We sometimes speak of the church as a family. It’s made up of singles and married's, children and seniors, women and men, who are all the brothers and sisters in the family of God The Father. That’s what the church is. But we have to remember that this family is unlike any we have ever had. For example, The Father keeps bringing home strangers.

Prayer - Lord God, we confess that there is both a believer and an unbeliever living within us. So we need Your Holy Spirit to fully believe, with all our hearts, that we may enjoy our place in Your sacred family, where at last there are no strangers. In the Name of our Savior who welcomes us into Your Presence, amen.

Professor Stanley Hauerwas, theologian at Duke University Divinity School, frequently reads to his students a letter written by concerned parents to a political official. The parents are complaining that after their son received the best education, at the best schools, he has now become involved in a weird religious sect. The members of this sect call upon him continually, they have given him a new set of strange friends, a strange new vocabulary, and well, he’s just different. Worst of all, he keeps squandering his money on their projects. After reading this letter, Professor Hauerwas then asks his students to identify the cult. Some say the Moonies, the Hare Krishna, or another group. Then he reveals that the letter was written by third century Roman parents, worried about their son’s conversion to Christianity.

From the time that Jesus first asked, “Who is My mother and who are My brothers and sisters, but those who do the will of My Father who is heaven?” The church always has existed as the other family in our lives. In fact, Scripture makes a radical claim that your biological family exists fundamentally to serve your church family; your church family does not exist fundamentally to serve your biological family. The church, not marriage and children, becomes our primary family, our truest community, and the most basic experience of relationship. In this family, we are bound together not by blood, but by the waters of baptism.

One of the most important roles of this other family in your life is to challenge some of the things you heard in your biological family. If you heard that you were not good enough in your family of origin, then you have to keep coming back to the other family called the church to hear that you are the beloved of The Father who is so pleased with you. If you were overly protected in your family, then you come here to learn that God has given you freedom. If you were abused in your family, you come to this family to find healing and trust. Even if the family in which you grew up was wonderful, you will still be challenged by some of the values in this, your other family. At home you may have learned to so value each other that you had little room for new people in your lives. In fact, you may have been told to never invite in strangers, to never ride with strangers, to never speak to them.

I know a family that lives in Washington, D.C. in a high-rise apartment building downtown. Their daughter was only four years old at the time, and they had been trying to teach her that difficult lesson of not trusting strangers. When you’re four, you expect everyone to be as loving and careful as your parents. So they had to keep saying, “Do not trust people you don’t know honey. They may hurt you. Don’t even talk to strangers.” One day as my friend and his little girl entered the apartment elevator, in which a distinguished gentleman was already standing, she looked up at him and said, “I’m not supposed to talk to you because you’re strange.”

Well, she learned her lesson well. But one of the values we learn in God’s family is to welcome strangers. As the writer Henri Nouwen states so beautifully, it is the task of the church to create open space where hostilities can be turned into hospitality, where fear can turn to family. Actually, throughout history we have mistrusted the stranger. That is why the early church needed a lot of help from the Holy Spirit in learning how to make room for the strangers among them. One of the first great struggles of the Jewish church in Jerusalem was to accept Hellenists Jews who were not from Israel.

About the time they learned to do that, the church was persecuted, and its members fled Jerusalem. Philip, one of the Hellenist Jews, went to Samaria. The Samaritans were not Jews but distant cousins. Far removed. They didn’t worship right or read all the right parts of the Bible, and they were religiously syncretistic. So the Jews despised the Samaritans, and typically would not even walk through their country, which is exactly why Philip thought he would be safe there. While he was there, he figured he might as well do some preaching. Preachers will find any reason to talk! And crowds of Samaritans believed, were baptized, and were added to the church. Now the body of believers included not only Hellenists, as if they were not hard enough to assimilate, but now Samaritans too.

As Deacon Phil was trying to figure out how to explain this to the church elders back in Jerusalem, an angel of the Lord told him to hit the road again. So he stood along the wilderness road that led south from Jerusalem to Gaza, waiting for God to show him the next person to whom he could give the gospel and baptize. While he was there, he saw an Ethiopian eunuch being driven in a chariot. He was coming from Jerusalem, where he had gone to worship. Apparently, he is now on his way back home, where he served as treasurer for the queen of Ethiopia. So, this is an important man. We would call him the Secretary for the Treasury. But we are not given his name and are forced to see him only as Philip did. By categories, he’s black, he’s a foreigner, and he’s a eunuch – not even close to an Israelite. So I am thinking Philip was saying, “Oh my, Lord, are You sure about this? If they had trouble with the Samaritans, they are really going to flip out about this.” The text tells us specifically that the Holy Spirit said to Philip, “Go over to the chariot and join it.”

Notice too here that Philip can only welcome the stranger by welcoming the interruption. There are two types of people: people who like to talk to strangers on planes, and the kind who would rather read or sleep. I am the latter – in fact, it really annoys me when someone talks my ear off. Planes are where I get reading or work done, not where I go to meet strangers. You can always tell the other type, and you know you are in for a long ride. I am not good at welcoming the interruption. I think most of us are like that when it comes to our nice comfortable lives where we know everyone, and everyone knows our name. We’d rather not be interrupted Filled with The Spirit, Philip runs along side the chariot. He gets close enough to hear that the Eunuch is reading Isaiah. Philip asks, “Do you understand what you are reading?” The Ethiopian responds, “How can I unless someone guides me?” So Philip hops in the chariot and helps him understand the Scripture text.

The text he was reading was from Isaiah 53, “He was like a lamb led to the slaughter. In His humiliation, justice was denied Him. Who can declare His posterity?” “Who is this talking about?” the Ethiopian asked first. Now why do you think he would be interested in a passage about One who was humiliated, without children to come after Him?

According to Hebrew law, as depicted in Deuteronomy 23, a eunuch was not even allowed in the holy places. Remember, he has just come from the temple. He went there to worship, but they wouldn’t let him in. He couldn’t even enter the court where the Gentiles could go. He traveled all the way to the temple to worship, but was stuck outside because he wasn’t good enough.

Imagine coming to church one Sunday morning, only to discover that you are not good enough to get inside. There’s something wrong with you. So you stand outside and ask people as they leave what it was like because you’re dying for a word from God, or the embrace of His love. How were the prayers today? What did they sing? What did the preacher say? Did he preach very long? Did he talk about depression? Or divorce? Or being lonely? Or feeling ugly? Or children who are in trouble? Or struggling with your sexual identity? Or dealing with failure? Or not having a long religious history? Or not feeling like you fit in with your friends? Or did he mention deadly disease?

My hunch is that if we are paying attention to the hard truth of our lives, and to the reality of just Whose House we’ve entered on this Sunday morning, we would all wonder, “What am I doing here?” By law, none of us are clean enough, or good enough, or whole enough to join this family.

When you look around at others who look so good, you think, “Well, she belongs here, but not me. I don’t have a great family like they do in that pew over there. They seem to have it all together. I don’t even have anyone to love. Haven’t for years. I’m not a eunuch, but I might as well be. How can I fit in here? Or maybe, all these people seemed to have such great marriages, and I am struggling with mine. Or I’m not even sure I believe all the church believes, or I’m struggling to believe God is good right now. Or: I am positive that I cannot make my life right now, because I’m into deep and there have been too many mistakes. If everyone knew the truth about me, they would toss me out of here. Trust me, everyone right now is saying, “That’s me.” Everyone. No one is in The Father’s family by rights, except The Son, Jesus Christ, and The Spirit who adopts you into this relationship with The Father.

As Philip begins to interpret the 53rd chapter of Isaiah, a chapter that describes the coming Messiah as a suffering servant, he relates Isaiah’s depiction to Jesus Christ. We have heard this so many times that we pay no attention. But this is the first time anyone does it in the New Testament. You can see the lights going on in Philip’s head as he says, “You know, Jesus was despised and rejected of men. He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace was upon Him, but with His stripes we are healed. And come to think of it, He had no children, no posterity. But as our Messiah, Savior, He created a new family that has room for us all.”

The Eunuch was so thrilled to hear this, he wanted to join Jesus’ family right there. Right on the road. “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” Notice, Philip didn’t say, “Well, you have to go back to Jerusalem and apply.” He didn’t elaborate a laundry list of things the Ethiopian would have to change about himself before he could receive this gift of baptism. Some translations of this text include Philip’s only condition for baptism: “If you really believe with all your heart, you may be baptized.” The Eunuch said, “I believe that Jesus Christ is The Son of God.” (Acts 8:37). That faith, repentance, and it's participation in the gift of baptism are the only conditions for membership in this church as well.

When Philip heard these words he and the Ethiopian eunuch went into the water for baptism. And when they came out, a black man and a white man became brothers, and little more hope entered the world. Luke could not be more clear about his message, one that he will make again in chapter 10 with the conversion of Cornelius: do not call unclean what God wants to make clean. You give up worrying about what God considers clean. Just preach the gospel, call people to trust Jesus, invite them to join this family in baptism and then you let God make them clean.

In this way, then, baptism is a social act, not a mere act of personal belief and obedience that leads to one’s personal salvation in Christ – though it certainly does do that. But baptism is much more – it proclaims that this family is not limited to those who share our blood – not limited to those who are categorized according to their gender or genes – but open to all who’ve been redeemed by the blood, and that is all of us. Baptism is not an act that speaks primarily to who is excluded but to who is included.

There is an instinct in all of us to want to preserve the blood line – to keep our family looking like us. There is no more radical act God’s church can take that is different than the world than to welcome the stranger, to welcome the people everyone else labels as being far from The Kingdom of God, to those who differ from us in race, economic well being, and spiritual backgrounds. It is the promise of Scripture that “they will come from East and West, North and South, and sit at table in The Kingdom of God.” It is at baptism and around The Lord’s table where we celebrate the inclusive call of God to all people to the cross of Jesus.

Now some of you are getting uncomfortable because you’re more concerned that I point out who is excluded from The Kingdom. We know the lists. My suggestion to you this morning is that the early church was known more for its inclusivity than its exclusivity—more by the radical nature of the people that found their way into their door than by the nice cute clean cut families in their midst, though those are welcome too. When I tell friends of mine outside the church that the church is an inclusive place, and not an exclusive one, they just laugh. They laugh because they know that the church often is more interested in discerning who doesn’t belong than sounding the call that all are welcome here if they are looking for Jesus.

The other religions of the Roman world were open only to those who qualified based on social status, birth, race or adherence to narrow legal requirements. But Christianity proclaimed itself as an invitation of God to all people. In Jesus, they saw a person who welcomed people regardless of their sin, their family, social status, age or gender. Samaritans were welcome. The sexually promiscuous. So were the poor. I wonder if they are welcome here. Even if those different from us, with less together lives, with less than perfect families, were to show up, would we do more than greet them? Would we invite them to our homes for lunch? Would they become our friends? This text is not just a call to the unsaved to join God’s family – it is a call to the saved to accept all who come.

In the 56th chapter of Isaiah, the prophet went on to describe some of the changes that would occur in the House of The Lord when The Messiah came: “In that day, the foreigner will no longer be separated. In that day, the eunuch who loves me shall have a name written in My house, and My covenant, which shall be better than a thousand sons and daughters, will be remembered forever.” No matter who you are here today, no matter your struggle, no matter your family . . . God welcomes you into this family.

Your name is written into the spiritual walls of the church. It has nothing to do with your limitations, sins or hurts. It has nothing to do with the family you had, and it certainly has nothing to do with your righteousness. It has everything to do with the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, where He was dying to make you part of God’s family. You can be part of this family, and you are made part of it by your baptism, not by your birth. Here, water is thicker than blood. And that’s our family value.

God welcomes you, and calls you a stranger no more, but He calls you His sons and daughters, His Beloved. The question is, “Do you believe this with all your heart?” If you do, the gift of baptism awaits you. There is water. What hinders you from being baptized?


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