Acts 8:26-40, Psalm 22:25-31, 1 John 4:7-21, John 15:1-8

From Acts 8 we read this morning about how Philip was sent by God to a wilderness road where he met an Ethiopian worshipper-of-Adonai, and how Philip was encouraged to help the man interpret what he was reading. With the sneaky use of a concordance we can identify the Ethiopian eunuch’s book as the servant song of Isaiah 53:7-8, and with a bit of scholarship we can suggest that the original hearers of this passage, (the people actually listening to Isaiah as he spoke this out), would have understood the message to refer to the leaders of Israel in their day. Maybe the Judahites would also have understood the sly reference to unjust treatments meted out to prophets like Isaiah; after all no-one likes the man who stands up in church or parliament and says that God is so angry with our society that we’re about to get smashed. Even in 700 BCE the first response was to shoot the messenger. It’s important to remember that in the time of Isaiah this passage did not refer to a future Messiah, rather it made very clear what happens to prophets who challenge the royal and religious leaders: Luke when he wrote Acts doesn’t actually say that Philip taught that this passage was speaking about the Christ, but that beginning with this passage Philip went on to speak about Jesus as a mistreated prophet. This is an important point for a number of reasons, but here’s one in particular: the story told by Isaiah to his own people is that any Man of God, in any era, who speaks to the People of God through the Word of God, will challenge those people with the accusation that they prefer to kill their prophets and shut them down rather than heeding the word of correction against their injustices.

So why does Philip start to witness to Christ with this passage? If these verses from the Hebrew scriptures aren’t actually about the Messiah, but could refer to any Jewish whistle-blower in the past thousand years, why use these verses at all? I mean, why not John 3:16? Why not walk this unbeliever along the “Romans Road” of Evangelical personal evangelism?  Well of course The Gospel of Jesus Christ According to John The Evangelist and The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Church in Rome had not yet been written at the time of Philip’s encounter, (derr), but I still think Philip was on the right track. Philip started in Isaiah 53 because that is where the Ethiopian eunuch was reading from.

In all of our personal evangelism we must always start where the person is and then point them to where Jesus is. If the person is in Isaiah 53 then that’s where we start. If the person is in Deuteronomy 5-6 then that’s where we start, and if the person is in Genesis 1-2 then that’s where we start, and if the person is in Revelation 17-18 then that’s where we start. So, Philip tells the story of Jesus beginning where the Ethiopian man is at, and when he has explained the gospel Philip agrees to baptise the Ethiopian in response to the Ethiopian’s new understanding of who Jesus is. This is the story of an individual gentile who chooses to trust in Jesus, and this is one of several such stories that some before we get to the full-blown conversion of the Gentiles and the missionary work of Paul later in Acts. This is an exciting story not only because Philip is miraculously teleported in and out of the location, but because it is a story about God’s preparation of the Church prior to God’s pouring out the Spirit across all Gentile nations. That, for me, is a cause of celebration: God knows who the marginal ones are, and God has made plans to include them.

When we turn to today’s Psalm we could nearly float in its cascade of imagery.  In Psalm 22:25 we read from you comes my praise: God is the source of our worship and in Psalm 22:66 we glorify God because of the work of justice which is acts of love on behalf of the afflicted. Those who seek God will praise God; those who live life under the reign of God will give glory to God and tell true things about God. In Psalm 22:27 we read of how the whole world shall be reminded of God because of the faithfulness of the disciples who work for justice, and how people from every nation will worship God in this way because the evidence of God’s loving-kindness will not be hidden from anyone. In Psalm 22:28 we acknowledge that God is the true and rightful ruler of every realm, and because of this God alone reigns in the places where God alone is worshipped and obeyed: indeed, in Psalm 22:29 the worshippers of God are not restricted to the living but also to the dead. The dead worship God and the living live out their worship of God. And I shall live for him declares the psalmist, or an alternative reading says, “and he who cannot keep himself alive” suggesting that the person who is alive to worship God is alive only because God has sustained him or her. In Psalm 22:30 the generations to come are brought into the communal act of worship, the universal act of worship when those not yet born will be told by their ancestors about what God has done. And what has God done? God has delivered the afflicted and forsaken. God has heard the cry and God has answered with salvation and restoration.

We heard on Good Friday that when Jesus cried out from the cross my God why have you abandoned me, all who heard him were immediately reminded of Psalm 22 in its entirety. Today, in this time between Easter and Pentecost we are reminded of the same thing: the story of Easter began with a man hanging crying on a cross, but it will end with the proclamation to every future generation and every ethnicity on the planet the magnificent deeds of salvation performed by God. And what is this salvation: what salve does the Psalmist offer on behalf of the faithfulness of God? Salvation from poverty, salvation from affliction, and salvation from abandonment. More than the forgiveness of the sins of disobedience and mutiny against God, God offers restoration of relationship, and the deep knowing and feeling of being held close, safe, and dear to God. You are loved, loved beyond your ability to comprehend. Now isn’t that a God worth worshipping and a truth worth proclaiming with great joy?  (If you’se were Pentecostal you’se’d all yell “Amen!” at this point.)

But if there is any doubt that God offers such love then John won’t have a bar of it. Not only does John tell us in 1 John 4 that God is loving and steadfast, he goes even further and says that God is love. Let there be no doubt of this, love is not something that God does and love is not something that God offers. Love is what God is: God is love.

And what is this love that is what God is, that is the nature and character of love? The love that God is is salvific: the love of God is atoning in that it is reconciling and restorative; the love that God is repairs what was broken and especially broken relationships; the love that God is soothes and heals. John makes clear in 1 John 4:12 that whilst no one has ever seen God, God is known by the love that is in us and the love that is shared among us as that love is being perfected. The more love we share amongst each other the better we get at doing it, and the more God is made known in our midst and amongst those who come to the places where we are and the places to which we go. God does not make Godself known through wrath or teaching or morality, God is made known through the fullness of love and the love than which no love is greater.  And what is the greatest form of love? Greater love has no man than this, that he should lay aside his own life for the ones he loves. Those are the words of Jesus himself (in John 15:13) which in this week of Anzac we read on our many war (peace) monuments.

Those who love like God loves are the ones who do the will of God. The ones who love like God loves have God’s presence within them. As 1 John 4:9 says God’s love was revealed amongst us and 1 John 4:20-21 says that those who love God must also love their brothers and sisters too. It is not enough to say that you love God; it isn’t even enough that that statement be true and that you do dearly and truly love God. Unless you also love your brothers and sisters in faith, the people around you this morning and other believers who you encounter in your everyday life, then you do not truly love God. In other words, the evidence that you love the One who is unseen is that you are demonstrating your love for the ones you do see.

So, what does this love look like? Well we’ve already seen that in the Psalm and in the passages from Acts and Isaiah. Love is not affection, love is justice. Love is not kindliness, love is compassion. Love is not gooey, love is sacrificial. Love is not giving your heart to someone; love is the continuous preparedness to give your life for someone.

Well if that is all true then love is hard. No wonder John speaks about love as being perfected, it certainly needs to be an ongoing process and it does appear that even John thinks the process will not be completed on earth. We can never love as completely as God loves; our physicality gets in our way. But this is where more good news comes in, and that good news comes from John in his gospel.

In the first few verses of John 15 Jesus speaks about himself being like a vine and he says that he is the source of every good thing. This is a metaphor of course; we cannot take it literally. The literal word of God here is that Jesus literally spoke about himself using a metaphor, Jesus is not literally a plant and no one would suggest that that is the case. But with Jesus imagined as a vine and God the Father imagined as a vine-grower we can talk about Christ being the stem and the roots where we are the branches. In the story of love, we can say that God revealed in Christ is the source of the love we express even as the grapes on a vine are fed by the water and nutrients sourced from the soil by the roots and stem. Like a branch cut off from the soil’s nutrition, a Christian cut off from Christ will not flourish. In the same way a branch cut away from the other branches will not flourish, we need each other too.

A Christian away from Christ cannot love as God intends. We have said that even as Christians we can never love to the depth and extent that God loves, but if we remain fruitful in the work of God, (which is to say if we continue to work at loving others), then Christ will continue to send love to and through us for the glory of God and for the expansion of the vine. The practical reality is that if we are cut off from people we cannot love as God intends, because as John said we cannot demonstrate that we love God unless we are busy loving other people. So, if you are planning on going off and sitting in a cave alone with God for a while so that you can focus on loving God without interruption, don’t stay away too long. God does call us into times of solitude to teach us, and love on us one-to-one, but if you try to live out there you’ll soon be lonely. God will allow you to feel lonely because having been discipled by the Father you are supposed to come back here and get on with the work of loving us in the midst of us in the same way that the rest of us love you.

So, do it. Love one another; be excellent to each other. Are you someone God could choose to send to the wilderness road? Are you someone God could choose to sing praise to God for the gifts of love including the gifts that empower us to love? Are you someone God could choose to be the Jesus-with-skin on wherever a hug is required today in Stawell? Be such a someone: that is God’s supreme plan for you today.

Amen.