Gospel & Sermon, May 2, 2021

Jesus said to his disciples, ”I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.”

And here is Rev. Charlotte’s sermon:

In a workshop I attended this week, we were given a well-known puzzle to solve: nine dots arranged into a square with three columns and three rows.  To solve the puzzle, you must follow these directions: connect all nine dots by drawing four connected lines without lifting your pen from the paper.  Each dot must have only one line touching it, and you can’t backtrack with your pen.  I’m going to invite you to take a minute with the puzzle and see how it goes.

Some of you may know the solution from previous encounters with the puzzle, and if that is the case, please don’t share it while others work.

I’m going to give you just another minute to work with it.

…

Did anyone solve it?

All right, so I’m not going to give you the solution entirely, but I will tell you this: in order to solve the puzzle, you have to extend the lines outside of the square to make it work.

It’s not uncommon that this angers people because it’s never said that you could do this! But, of course, it’s also never said that you can’t! Here are the instructions again: connect all nine dots by drawing four connected lines without lifting your pen from the paper.  Each dot must have only one line touching it, and you can’t backtrack with your pen.

It’s a great exercise to look at the difference between the parameters actually given to us, and the ones we think we have to follow.

And there’s another version that’s even worse.  The instruction that you have to connect all the dots with one line.  If you google the nine-dot puzzle you’ll see all kinds of maddening solutions, from simply using curved lines, to cutting the paper and placing the dots in a line, to placing the rows on a globe, to burning the paper shaping the ashes into a straight line and running a pencil through it!

None of these things are provided for in the instructions, and yet what is to prevent them from being possible solutions to the puzzle?

A question quite similar to this one appears in the reading from Acts this morning, when the Ethiopian eunuch asks Philip, “what is to prevent me from being baptized?”

And the outside-the-box story we hear about him is both as unexpected as the solution to the 9 dots puzzle and as potentially infuriating for those who like the rules.

This man had heard the news of the God if Israel in his own land and had traveled to Jerusalem to worship at the temple.  But the text’s inclusion of the fact that he was a eunuch tells us what happened when he got there, for Deuteronomy 23:1 prohibits eunuchs from temple worship.  Despite this man’s authority in his own country, controlling the treasury for the queen, despite his obvious wealth of having his own chariot and scroll of Isaiah, his journey thus far would have underscored for him that he was definitively “other” as a foreigner, a black man, a gentile, and a sexual minority, an outsider in nearly every aspect of his identity in Jerusalem.

And yet, having been turned away at the temple, we still find him, as Philip did, pouring over the scroll of Isaiah on his way home, still seeking God, even though God’s people had rejected him.

The passage he is reading speaks of humiliation, justice denied, powerlessness.  It is not terribly surprising given his experience, that he finds deep resonance with the scriptures, and yet, having been denied access to instruction about them, has no context for their meaning.

And so Philip tells him the story of Jesus, of all that has happened, of this man who was constantly seeking out the outsiders with attention and love, teaching and proclaiming the presence of God in the midst of them, serving those the world had rejected, rejected himself for his refusal to fit the expectations, the rules of society around him, his giving of himself on the cross out of the depths of his love, his resurrection’s proclamation of this love’s power over the worst the world has to offer.

And “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?””

What is to prevent me?

In response to this question Debie Thomas writes, “I love the resounding silence that follows the eunuch’s question.  Because the silence speaks what words cannot.  The silence is thundering, and gorgeous, and seismic, and right.  Because the answer to the question is silence.  The answer — the only answer — is “nothing.”  In the post-resurrection world, in the world where the Spirit of God moves where and how she will, drawing all of creation to herself, in the world where the Word lives to defeat death, alienation, isolation, and fear, there is nothing to prevent a beloved image-bearer of God from entering into the fullness of Christ’s salvation.  Nothing whatsoever.”

When Philip is faced with this question, he is faced with a decision: Will he do as the eunuch has asked? He would have been aware of the temple prohibition of eunuchs, with their outsider status in society.  There was no doubt this man was not a Jew like Jesus’s early followers, he was so different from anyone Philip had baptized or seen baptized before.

He knew about the exclusion of Eunuchs from the temple, but Jesus had never explicitly said they could be included, could be baptized.  He was going to have to think outside the box on this one, he was going to have to connect the dots in his own way between the laws he knew, and the way of Love Jesus consistently showed in his life.

And he didn’t have much time.  The eunuch commanded the chariot to stop, and they walked together toward the water, and while Philip hadn’t been given the solution to this puzzle, he knew that the Holy Spirit had brought him to this moment, and he made his own solution:

“both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him.”

This is the grace that the eunuch gave to Philip that day, just as much as Philip offered him the grace of baptism, the grace of realizing that there was nothing, no earthy difference that could separate this man from the love of God, could prevent him from receiving the grace of God in baptism.

The Holy Spirit whisked Philip away immediately from that place, the eunuch left rejoicing and Philip began preaching the good news to all the towns.  And his good news was this: there is room for everyone in the community of believers, and in this new life in Christ, there is freedom given by the Holy Spirit to cross margins and barriers, to stretch outside of, extend beyond our expectations.

This has never been more true for us than in the last year, a year that has felt like a nine-dot puzzle in a lot of ways.  Before COVID happened we could not have imagined a world in which we were called to continue being church without being at church, and yet… we have found the way by stretching outside our imagination of what church could be like, how it could function.

And I think the timing of this gospel reading is spectacular for this place of reopening in which we find ourselves.  Because now that we’ve had this experience of operating outside of what we assumed the rules were for how the church had to be, we can’t help but look for other places where we’re operating according to rules that no one ever made.

Where might we see new openings, new possibilities now that we couldn’t have imagined before? Are there places that, with this new sense of vision, there are actually things in place that prevent people from joining this community of believers? If so, what are they, and how do we enter that place of greater welcome that Philip reached that day?

I don’t have answers to all these questions, but I find myself excited to be even asking them, to look for opportunities to be the church, to proclaim the good news of God’s boundless love outside the frames of what seemed possible before.

This is what I look forward to as we make our way into our future together.

Amen.