Fruitful

Acts 8:26-40; John 15:1-8

The story we heard from the Acts of the Apostles this morning is one of my favorite stories, and not just because it ends with perhaps the only recorded instance of teleportation in scripture, when the Spirit of God picks Philip up from a river along the Gaza road, and – like a divine Star Trek transporter – drops him at Azotus for his continuing mission of preaching the good news in new worlds.

It’s not just that Philip – fresh off a successful church planting mission in Samaria – is led by the Spirit to exactly the place where he meets someone ready, eager, and longing to hear the good news about Jesus (enough to envy, in a day and age that’s gotten pretty jaded about Jesus).

It’s not just how powerfully the conversation works, so that the traveler is ready to be baptized – to make a commitment of life – on the spot.

It’s the number of barriers shattered or transcended in this story.

Luke’s first readers would know, of course, that while it wasn’t all that unusual for an Ethiopian to be interested in the prophet Isaiah, or even – as this man seems to have done – to travel to Jerusalem to worship the God of Israel, this particular man would never have been fully included in the worship at the Temple he had traveled to. Scriptural laws, in both Deuteronomy and Leviticus, prohibit eunuchs from “entering the assembly of the Lord”, or “approaching the altar.”

Because, you see, eunuchs are not fruitful.

Eunuchs, unable to have children to carry on their name, or to multiply God’s people, are almost like walking dead men in the mind of the world that formed the Temple traditions and most of our scripture. Many of the laws of ritual purity – the laws that define not whom God loves, but those who belong in the holy spaces of the Temple and can fulfill their vows and duties to God –were created to protect the community from death, or the fear of death.

Contact with dead bodies, leprosy which created a corpse-like appearance, any type of bodily emission that represents a lost possibility for life; all of these made you too closely connected with death to take part in Temple worship – for close contact with the holiness of God. Most of those conditions, of course, could be healed or ritually cleansed. But being a eunuch made you unfruitful, a man of death, your whole life.

So when this particular eunuch asks Philip, “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” he may very well be expecting that something will prevent him. After all, how can eternal life come to a person conditioned, in the eyes of his world, to eternal death?

I am the vine, Jesus says, and you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.

Neither Philip nor the eunuch had read those words when they met on the Gaza road. John’s gospel hadn’t been written yet, and Philip might not even have been in the room at the Last Supper, when Jesus spoke those words to help prepare his disciples for life after his death. But both of them lived those words and promise when they met one another traveling down from Jerusalem.

Philip, abiding in Jesus as a matter of course, an everyday matter in his living and preaching of the gospel, knew the life-giving power of baptism. He knew that Jesus’ resurrection could conquer not only death, but the implications of death, the fear of death, that had been keeping this man from the center of religious life, from full participation in the community of God.

More than that perhaps, Philip, abiding in Jesus, saw that Jesus was already abiding in this man; already bearing fruit. After all, here he is, on the road home from the Temple, not just opening his heart to God through his study of scripture, but opening his chariot, his wealth and comfort, to a dusty itinerant preacher who accosts him on the road. One commentator compares this moment to a UN diplomat welcoming a street preacher into his limo with generous hospitality. A generous hospitality that is already the fruit of abiding in Jesus, before Philip ever mentions Jesus’ name.

With open spirit and heart, this Ethiopian court official crosses barriers of class and wealth and privilege (the privilege not only of the Ethiopian’s secular power, but of Philip’s religious status as a whole and holy man of Israel), to know God and to make God known.

Years ago, the congregation I attended in Chicago began to open up the parish hall to people waiting to be fed at the food pantry. It started with shelter from the freezing weather, and moved on to hot drinks, to fellowship, to shared meals and service together.
I remember my first night volunteering in the open house, knowing we needed to make people welcome, but tied up in knots of anxiety about simply starting a conversation. And then one of the men – a man I would have unconsciously avoided on the street; a man whose appearance represented almost everything I feared though I wouldn’t have admitted it: hunger, poverty, exclusion, misfortune – one man greeted me warmly and invited me to sit down at his table.

I “belonged” in that church hall; I had authority of a sort, the privilege of race and economic security, the identity of a member of the congregation, and he – a stranger to that place – welcomed me, gracefully and generously, and made me at home in the Body of Christ that evening.

Abide in me, says Jesus, 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.

None of us bear fruit by our own birth, or privilege, or merit. None of us make converts, show God’s hospitality, increase the people of God (grow the church), or create life by ourselves, any more than either that eunuch from Ethopia or Philip the apostle bore fruit by themselves. But Jesus, abiding in us, as we abide in him, makes any of us fruitful, makes us bear much fruit, in spite of obstacles; sometimes, in spite of ourselves.

We can help, of course. Jesus invites us to help. Not by a flurry of effort to increase our productivity, but by abiding in him, placing our hearts and selves into Christ, not occasionally when we think of it, but constantly; always.

Abiding in Jesus takes practice, of course. The study of scripture helps us, as it helped that Ethiopian. Openness to the leading of the Spirit helps us, as it helped Philip on the Gaza road. Prayer never hurts. That’s how we practice abiding in Jesus.

And when we abide in Jesus, Jesus, abiding in us, crosses all the barriers of fear and privilege and even death, to bear much fruit, with us and in us, to the glory of God.