The Same Spirit

Acts 8: 26-40

We just celebrated Pentecost this past Sunday. The day marks the celebration of the arrival of the Holy Spirit, poured out upon the followers of the Way of Jesus. Because of the 3,000 people converted that day through Peter’s Spirit-inspired sermon, Pentecost is often celebrated as the birthday of the Church. It was an incredible day. However, if you stopped reading Acts after the account of Pentecost, you might believe that everything was easy for the early church.

Reading past chapter two of Acts, it doesn’t take long to discover that the early church faced multiple challenges. Yesterday, we read about the conflict between different ethnic groups within the church in Jerusalem. Immediately after that conflict is resolved, we read about the various ways the church was persecuted for spreading the Gospel (specifically the martyrdom of Stephen and Saul’s imprisonment of believers). As a result, the believers, with the exception of the apostles, were driven out of Jerusalem and ended up scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. Philip was one of those believers driven out.

We pick up today with Philip being sent out to a wilderness road from Jerusalem to Gaza. On this road, he encountered an Ethiopian eunuch who followed Judaism but was obviously not Jewish. He would have been considered a “God-fearer.” Yet he was still a complete outsider. He was a member of a foreign court, serving a foreign queen. He was African and probably of a different race and culture than Philip. He was also an outsider because of his status as a eunuch, having been castrated to serve as a trusted confidant to the queen. As a eunuch, he could never fully fit into normative gender roles, be circumcised, or fully enter temple worship. He could never truly become Jewish. He was a complete outsider.

However, by the end of the story, he is a baptized believer in Jesus. It all happens because Philip listened to an angel of the Lord and traveled that road. Yet we are told that something else happened to precipitate this conversion. Because the eunuch was such an outsider, it would have been understandable if Philip had tried to avoid him completely. He could have turned his head and not even acknowledged this foreign stranger. However, the Spirit—the same Spirit whose arrival we celebrated this past Sunday—nudged Philip toward this stranger. The Spirit tells Philip, “Go over to this chariot and join it.” The work of the Spirit, combined with both Philip’s and the eunuch’s willingness to listen, created an opportunity to grow the Kingdom of God through conversion and to expand the understanding of who is welcome in God’s kingdom.

Are we listening for the Spirit’s direction in our lives? Jesus promised that we would never be alone, and the Spirit is the fulfillment of that promise. However, the Spirit’s role is not merely to comfort us and help us feel God’s presence. The Spirit also nudges us and empowers us to do the work of God. The Spirit directs our steps. The Spirit convicts us when we go astray. The Spirit enables us to do difficult things in the name of God—difficult things like leaving the comfort of our homes to help spread the Gospel; difficult things like approaching strangers; difficult things like interacting with people who seem odd and may even scare or unsettle us; difficult things like advocating for drawing the circle wider.

Philip’s response to the Spirit’s nudging demonstrates how the Spirit can lead us where God wants us to be, even if it is not where we think we want to go.

Rev. Dana Ezell