14th May 2006 Fifth Sunday of Easter
Fr Robert Wiggs, The Bishop of Chelmsford's Advisor on Refugees and Asylum Seekers
Acts 8 : 26 - 40 ; I John 4 : 7 - 21 ; John 15 : 1 – 8
I want to give you a text today that is not part of the readings, but was clearly in the minds of both Luke and John as they wrote it, the text that miraculously unites the true vine with the Ethiopian eunuch – a wonderful text that will cheer you up next Wednesday when you are feeling thwarted, useless and depressed. It’s from Isaiah chapter 56 :‘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 thing that pleases me and hold fast my covenant……. I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.’
‘Do not let the eunuch say, ‘I am just a dry tree.’
I was not feeling inspired when this Friday, far too late, I came to
consider my sermon. The true vine could not help, I know it too well. A
familiar text is the last thing to invigorate a stale mind. But what
about the Ethiopian eunuch? There is something extraordinary even about
the word, ‘eunuch’. A term of abuse, a word that we used to
insult one another with in the showers in the third year. And this
particular eunuch just arrives in the narrative and disappears as
quickly. But now he lingers in my imagination. So I am not as fruitless
as I thought.
Is it of any real importance that this man is a eunuch, or is that just
an incidental detail ? I think it must be important. The
more I read the Bible, the more I realize that there is nothing
that is there for no reason. This man is an Ethiopian eunuch. He is
black and he has got no balls. He may or may not be Jewish. My
commentary reckoned that Luke needed to leave that issue open because a
few chapters later he is going to introduce Cornelius to us as the
first non Jew to be baptised. But even if he is a Jew he isn’t a
proper Jew : Deuteronomy Ch 23 v 1 :
‘No one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted to the assembly of the Lord.’
This man has become important. He is a court official of the Queen of
the Ethiopians. But he is still a humiliated man. It may have been the
humiliation that drives him to get to the top. But he is still a dry
tree. No amount of importance can cover that up. But this particular
humiliated man, as far as we can tell, seems not to be covering up his
inadequacies by humiliating others. He is searching. And it is probably
his barrenness that makes him go on searching. So he has been to
Jerusalem to worship, and now he is reading the Scriptures, and Luke
has him reading absolutely the right passage, the one in Isaiah about
the humiliated servant of God who will be allotted a portion with the
great. Luke clearly has in mind the words of Isaiah that I quoted at
the beginning – about the eunuchs who keep God’s sabbaths,
who choose the things that please God and keep his covenant, that he
will give them an everlasting name. So this eunuch finds satisfaction
in the preaching of the gospel. The right person has come along at the
right time. He is baptised into the name of Jesus so that he is in the
profoundest sense imaginable, no longer a eunuch, and he goes on his
way rejoicing.
Allow the story to meet your imagination. It is part of
Luke’s catalogue of outsiders: barren women, prostitutes,
the sick, the blind, the disgusting, foreigners; all these are welcomed
home as royal sons and daughters in the Kingdom of God; and it is the
gift and the duty of the Church to do the same kind of welcoming,
because we have been thus welcomed. So may it be proved that there is a
heavenly banquet at which Jesus presides, at which shrivelled up
people discover that they are shrivelled up people no longer. In which
people like me face our own disgust at shrivelled up people, and in
doing that discover new ways in which we become green olive trees in
the house of the Lord, branches, receiving the endless flow of sap and
sweetness from the true vine.
I have just become the Bishop of Chelmsford’s Adviser for Asylum
and Refugees. In order to get this work going, last week I got together
at Chelmsford Cathedral asylum seekers and church members, including
our Bishop, in order to tell stories to one another, so that, if you
like, the turning of eunuchs into the fruitful might be given a chance
to enliven the whole Church. A Kosovan Muslim woman from Harwich, who
has been in a limbo of waiting to see if she and her family might get
refugee status for 8 years and a Christian, the wife of a village
churchwarden, told the story of their friendship, and of how
friend had fought for friend over the years. A former
Vietnamese refugee told the story of how he discovered that he
wasn’t a eunuch when the whole congregation of a church came to
meet him at the airport at 2 in the morning. A crazy act of love from a
group of people who knew themselves to be outrageously loved that began
to change his life, and no doubt their lives too. Perhaps any of
us could so exercise our imagination in order to discover ways of
taking the Bible literally. I think that it is the people who take the
literal meaning of the Bible very seriously who are then able to find
joyful symbolic meanings. Only, for example, if I take the text of the
story of the raising of Lazarus seriously, however difficult I might
find that story, that I will then be able to discover that I am the
person whose grave Jesus enters to take off my grave clothes and sets
me free. It is only as I imagine that an evangelist, a Philip, is
suddenly standing beside me on the road interpreting the story of my
life with the story of Scripture, that it might be possible to imagine
that those parts of my life that bear no fruit at all might become
fruitful. That is what we need returned to us – a Biblical
imagination. The Book of Deuteronomy, with its love for the Law
of God, the law which protects the widow and the alien, and yet rejects
the man with crushed testicles from the assembly – that is the
Word of God. But so is the Book of Job which is arguing with
Deuteronomy, and the Book of Isaiah, which in some ways turns
Deuteronomy on its head, that is the Word of God. And it is because the
Law of God still matters, that it its stupendous that those outside the
Law are the first in the Kingdom of Heaven. Modern liberalism, with its
desire ti abridge the Bible, simply doesn’t understand this.
Isaiah reverses Deuteronomy. Those with crushed testicles are royal
sons in the Kingdom of God. But it is not anyone with crushed
testicles. It is those who ‘do the things that please me, those
who hold fast to my Sabbaths.’ Now that could be interpreted very
negatively ( like, ‘you are welcome so long as you keep the rules
and never forget that your testicles are crushed’. ) But that
would be to misunderstand profoundly the keeping of the Covenant and
the holding of the Sabbath. The Sabbath is the joyful feast for which
we wait, something for which we give up anything that will prevent us
enjoying its freedom. But when the Sabbath comes we celebrate.
The last thing that we know about this eunuch is that he goes on his
way rejoicing. As far as we know, the rejoicing of this eunuch never
ends – he simply disappears from us in a cloud of joy, the joy
that we catch glimpses of in partying and eucharistic worship.
For some reason, my mind runs on to another eunuch, to Peter Abelard.
Probably not a good man, but maybe a great one, castrated by the uncle
of Eloise, whom he had seduced, but mostly known to me because of Helen
Waddell’s novel, and because of his hymn, which expresses the
mood in which I now preach, and which we will sing in a few minutes :
‘O what their joys and their glories must be,
Those endless Sabbaths the blessed ones see,
Crown for the valiant, to weary ones rest,
God shall be all, and in all ever blest.’
Amen