To begin, I would like to narrow down the audience I hope to talk to today. (If none of the following categories fit you, you may be excused.)

I would like to talk today to people who feel out of place at Seekers and people who work on Seekers core team. I’d like to speak to people who wake up for church and people who stay up far too late on Saturday night to do that, (and the few the proud who can do both.) I’d like to speak to the regular chapel-goers, and the ones who just came today for the first time because the loud girl in the back of your sorority meeting asked you to come and support. I would like to talk to the partiers, the over-21s, the under-21s, and any combination of those that might exist. I would like to speak to both the Philips and the Ethiopian eunuchs.

Because all of us, the eunuchs and the Philips, ask ourselves: “what will we do with our lives?” Whether you’re an underclassmen wondering about it, you’re an upperclassman with a carefully memorized paragraph of “what you’re doing when you graduate,” or you’re an “adult,” who knows better than to ask that question now, everyone in this room is either thinking about or has thought about our lives as if it’s some “thing” that we will get to after we complete a certain stage of development (like high school, or college, grad school, retirement.)

(I recently visited the seminary I’ve planned to attend for the past four years and got the impression that it might not be the home I had imagined, so I am very much a fan of asking this question right now.) What will I do when I graduate? Where will I live? Who will I marry? Will I get married or will I admit that I’m a crazy cat lady? Will I have to get a dog or will my significant other be ok with my cat lady tendencies? These important questions have been pondered over by all of us, I’m sure.

If I could enter into “religion major” mode for a minute, let’s run through the passage that Alex read again, because what the heck does a eunuch have to do with what Westminster college students, Seekers or no Seekers, will do with our lives?

Acts 8 reads: ²⁶ Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Go south to the road—the desert road—that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” 

Note here where Philip is asked to go: he’s on a road, a desert road, to Gaza. We hear of Gaza today in the news, but at this point, it was more like a ghost town, halfway between an older population and the one we know today. This is one crappy road, and one crappy calling.

Shane Hipps, a pastor at my beloved Mars Hill equates Philip’s call with telling a businessperson to go to an abandoned barn in the middle of nowhere to see if they could sell their product there. That would (and should) seem completely fruitless to this businessperson, and likewise, this call should seem ridiculous to Philip.

Who wants to go to a desert road, pot-holed from Amish buggies, between Jerusalem and Gaza, between a Walmart and a Starbucks, to become a revolutionary? Paul and the disciples got to go to and communicate with big cities like Rome and Corinth and the vast area of Galatia, and meanwhile, Philip is asked to go stand along an empty road?

You for whatever reason have ended up at this road. This little civilization. This abandoned barn that we lovingly refer to as Westminster.

Sometimes our callings seem insignificant.

²⁷So [Philip] started out, and on his way he met an Ethiopian eunuch, It has come to my attention while preparing for this talk that many among you might not be familiar with the term “eunuch.” Let me graciously enlighten you. Many highly assistants in Biblical times had the honor and privilege of serving directly under different queens or royal women. Having a male “escort” got a bit tricky at times, so occasionally, (and often quite willingly) the servants would volunteer their, ahem, manly parts to be removed as a sign of chastity towards the female leader. Their hormones would decrease, their ability to impregnate would be gone, and the king’s egos and the queen’s power would rejoice everywhere.

So this man is a eunuch to the queen, and not only that, but an Ethiopian one. The Biblical Judeo/Christian view towards this man would have been seen as anything but welcome. He is not Jewish. He is unnatural, and willingly so. Nothing can be done to ritually cleanse him because of his irreversible condition. He should likely remain an outsider to the Jews and likewise the early Christians.

But Philip does not do this. The Acts story goes on to find Philip reading with the Ethiopian, eventually getting the opportunity to tell him “the good news about Jesus,” and getting to baptize him.

³⁶ As they traveled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?”  ³⁸ And he gave orders to stop the chariot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip baptized him. ³⁹ When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way rejoicing.

Putting aside the very literal evidence for Holy Spirit sorcery and Harry Potter-like apparition that we find in this passage when Philip disappears, we again see something completely beautiful at the close of this passage. What can stand in the way of the Ethiopian being baptized? Practically every rule Philip’s faith and culture lived by. He was wrong. He was foreign. He not only screwed up, but he would continue to be screwed up for the rest of his life. No cleanliness could be found in this man. And cleanliness meant everything to this group. (The eunuch definitely never attended chapel on Mondays or Fridays.) And yet, Philip again offers a counter-cultural response: “Look, here is water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?” Nothing in God’s eyes, says Philip.

We create our own cultural ways of being and feeling unclean. What is preventing you from baptizing and being baptized? Do you have a grudge against someone? Do you feel alienated by a community that does “everything right?” Think you’re not good enough, that you’ve made the same mistake one too many times?That you’ll never learn? Do you not have time to go to chapel or are too tired to wake up for church on the only day we have to sleep in? (And are you always gonna be too tired?) Have you seen the pain of the world, and so in a very honest way, you have trouble trusting its Creator? Have you realized the secret that it’s easier to escape on the weekends than think about that pain? Identify what is making each of you wait to be extraordinary, and see if that matters to the religious elite of today. Where do you feel judged? ill-equipped? Now think of whether that matters to God.

What is to stop you from searching out a Philip to help you understand? What can stand in the way of you being baptized? What is to stop you from helping a eunuch understand? What reason could you have to not give them the gift of baptism, a tangible symbol of the fact that they are included in God’s family? It is Jesus, or is it Christians? According to this passage, though our culture can give us an infinitely long list of reasons to be excluded, God finds none of them worth listening to.

The passage ends saying that the Ethiopian went on his way rejoicing. Not only is this outsider now tolerated to be part of the community, but he was used as a vessel to start the Christian church. Many see this story as the first New Testament example of a missionary, and Philip “the religious one” is not the missionary. The Ethiopian Christian church today can trace its ancestry back to the times of the New Testament’s writing, not to after it was written. They didn’t learn from reading the Bible like we did. They learned from this Ethiopian! Do you feel like you’re not worth a high status in Christendom? Well watch out, because those are always the types of people God uses to revolutionize the world. God used this unnatural outsider to start one of the oldest Christian churches. If God did that on a desert road, what could be waiting to be done during the whispers in the computer lab, with graciousness to the annoying person in our MWF class, or, yes, I’ll say it, at the frat houses?

Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked. ³¹ “How can I,” he said, “unless someone explains it to me?”

This line is the type of thing I’d very willingly get tattooed on my body. (This is also the point in the narrative where I fall in love with the Ethiopian—too bad he’s a eunuch.) J I have two tattoos, and both are a reminder of places in my life where I felt called to remind myself, quite literally everyday, of the message they portray. And when I read the poetry of these lines “How can I understand unless someone explains it to me?” I want to remind myself daily that people all over the world, but yes, here at Westminster too, are asking that question.What a beautiful calling for Philip. What a beautiful calling for us.

What are we doing after college? After grad school? After we marry our fiancé, or finally get a teaching job? Who could we be? These questions are helpful. They’re important, and they’re part of our development, even our faith development. But what if we started to think that we were living now? What if we started to think that we were a missionary here, on this campus. What if we saw ourselves as teachers here, to our peers? What if we look at how we saw the Universe, today, yesterday, and tomorrow, instead of waiting years in the future, until we “are qualified enough to make a judgment.” What if we took joy in the way we communicated with our peers, the way we learned from professors, the way we failed and triumphed with our friends here, not just at our job, at grad school, or with our eventual family. But, now, on this seemingly insignificant desert road.

What if this “preparation time” became our present time? What if we heard an angel of the Lord saying now, “Go south to the road—the desert road—that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza, and we went out, and on the way we met an Ethiopian eunuch who could only understand because we explained it to him?

Behind me are pictured the significant places that I’ve visited during my time at Westminster: the Ukraine, Scotland, England, Ireland, S. Korea, (my new home in Oil City), and finally, Westminster. Those first six places only seem more significant than the last one because they have more than two stoplights, but having had the joy and the privilege of experience away from this place, I want you to know that you can be just the person you want to “grow up to be” right here on this little campus. Ministry can happen on the desert road just as much as in the big city. We need to stop underestimating the highly emotional, influential, and trying times that we all experience during our college years in this small little institution. You know stuff. You are well-equipped to handle “the real world,” because you do it every day. The desert road is just as important as the big city.

The best thing that I realized in college is that I didn’t have to wait until I graduated to (attempt to!) be extraordinary. I didn’t have to wait until I was published or had a couple of degrees to be interesting. I didn’t have to wait to fall in love until I was married. I didn’t have to go through nine months of pregnancy to be a mentor. I also didn’t have to experience my own divorce to know what abandonment was. I didn’t have to be hit in the face to know what it felt like. I sure as heck didn’t have to buy a house, a car, a vacation spot to know what it was like to be in debt. 

Yes, we all know Westminster is a bubble. (Driving to Sheetz and knowing 50% of the people there can tell you that.) We are halfway between our life with our parents and our life on our own, halfway between Jerusalem and Gaza, and we feel insignificant because of that. There is this false aura that college students are only waiting to get out of school before they start the “real” living, when we do so much “living” in these four years that it practically tears us apart, and definitely tests our faith. This desert road is significant, no matter how few stoplights we have.

Quite simply, my message today is two-fold:

Do you feel out of place? That’s ok…Jesus takes eunuchs, a member of the least of these in the Judeo-Christian Biblical time period—someone that not only was an outsider, but one that would by definition continue to be throughout their ministry. There was never an “after college” for the eunuch, he was stuck the way he was forever.

Do you feel like you’re waiting to get started on your life? Are you so worried about “after graduation” that you forget that a willing and eager outsider is awaiting the gift of community right in front of you? Are you waiting to be at a more significant time in your life? A more interesting road?
Sometimes our callings appear to be insignificant.

But look around, Westminster, here is water. Here are Philips to learn from, eunuchs to teach, and revolutions to begin. What can stand in the way of us being baptized, and baptizing those around us?