early Christians also had a conversion after their conversion … meaning this fits into the same picture that Luke draws in chapter 10 when finally Peter gets it:  “I now see that God doesn’t show favoritism.”   Luke’s dual message:

1)     Even Ethiopian Eunuchs are a part of God’s kingdom.

2)     Even Christians need to grow so they might embrace all of God’s children.

I’m going to leave a lot unsaid today… I do that every Sunday.  There’s much more to say, learn, understand and discuss about sexual minorities, like this eunuch.  There’s more complexity here than can be – or should be – addressed in a sermon with children in the room.    But I’ll leave you with two unequivocal statements.

1)     There is room in the church to discuss “the issue” but there is no room in the church to discuss the ultimate response of love.  We are called to love all.  And this loving is not the paternalistic “we’re such delightfully open people that we’ll even love you!”  No, this is the kind of love that recognizes Philip needed the Eunuch as much as the Eunuch needed Philip.  Our Gentile embrace of the gospel is partly dependant on Philip’s encounter.

2)     I paraphrase a fellow CBF pastor who recently said:  “even if being a sexual minority doesn’t represent God’s plan A… which of us can claim to be living out God’s plan A?”

I for one know that I’m on plan T, or W… I hope I’m not on plan Z… but I know me enough to not be throwing any stones.

We know more about the world than they did 2,000 years ago.  We know it goes around the sun, not visa versa.  And we know that people are born with inalterable genetic traits.   It is this world, spinning around the sun filled with all kinds of diverse human beings that John was talking about when he said that God so loved…

Without question William Wilberforce would have been very proud of the fact that his work not only prompted abolition in the UK, but helped end slavery in the United States of America.  From the perspective of heaven, maybe he finds it ironic that it was a woman who more than any other person besides Abe Lincoln brought it about.  Harriet Beecher Stowe, the famed author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is likely now smiling with him… looking down on a much better world, but one still in need of those who will listen to the Spirit.