Phillip asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” He replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?”

The story of Phillip and the Ethiopian Eunuch is a story of a surprising and crucial moment in the development of the early Church. And for us, as Reformed Christians, as American Reformed Christians, as American Reformed Christians in Clover Hill in 2009, the 175th year of our faith journey, it remains a crucial story, capable of surprising us.

Not because there are chariots with Ethiopian Eunuch’s riding up and down Amwell Road so that we can run along side of them. I don’t know that I’ve seen that recently, or ever.

But the story is crucial to us because the Church of Christ needs to be always checking and rechecking her ability to stretch and to include those who might otherwise not be included, to be surprised as we help those who need it.

That was what distinguished Jesus’ ministry among fishermen and tax-collectors and lepers and prostitutes, he was inclusive and he surprised people with the people he included.

That was what the Holy Spirit led the early Church to do, and thus transformed it, from a small Jewish sect to an Empire-wide religious movement that would not be limited.

Ethiopia was the southern edge of the known world, for those in Jerusalem. And this court official, this royal treasurer of the Queen of Ethiopia, he was the end of the world culturally from Phillip.

He was not a Jew from birth, yet he was a man of apparently great intellectual and spiritual curiosity for he had made this pilgrimage – that is the Greek word that is translated here as worshipped – he had made this pilgrimage to Jerusalem. And now he is on his way home and yet he remains unclear as to what he has learned. Doesn’t that sound familiar?

Haven’t we had times when we have made a pilgrimage, a faith-seeking journey, to a place – here perhaps – and yet come away unsure?

And it isn’t that we need more information, we’ve got plenty of information. Too Much Information is the plague of our era, we can’t make decisions because there is always another book or article to read or consider.

What we need is what this unnamed Ethiopian needed, we need a person to talk to, to talk with, to learn from and to teach. And Phillip provided that people connection, that relational piece of faith that we so often think we can do without.

But, and I think this is important, Phillip could not have done this without that which the Ethiopian provided: the invitation, the acknowledgement that he needed help in understanding the scripture. This story is usually interpreted to encourage us to be like Phillip and share our faith openly, but there are times when we need to be like the Ethiopian and be honest about what we don’t know and what we do need.

Phillip asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” He replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” Who do we have to guide us? Who do you have? Who do I have?

The answers aren’t really important, what is important is that there are answers, that we have people we can and do turn to. We can’t get our spiritual insights alone, like the Ethiopian pilgrim, we need to have someone guide us, we need to admit that we need help. That is never an easy thing to do in this nation of ours, which is probably why self-help books are so popular . . . and so generally worthless.

This Ethiopian had just been to Jerusalem and had, no doubt heard from countless expert scholars who were well trained in the scriptures. But he needed a relationship with someone.

And yes, on a formal basis you have me or Chris, people who have been trained in the scriptures, but one of the first things that you will notice is that the more trained a person is in the scriptures, the less likely the person is to provide you with a single clear easy answer to a question.

The accusation is always made of ministers that people ask us what time it is and we tell them how to make a watch, but the truth is that sometimes it’s just not that simple. For the more we learn, the more we are aware of how much we don’t know.

Especially in scripture and the things of God.

So the reality is that we all need relationships with others if our faith is going to grow. We need help and we need to provide it. Sometimes we are Phillip and sometimes the Ethiopian pilgrim.

Now, we have no idea what happened when the Ethiopian returned home, the legends give him credit for the Church in Ethiopia which developed pretty much independently from our Western European tradition.

But we do know what happened to Phillip, we do know that this encounter changed him and, through him, changed the Church in Jerusalem and ultimately the European Church that became the American church.

And it was the pattern that allowed our Reformed Church to decide, in the years after Niew Amsterdam became New York, that preaching in Dutch was going to have to be sacrificed if they were going to thrive in an English colony.

And what was it about this encounter that caused all of this change?

Well, the Ethiopian was a Eunuch.

Seems, at first to us, like an odd detail for Luke to record. Why did he record that?

Well, the answer is simple, I think, at least for the first century readers.

It comes a few verses later when the Eunuch asks Phillip “What is to prevent me from being baptized?”

You see, he and Phillip both knew, as did anyone who heard about this story, exactly what was to prevent him from being baptized. They both knew that there were strong prohibitions in the book of Leviticus about Eunuchs. Leviticus is really tough on Eunuchs. They were prohibited from worshiping God and they are excluded from the covenant. Period. End of conversation, no ambivalence about it.

But there, on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza, Phillip was led by God to make a decision that would define the Church in terms of God’s grace rather than God’s laws, the Church as it was meant to be, different from the temple and synagogue worship of the Jews.

“What is to prevent me from being baptized?”

After their conversation, after they mutually explored scripture, after they established a relationship, Phillip realized that there was nothing to prevent this powerful government official from being baptized.

From that day forward God’s Holy Spirit has been stretching the hearts of God’s people to move beyond the narrow confines of the Leviticus passages that exclude people from God’s family.

Now don’t get nervous, I will leave it to each of you to figure out where and how and if that work of the Holy Spirit, that stretch beyond Leviticus, is happening in our world, perhaps in places like New England and Iowa, those hotbeds of radicalism. You can talk about it, pray about it and time will tell.

But I want to go back to the familiar image that Christ gives of the vine and the branches.

I read this week, and I don’t know that I ever thought about it before, but there is no part of the vine that is the vine.

There is the vine and there are the parts: there are roots and a trunk and branches and together they form the vine. So Christ is suggesting that without branches the vine is incomplete, without us, he is incomplete.

Savor that for a moment.

Christ is saying to us, in the words from Jerry Maguire “you complete me.”

God is complete through our lives, through our relationship with him.

Isn’t that the answer to the painful and stinging questions that we ask in our sorrow and anger, “Where was God in the illness and death?” “Where was God in the failures and rejections?” “Where was God when terror struck and disasters erupted?”?

God is where we are.

And if we will not stand up for the poor and those who are being treated unfairly; if we will not forgive those who have caused us pain and if we will not heal the wounds of our own careless or intentional words that cut, how do we expect God to do it?

We are the Body of Christ, that’s what the Church is.

We are his hands and his feet and his voice and his tears and his laughter and his love.

We need to let God work through us for others.

We need to let God work through others for us.

We need to help and be helped.

We need to let God work in ways that in years past we were sure were wrong.

Phillip did it. The whole book of Acts is full of the stories of how Phillip and the others, the Jewish fishermen and tax collectors, were able to let God change the world through their faith as they surrendered their fear of change and produced the love and the joy that is the fruit of the vine.

He replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?”

And where does that get learned.

Well, it is Mothers’ Day and the answer is pretty obvious at least to me.

We learn what we need to know, we get our help form our mothers.

Sometimes it is our actual mothers who have provided the roots that we need, sometimes it is the surrogate mothers who shape us, another older woman who has given us that nourishment of the soul, a teacher, a scout or 4-H leader, a coach or a neighbor. For me it was my mother, who had this unshakable confidence in my ability to weather any storm, to handle any crisis, a confidence that far exceeded my own and yet it was her assumption of my competence that often forced me to do and be more than I would have expected of myself. I would moan and groan about life and she would give me about 10 minutes of self-pity and then tell me I would be fine and I didn’t want to let her down.

That’s what Mothers do.

They don’t always understand us and they don’t always agree with us, read the stories of Mary in the Bible and think about what she went through, but they guide us, when we are bright enough to seek their guidance and whatever abuse we heap upon them, they love us anyway.

So we take the time, today, to thank those who are Mothers,

We hold, before God in our prayers, those mothers who are in sorrow this day, those whose sons and daughters have been killed in warfare, in the streets of our cities; and we need to hold before God those who mourn the death of their mother, that painful loss of the connection to our birth and childhood.

We need to hold before God in our prayers the families that mothers guide and inspire and to remember that in scripture we find families – much like our own - in all shapes and sizes, sometimes sharing great and loving support, other times providing bitter and painful experiences, all a part of sharing life together.

And we need to ask for help and provide it whenever and wherever and to whomever we can.

Phillip asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” He replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?”

Clover Hill Reformed Church 1834-2009 A 175 Day Scriptural Companion Dear Friends, As we progress through our Anniversary Year, I invite you to join together in a shared reading of scripture. I have selected 175 passages, from Genesis through Revelation, that have had special meaning in our Congregational life. Go Here