Identified With

Acts 8:26-40

When you read a story – or hear one, or watch a movie – are you looking for someone in that story who is like you – or who you want to be like?

 

It’s pretty normal, it seems, for many of us to come to stories looking for a character to “identify with” – unconsciously if not deliberately.

To see someone whose experience or perspective is like my own – hey, I’m in this story.

Or someone whose experience or perspective I want to have – I want to be like them.

 

It’s also perfectly normal to just enjoy the story without seeing ourselves in the story – but a lot of the time what we remember, or tell others, about the movie we saw, or the book I read, is about how it connects with my story. About “identifying with” the story.

 

That’s how I’ve had this morning’s story about Philip and the Ethiopian explained to me. Very nearly every commentator I read or skimmed this week talks about how the Ethiopian man – a eunuch, someone who is “cut off” from lots of parts of community he might want to join – must be “identifying with” the figure he’s reading about in the scroll of the prophet Isaiah.

 

That character in Isaiah is a famous one for scripture scholars. Called “the suffering servant”, there are whole chapters about this figure who is a “servant of God”, a messenger of good news…who is insignificant, despised, rejected, bears the sins of others, makes many right with God, suffers in ways that benefit others…and also triumphs.

 

If some of that sounds a little familiar to you, and you’re thinking “hey, didn’t people say that about Jesus?” – well, Philip in our story today was probably not the first, and definitely not the last, person to identify Jesus with the suffering servant in Isaiah’s prophecy.
That’s an “identifying” that’s a big part of the traditions of Christianity – an idea that has helped many generations wrap our minds around the idea that the Messiah of God actually might win by appearing to lose.

 

But as our story today begins, one of our heroes, our eunuch, doesn’t know anything about Jesus. He’s reading all of what Isaiah has to say; he’s looking at this poetic description of someone like a shorn sheep, “cut off” and despised and shunned. And lots of folks who read this story and comment on it think that maybe the eunuch felt that way about himself. He’s a person of wealth and power in the court of Ethiopia. But the Roman-empire world – the dominant culture of that time and place – would look at him as “less than” a man, someone who doesn’t really count, doesn’t really belong. And he couldn’t fully participate in the worship of the Temple in Jerusalem – where he has just been, on a journey to worship God.

 

So, yes, our eunuch might see himself in Isaiah’s story. And then when Philip starts to tell him “well, there’s this incredible person called Jesus, who is God, and his life was just like what Isaiah says”, he might have an even more powerful experience of connection with Jesus.

 

I could imagine him thinking: This is like me…wait, that means that God was like me…or I am like God…and this story comes to a whole promise of healing and inclusion and salvation…Yes!

With a connection like that, it’s no surprise at all that the eunuch wants right away to claim that identity, claim his belonging to Christ – to the one who suffers, and triumphs, and brings God’s triumph to everyone who is cut off – claim that right here and now with baptism.

 

I wonder how many of us here – how many of us listening to this story now – can “identify with” that?

I wonder how many of us had a moment where you felt a sudden belonging, a sense of acceptance – no, welcome, a perfect fit – with Jesus, with the love of God – or with a community that loves like God loves – some time in your life.

 

Many of us have felt like outsiders, like you don’t belong; felt as if other people avoided me – or would, if they knew what I really thought or felt or was.

Many of us have felt like that in places, communities, where everyone else assumed we did belong. Even places where we might have had an important job – like being in charge of the treasury!

(I know I’ve been there, sometimes.)

 

So it’s a gift when we recognize that we do belong.

Sometimes that fit, that belonging, that identifying creeps up on us slowly.

Sometimes we know all at once.

Some of us – maybe many of us – can identify with the eunuch in our story – with him recognizing himself in Jesus’s story, and discovering with joy that he does belong. That all that he is belongs.

 

And then some of us might be in the parts of life where we already know we belong. Or in the parts of life where we help decide who else belongs. Like Philip, in this story. 

Philip, who when we see him here, is a recognized leader in the fledgling Christian community. Philip who has just been off in Samaria, actively inviting people to belong – and full of success in healing people, connecting people – having his work and presence welcomed with joy.

And here he is – knowing he’s being sent and guided directly by the Spirit of God – knowing he has the knowledge and connection this stranger on the road needs, that he has the good stuff to share – and asked to decide if this new believer can belong: can be baptized, when they come across some water by the road.

 

I wonder how many of us might “identify with” Philip. How many of us like to be the one who knows the good stuff, who can hook up a friend with a great opportunity?

I wonder how many of us have felt guided by God’s spirit – to the right place at the right time – whether we planned it or not. 

I wonder how many of us have found joy in saying “yes!” to someone else: yes, you matter. Yes, you belong.

Or how many of us would love to have those experiences.

(I know I do.)

 

Just like it’s a gift to be welcomed, it’s a gift – of God’s spirit, a gift of the heart, a gift of joy – to welcome someone else. To make belonging happen – not just in the church; in your neighborhood or workplace [or classroom] or friend group – or on a wilderness road – or the modern-day wildernesses of the internet or the airport or any of those places where everyone doesn’t quite belong.

 

So I’m coming to suspect that Luke doesn’t tell us this story of dramatic conversion so we can identify with one of the characters – but rather with both of them.

So that we can see ourselves as the ones who need welcome, and good news, and revelations about God – even when we’ve been here forever and look like we belong.

AND see ourselves as the ones who have power to befriend, and teach, and include others in the love of God – even when we aren’t sure if we belong yet ourselves.

 

I don’t think this is a story we’re meant to enjoy without seeing ourselves in the middle of it.
I don’t think God’s story is ever one we’re supposed to watch from the sidelines.

You and I, I think, are always supposed to find our identity in God’s story, always supposed to belong in the story – in the whole story.

Because, after all, God keeps choosing to belong in our story, with us.

Believe With Our Bodies

Luke 24:36-48

Peace be with you.

...

 

We know (mostly) how to respond to that greeting, since every Sunday we say this – me to you as a body, and to each other individually:

“Peace be with you”

“And also with you”

Our response is usually words, and also often gestures. We shake hands, often. Wave, or make “V” shaped peace signs with our fingers, occasionally embrace – similar to other ways we might greet friends.

 

After years of Episcopal worship experience, these responses become almost automatic for many of us

(you might even start hearing yourself respond that way outside of church: I know I react automatically when a friend says "May the Force be with you")

But I wonder how automatic it would be for us if you or I were greeted that way by a ghost – a person upending all you know about reality; a phenomenon you know can’t be real.  A good friend, recently dead, just appearing, like magic, in front of you.

 

It’s about as big a shock as you’ve ever had or imagined.

Do you respond?

Do you shake hands?

 

Jesus wants us to shake hands.

More than that, to touch flesh and bone to flesh and bone, to respond with our muscles and the sensitive cells and nerves of our skin. To respond with all our senses. To feel – see, touch – the reality of the impossible. Touch the miracle of the physical body.

 

That’s why Jesus shows up at all among that group of the earliest disciples trying to come to grips with Easter – at least according to the way Luke tells it. Most of this story we read this morning is about the assurance of physicality – the real, flesh-and-bone reality of Jesus, normal to our senses.

 

Touch me. See me. Feed me.

 

This piece of broiled fish that Jesus eats is one of my hands-down favorite morsels in the gospel stories – the banal practicality of “got anything to eat?” and carefully practical, physical description: He took it (his hands can hold things!) and ate it (like a normal person, with bites and chewing and swallowing, not magic vanishing) in their presence (no mystery!).

 

The only reason to tell that as part of a resurrection story, a Jesus story, is so that those first stunned and uncertain disciples, and those who heard their story, down to you and me, can be absolutely assured that Jesus is physically alive. Real; not a spirit, not a ghost, not a figment of imagination or a supernatural phenomenon. Real – physical – death turns into real, physical life.

 

In the story, that fish-eating, hand-to-hand assurance of physicality moves those first rattled and shaken disciples from terror to joy, from an inability to respond to an openness to understanding. The physicality of God’s presence matters, makes faith possible in that moment.

And it matters theologically, too.

Luke wants you and me, reading his story of this revelation, to recognize that the physical, touchable, chewing and swallowing body of Jesus means that flesh – all flesh, our flesh – is redeemed and renewed in Jesus’ resurrection just as much as our spirits and hearts might be.

This complex, messy, touchable flesh and bone is fundamentally good, holy, true – and is the place where we deeply encounter God.

 

That’s not just what a small group of anxious and hopeful people needed to know two millennia ago in a house in Jerusalem. That’s what Luke knows, Jesus knows, that you and I need to know, now and here.

 

That flesh and blood and bone are the home of new life (even flesh and bone that creak or ache or don’t look like we want them to, or break or bleed, or even die) – that flesh and bone and working digestive systems are holy and good and full of the presence of God.

 

Luke and Jesus may also want you and me to know that we – two thousand years or so after Jesus’ resurrection – should also expect the physical, touchable, presence of God among us.

 

Here – in this church where we gather with our own questions and weariness and hope (even here in the separate places where some of us are worshipping together online) – here, now, is the physical presence of God. The Body of Christ.

 

Inviting us to touch, to feel, to see, to swallow, to believe with our bodies.

 

Across the miles and the centuries, you and I are invited to feel, to experience, the physical presence of God, and the risen body of Christ, in each other and for ourselves.

 

Our church encourages that, with physical symbols and actions we can touch, to feel the texture and shape and physical nearness of God’s presence, Christ’s love and gifts of life.

We meet eyes, or touch hands, or share physical gestures of Christ’s peace with each other. We breathe in to pray (or sing) together.

[We splash water, and apply scented oil, to convey the refreshment and love of baptism.]

 

We share a meal with Jesus – not broiled fish, but bread of a sort, and wine of its own sorts. Our own hands touch that “body of Christ”, and we eat it – our bodies taking in Christ’s body with taste as well as touch, like Jesus’s risen body chewing and swallowing that piece of fish so long ago in Jerusalem.

 

And we eat that, we listen and look with our senses, wonder and pray with our hearts, alongside, in touch with, the body of Christ that is the whole network of the physical bodies you and I bring with us.

 

This body, your bodies, achy, strong, fragile, soft, stretched, growing, bleeding, broken, healing – bodies touching and looking and taking in the physical world with five senses and more – these bodies are, should be for us, Christ’s body, real and taking up space and filled with the life-giving presence of God.

 

Take that in for a moment.

Touch your own hands, or the hand of a person near to you if that’s right for both of you.

Hear Jesus say “See that it is I, myself; touch me and see.”

Let your body recognize the physical presence of God, in the flesh – redeemed and holy flesh, that eats and drinks and breaks and bleeds and is so good, so full of God’s own life.

 

That physical presence of Jesus comes – day after day, week by week, through some two millennia and counting – comes to us to meet our uncertainties with warm reality, to hold our hands, and make a place for our doubts to turn to hope, our minds to open to understanding, our hearts to be assured, through our skin and eyes and ears, of the reality of not just God’s presence among us, but our own presence with God.

 

Like those gathered long ago in a room in Jerusalem, Jesus invites you and I, today, to touch the divine, to see and feel the holy, to know with our bodies that God has come to us, to give the life that changes everything.