We’re all Eunuchs

We’re all incompatible with God’s teaching

The Old Testament(!?) text assigned for the Fifth Sunday of Lent is Acts 8.26-40.

While I may quibble with the Revised Common Lectionary for disappearing Jesus’s scriptures during the season of his resurrection, I count it auspicious that this passage from Luke should intrude upon the middle of my denomination’s global gathering. Just as United Methodists will be in the midst of our quadrennial squabble over LGBTQIA Christians, a sexual outcast from the first century will remind us how God the Holy Spirit is always transgressing what we take to the parameters of his law.

The Holy Spirit cracking open settled worlds, disrupting contented lives, exposing our lack of imagination, and infinitely expanding the horizon of salvation— that’s about as good a dust-jacket summary as any for Luke’s sequel to his Gospel.

Despite the prophet Isaiah promising that the Messiah would lure to himself people from all over the world; even though Jesus of Nazareth taught that the Kingdom of God would draw people from east and west, from north and south; in spite of the fact the Risen Christ makes it plain in his Great Commission that the disciples—now apostles— are to venture forth and make disciples of all the ἔθνη (ethnics), nonetheless the Book of Acts documents in embarrassing detail how the gravitational pull of the human heart is to draw lines between us and them, to make distinctions between insider and outsider, and to hunker down into our homogenous tribes.