Cut off

 Last night, the wife and I watched part of a documentary on John and Lorena Bobbitt.

Sure, you all know that story.  If you don't, go ahead and google it.  It's quite a ride.  But this story all about John and Lorena Bobbitt was all about spousal abuse, revenge, and dismemberment.  This story was sensationalized to the point that the Bobbitts became household names, and contrasting that with the reading from Acts that we had from Sunday was a bit of a trip, given that our reading from Acts features a Eunuch very prominently.

You see, the trip is that eunuchs were once sort of standard operating practice.  It wasn't that strange for eunuchs to be around, for them to have relatively high office, to be in charge of much, and so on.  And looking back through the scriptures, it's like looking at another world, where having people be eunuchs was de rigeur, instead of basically unheard of.  

Eunuchs were so well known, and so much a part of life, that their conduct is described in the scriptures.  There are several classes of people who are not allowed to be in the assembly in Jerusalem, and eunuchs are within those classes.  Deuteronomy 23:1 clearly states that if you're a eunuch, you're not going to enter the assembly of God.  And the thing is, that being a eunuch isn't something you can change.  There are rules in the scriptures about uncleanness, about how to become ritually clean again, but being a eunuch, that's a one way trip.  Bobbitt had microsurgery to repair him, but if you're a first century eunuch, well, that's just who you are now.  You're defined by that, you'll live like that, and you'll die like that.

Well and good.  But the Ethiopian eunuch was a worshipper of the Lord God.  He had gone to Jerusalem to worship, but would have assuredly been barred from the gates.  He doesn't get to go in.  He can stand outside, reading his scroll all he wants, but he can't go in.  

There are concentric rings of holiness in the Temple, and at each stage you have to be holier to get in.  There are layers and layers keeping the unclean, the impure, the maimed out.  Only the high priest can go into the holiest of holy places, nobody else. If you're going to stand in the highest holy place, you're going to have to be very holy, very pure, very clean indeed.  And very few people were. Pretty much nobody actually.  Only one person, and everyone else was going to be stopped at one of those concentric rings.

But then Christ.  Christ and his mission on earth, to be the hands and feet of God in the world. Christ comes to people not as a prophet, but as God himself, and everywhere he goes becomes the presence of God.  For the Ethiopian eunuch, that would have been quite the good news to hear - that God wasn't confined to a building built with human hands, but instead was out in creation, calling for his people.  

Up until that moment, the eunuch's life was a desert place.  Isolated and cut off from the assembly, there was no healing water there, and he was forever doomed to be on the outside looking in.  His fortunes weren't going to improve, and his circumstances weren't going to change.  This is his life now, and forever.  But traveling along with Philip, and hearing about the presence of Christ on earth, about his suffering and death as mentioned in the scroll of Isaiah, and about how Christ comes to his people in baptism, the Eunuch pointed to water and asked 'Here is water, what is preventing me from being baptized?'

Nothing.

There is nothing stopping you from being baptized.  Nothing at all.  We baptize babies, you know, as well as grown adults.  We baptize whole households.  And if someone were to come to me to ask 'what is there to prevent me from being baptized,' I would respond 'nothing.'  For his whole life, the Ethiopian Eunuch had been cut off from the assembly of God, and he would never get to enter into it.  The holiest site in the world was always going to be outside his reach, and beyond his capability.  But as Philip explained to him, the holiest site in the world isn't the Temple, it's wherever God is. 

So where is God?

Not in a building made with human hands, not in the Temple or on the mountain.  God is where he has promised to be - in bread and wine, in the water and the word, where two or three are gathered in His name.  So when the Eunuch sees water and asks to be baptized, for the first time in his life he gets to be where God is.  Instead of being cut off from the assembly, he is embraced into the family of God.  This is the Good News of Jesus Christ, you know.  The Good News that says that you are a child of God born of his will, not of your own. He has washed you clean so you can be in his presence.

If God kept a record of sins, none of us would be able to be in his presence.  But instead of that, he calls us, enlightens us, and forgives us.  And because of that, we are redeemed.  For someone who was cut off from the worship of God, that was good news indeed.  And for those of us who, due to our sinful nature rightly should be cut off, that continues to be good news.  The holiest place on earth now is no longer the Temple built with human hands, but the temples of God's people, where God's spirit dwells.  In paradise, there will be no temple, because God will be with people.  

And you know what?  In baptism, in the Lord's Supper, in the gathering of his people, God is with us now.  You can't be barred from entering God's presence now, because God comes to find you, instead of waiting for you to be good enough, or pure enough, or holy enough to find him.