Our Gospel reading for this morning is commonly known as the Conversion of the Ethiopian Eunuch – for the obvious reason that at the end of the story, the eunuch comes to believe in Jesus and is baptized. But this week my friend Nadia Bolz-Weber posed the provocative question: is it the eunuch that is converted here, or is it Philip, or both?

Consider, she says, that the eunuch was seeking God (reading from Isaiah, going to Jerusalem to worship) but would not, by religious law, have been allowed in the worship assembly because of his, um, eunuch-ness.

So, he’s returning home from Jerusalem to Ethiopia. Perhaps disappointed, dejected, still a little confused, but still searching the Scriptures nonetheless.

God sends Philip to meet this man. Notice: this graceful exchange between them is almost all questions:

“Do you understand what you are reading?” “How can I unless someone guides me?” “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” Well, nothing. And so he is.

On a wilderness road, in a road-side puddle, a foreigner, a eunuch, formerly forbidden from the assembly of the Lord, is baptized into Christ.

The Book of Acts is about the global spread of the Gospel after Jesus’ ascension, which includes people like this man previously excluded. So the Gospel goes to Ethiopia, which remains one of the most ancient centers of Christianity. It is carried there by a court official to the queen, a eunuch, an unlikely evangelist, who encountered God in an unlikely place. And Philip is witness to God doing a new thing, saving new people, beyond the religious, cultural, and political borders that had been held for millennia.
Read in this way, Nadia suggests, the Book of Acts is about the conversion, not just of outsiders, but also the people who were the closest to Jesus, who discover that this emerging Christian faith is not just a Galilean experience, a Jewish movement, but for the entire world.

So, who, exactly, is being converted in these stories? Continue reading