It isn't complicated--Bombs, Boston, bullying, baptism and the Bible

Text: Acts 8:26-39

We make this way too complicated.

OK, I get it. We live in a world where you have to fill out a novel’s worth of paperwork to buy a cell phone or play a sport; where our youth going on a summer mission trip have to fill out ten pages of release forms for our liability; and for the rest of us there are taxes and wills and all manner of legal things, and that’s before we come to church and learn about the 613 commandments in the Old Testament that apparently we’re supposed to follow. Clearly, if all that stuff is super complicated then things that really matter—like things about salvation and baptism; things near the center of the faith—must be even thornier still. The idea that there is nothing stopping this eunuch from being baptized is just an absolute affront to this complicated world.

            It’s hard for us to reach back through the annals of history to a time when things were less complex, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try—try to be that Ethiopian eunuch reading from the scriptures for the first time. Imagine being in a world where there’s no Google to tell you how to be a Christian; in fact there are no Christian denominations at all. There is only you in a chariot, some words from long ago and a man named Philip willing to interpret them for you.

            It was such a much simpler time.

            By most measurements we live in the best period in the history of the world. Our life-spans are longer than ever, we have more wealth than any generation, and some of us even have such a thing as free time (an idea completely foreign to almost anybody in history). We have cars and boats and other toys; we have televisions and video games and all sorts of things to make life more enjoyable. We also have the internet and cell phones and tablets and iPods and all sorts of things that connect us. There is no time in the history of the world like today.

            But there has been a side effect of all these useful things that we have, and it’s this: we have begun to lose the art of connecting with one another face-to-face. For many people, it’s hard to imagine sitting patiently by a man learning about the Bible, because we have an app for that. If you’re looking for a resource, here’s a website. In need of help? Here’s webMD or, failing that, a self help guru.

            In most measurable ways the time in which Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch lived was a rough one compared with today. Their life spans were shorter; they could be done in by any number of diseases. Terrorism wasn’t called terrorism; it was called zealotry and mostly it was a common fact of life. But in spite of those challenges they had things that we do not. They had the joy of discovering the faith as they went along and the freedom to do that. Too many people between then and now have created a norm for belief; too many people have raised a bar for how faithful and penitent and holy a person must be before they can be worthy; too many people have generated too much criteria for what it means to be a Christian.

            This has to stop. “What is preventing me from being baptized?” asks the eunuch. You can almost hear the scriptures come to a screeching halt along with the chariot. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. If you want to be baptized, here is a person willing to do it and I bet you we can find some water. It doesn’t need to be me; it can be anybody that the Spirit calls to meet you on the road. We have made this way too complicated.

            This week I preached an abbreviated version of this sermon at the nursing home and had someone come up to me afterwards to tell me that I had skipped over the most important part of the story: the part where the eunuch repented before he was baptized. This caught me a little off-guard since I read the whole scripture—it’s not like I skipped over anything—but giving this person the benefit of the doubt, I explained that that may well a textual variance, since I knew there was one in the text. If you look closely at today’s reading there is no verse 37 because at some point it was determined that a scribe had added that verse at a later time—but when I opened my Bible back home I discovered that even that missing verse had nothing to do with repentance but only about belief as a prerequisite to baptism. To put it simply, some scribe, after the book of Acts was already written, thought that baptism needed more rules and so he or she added in that we must believe before we are baptized. Now, many centuries later, the person who heard this sermon on Thursday was certain—absolutely certain—that there was also something about repentance required; in fact, as she told me, repentance was the most important thing before being baptized. The fact that there’s nothing about this in the Bible did not stop her from telling me twice, “We just have to follow what the Bible says” even, apparently, when the Bible doesn’t actually say it.

I don’t mean to pile on here because I think we all do this. We all have constructed our own various criteria for who is acceptable and who is not; and we’ve convinced ourselves that our authority for those criteria is very good—even biblical. Even in those days long ago when the eunuch was on the road people thought like this; this is the kind of rationalizing that the Pharisees so often did with Jesus. Everybody does this. Only hours after the Boston marathon bombings last Monday there were those who were already pinning the attack on various groups, because everybody was trying to figure out how this played into the stories they have already told themselves about good and evil. You know it’s a bad week when the satirical newspaper, The Onion, was closer to the truth than most national publications. In fact, there was one brilliant piece that came out from The Onion on Friday which was titled, “Study: Majority of Americans NotInformed Enough to Stereotype Chechens.” We are far too quick to fit stories into the form we expect them—or want them—to take.

Part of my job as a theologian is to keep up on trends and ideas in the Christian faith, which is a fairly lonesome task. Too often I find myself on the internet reading through comments that are cruel and vindictive. Too often I read about stories that make me ashamed to call myself a Christian—not for what I believe but for the words of my fellow followers of Jesus. Way too often I see evidence of the impersonal nature of online communities contributing to plain evil. It seems like every week I hear accounts of cyber-bullying, and much of it is things I hear happening right here in Kittson County. Too many of our kids are like that eunuch, sitting completely alone, but they have nobody running over to help. We’re all so busy watching chaos from afar that we are all indirectly allowing the spark of chaos to start in our midst. We are stuck—stuck on the TV news, stuck on the internet, on our favorite opinion site or Facebook or Twitter, and, meanwhile, there are people genuinely curious about Jesus who are sitting by watching the chaos and wondering why they ever picked up that scripture in the first place, and there are other people hurting—in need of somebody to stand up for them when it is the most unpopular thing to do.

We’ve made this too complicated.

It’s not about rules. In two thousand years of the Christian faith we have put a serious human handprint over everything Jesus preached and it’s strangling us little by little. The rules are all secondary to the promise. If Jesus taught us anything it is that—rules are good, but the promise trumps all rules. What is stopping the eunuch from being baptized? Nothing. What is stopping us? Nothing. What is stopping us from standing up for the least, the last, the lost and the lonely? Only our self-righteousness. Damn our self-righteousness. It isn’t that complicated. We’re all in this together, and the best thing we can do in a digital age that spews conspiracy theories and vitriol is to say, “No thank you.” No thank you to bombs. No thank you to prejudice and racism. No thank you to bullying and cyber-bullying. No thank you to our self-righteousness. But thank you to the one-on-one, the acts of charity in the face of terror, the people running toward danger, running toward the people forgotten and abandoned. This happens in Boston, but it also happens every time we stick up for somebody who is alone. Thank you. All of you. Each of us you is Philip, called by God to sit alongside one who is in need of help. It isn’t complicated. Amen.

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