Text: Acts 8:26-40                                                                                   U Cantate (5^th Sunday of Easter)

Bridging the Gaps

            In the name of him who has filled each of us with his Holy Spirit, dear friends in Christ:  I’m sure that you know that I spent ten years in the Army; but what you may not know is that for eight of those years, I was specifically served as a combat engineer.  What’s that? Well, among other things, it means that when the enemy attacked, it was my job to try to slow them down or stop them by doing things like putting obstacles in their way, laying minefields, destroying roads, and – what sort of the icing on the cake for an engineer – blowing up bridges.  That was sort of the most glamorous and spectacular part of the job.  But no army ever won a war by staying on the defense.  You have to attack to win.  So when our forces were on the attack, it was my job to keep us from getting slowed down or stopped by undoing what the enemy engineers did.  That meant clearing obstacles, making safe lanes through minefields, repairing damaged and cratered roads, and – what was by far the hardest thing of all – you guessed it – building bridges across gaps and rivers.

Now, bridging a gap is never an easy task; but there are three things that make it even harder for a combat engineer over his civilian counterpart who works for the highway department.  First, in combat, you’ve got to do it as quickly as possible in order to keep the momentum of the attack going.  Generals at war want their bridges built in a matter of minutes and hours, not weeks or months.  Second, bridges built in combat situations have to be strong enough to reliably support the weight of seventy ton tanks and other armored vehicles, not to mention all the heavy supply vehicles that will follow in their wake. So you’ve got to do a really good job the first time.  And finally, the job is likely to be greatly complicated by the fact that there’s going to be someone shooting at you while you’re doing it.  So, no question about it, bridging gaps is the most difficult, dangerous, and thankless job a combat engineer does – but it is a job that is absolutely critical.  Seventy ton tanks are mighty and terrible weapon systems; but they do not fly or swim very well.  Even relatively small rivers, like say the Nodaway or the Tarkio, would be enough to stop an entire armored division dead in its tracks.  In order to keep your advance going forward, you’ve got to be able to bridge the gaps in your way.

            And that brings me to today’s reading from the Book of Acts where we find a different kind of advance into enemy territory underway:  it’s the growth of God’s kingdom on earth by the spread of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. You recall that Jesus gave his Apostles the mission of going into all the world and freeing people from Satan’s bondage and death by sharing the good news that in the atoning sacrifice of his suffering and death there was forgiveness of sin and eternal life. That message had to be carried forth into the world of peoples still shrouded in darkness so that they could hear what Christ had done for them, believe, and be set free.  But impeding the progress of this spiritual offensive were a number of wide gaps—yawning chasms, as it were, of culture, class, history, prejudice, and misunderstanding.  In order for the advance of the Gospel to continue, these gaps had to be spanned by skillful bridge builders – bold, quick-thinking, innovative disciples who were willing to fearlessly step into the breach and get the job done – even if it meant taking some fire.  And fortunately, as we heard, the early Christian Church was blessed to have as its chief bridge-building engineer, a courageous and faithful young man named Philip.

            It seems that he was the first to really size up the problem.  You see, throughout most of the Old Testament period, the people of God were on the defense. And for that reason, they needed barriers to help protect them from the corrupting influence of the world at large. The Lord’s way of doing this was to impose upon his people certain laws and customs that were designed to keep them separate from the other nations.  The laws restricting a Jewish person’s diet and dress, for example, functioned just as a castle’s walls and moats.  The Jews had their own peculiar ways of doing things, and that tended to keep God’s people together and prevented them from mixing so freely with others.  This was important because it was within the nation of the Jews that the Lord was preserving the seed of his Word – the light of his truth in the otherwise dark and deceived world.  He was keeping that seed alive and protecting it until the time was right.  Then when that time came, he sent his Son into the world to fulfill the mission of salvation that he promised already to our first parents when they fell into sin. That mission having been accomplished by Jesus, it was now time to take the offense and get the good news about what he had done to save mankind out into world.

            The problem was that it wasn’t happening. The major offensive the Lord had ordered had pretty much stalled right where it started in Jerusalem.  The apostles and other Christians who had been commanded to go forward were mostly sticking around close the flagpole, so to speak.  There were two reasons for this.  One was that after all those centuries of being isolated and discouraged from mixing with the nations, it was hard for the Jewish Christians to think in any other way.  Now that they had the Gospel, they naturally tended to think of it as something to share only with other Jews – people who were like themselves. And I suppose we understand how this would happen even in all innocence; but further complicating this exclusive mindset they had was the dimension of sinful human thought and behavior.  Their being kept separate from the others by the Lord – which was done for a good purpose – was also taken advantage of by Satan for evil purposes.  And as a result, the Jews had long since yielded to the temptation of believing that they were better than the others, somehow more worthy and noble—that’s why the Lord had chosen them.  They thought of the other nations as undeserving of God’s attention.  That had the effect of making the ditch separating the Jewish Christians from the rest of the world even wider and deeper than it was ever intended to be.  But that’s why the advance wasn’t going anywhere:  it had come up against this vast gap that first to be bridged.

            And Philip was the man the Lord chose to do it. He wasn’t one of the original twelve disciples of Jesus.  In fact, he wasn’t even what we would think of as a pastor or principle leader in the early church.  Instead, Philip was one of the seven deacons or trustees chosen by the Jerusalem church to oversee and help distribute the donations people had made of food and clothing to the poorer members of the congregation.  At first the Apostles had done that job; but as the church grew larger, that sort of work began to take over and crowd out their primary duties of preaching and teaching and so on.  That was one problem.  The other was that the Apostles, being steeped in the Jewish superiority mindset, tended to favor when distributing goods to the poor those Christians who were perceived as being more Jewish in their practice than others who had perhaps adopted some of the Greek culture and customs.  You see, even within the Jewish community there were levels of “Jewishness”.  And whether they were doing it consciously or unconsciously, when the Apostles were accused of being unfair in the distribution of gifts to the poor, they said, “Fine, this is taking up too much of our time anyway.  Choose some men that you know are faithful and who will be fair to do this work so we can get back to doing what we were called to do.” Philip was among the very first chosen by the church for this work.  People seemed to recognize that he wouldn’t play favorites.  They knew that his was a heart of compassion for all, regardless of their comparative level of Jewishness.

            And, as it turns out, they soon discovered that his compassion extended even beyond Jewish people.  Just north of Judea were the people of Samaria.  Though geographically and ethnically they were the Jews’ closest neighbors, they didn’t get along well.  The Jews thought of the Samaritans as a mixed-up, mongrel race of sub-humans composed of the descendants of unfaithful Israelites and a mishmash of various pagan peoples.  They hated them.  The Samaritans, for their part, hated the Jews because of their spiritual snobbery and monumental pride.  But Philip saw it differently.  He saw reaching out to the Samaritans as the first step forward.  To him they were, after all, people with whom the Jews shared much history, who also lived in the Promised Land, and who, for the most part, had at least some Israelite blood coursing through their veins.  More importantly, he saw them for what they were: lost people for whom Christ the Lord died to save.  He decided to build a bridge to them.

            He went to Samaria and began teaching people about Jesus. Before long, there were a large number of converts there, all baptized by Philip and happily worshipping together. When the Apostles in Jerusalem heard about it, they weren’t too sure. Was it possible that Samaritans could become Christians too?  They sent Peter and John to check it out.  When they arrived, they were amazed at what they saw.  And while they were there, the Samaritan church experienced its own miniature Pentecost event, what with all the physical manifestations of coming of the Holy Spirit that the disciples had earlier experienced in Jerusalem.  And as much as this benefited the Samaritans, I’m convinced that it happened even more for the benefit of the Apostles – so that they would have indisputable proof that yes, even the Samaritans were to be included as equal partners in the Gospel.  The Spirit’s coming proved that they too had a place in God’s kingdom.  But the thing I’d have you see here is that once Philip built the bridge, the Apostles crossed it; and when they did, the cause of the Gospel took a mighty leap forward.

            And in today’s lesson, we see Philip building several more bridges.  The Samaritan mission was going well, to first the shock and then the delight of the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem.  But for the most part, they still failed to see the big picture.  The Samaritans were, like I said, in many ways very close to the Jews – almost cousins in a way.  Still, it was a big step for the Jews to even begin to think of the Samaritans as equals in God’s sight; but the Lord wanted his church to see just how far he intended his Gospel to go.  And so he sent an angel to Philip who told him to head south to the road that wound through the Judean hills and headed off across the desert to Gaza, to Egypt, and beyond – which in those days would have seemed like the farthest corner of the earth.  There he intercepted the Ethiopian official returning from his visit to Jerusalem.

            And I think it’s hard for us to understand just how different these two men were.  I mean, in a religious sense they were a Jew and a Gentile, which for the Jew is already a huge gap.  From a national and cultural perspective, one was a citizen of Judea in the Middle East and the other a citizen of Ethiopia in Africa.  So they were not just nations, but continents apart.  In terms of status and position in life, one was a high ranking member of a royal court; think of him being like the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve rolled up into one.  The other was an average working class Joe chosen to be a menial servant for the church.  In terms of finances, I doubt that Philip had two drachmas in his pocket to rub together; the Ethiopian would have been a fabulously wealthy man as would suit his station in life. And racially, well, the difference between the two men was quite literally black and white.  Each one of these differences represents a wide gap that had to be crossed to reach the other side.  They are the kind of differences that keep people apart.  So it seems that to make his point, the man the Lord chose for Philip to build bridges to was as different as he could possibly be.

But the greatest distance between these two men was their difference in understanding the Lord God and his plan of salvation for the world. That’s the truth this story illustrates so well.  The Ethiopian official had come to Jerusalem seeking God and light of his truth. Apparently he was a proselyte to the Jewish faith.  What he did while he was in Jerusalem and how he worshipped there we can’t say.  We do know that as a Gentile, his approach to God would have been limited to the outermost court of the Temple – he couldn’t have gotten any closer. What’s more, because he was so obviously a Gentile, his skin color, dress, and accent all betraying him, most Jews wouldn’t have given him the time of day.  We do know this:  he left the city without finding the truth he came for.  But he did manage to pick up a copy of the book of Isaiah while he was in town – a purchase, incidentally, that would have set him back a small fortune.

We find him pouring over his newly obtained treasure as he journeys back toward his distant home.  And the mere fact that he attempts to read it while bouncing around in the back of a chariot gives us some insight about how excited he is to have it and to be able to read God’s Word for himself.  The trouble is that he doesn’t understand it.  Oh, he can read the words and understand what they say; but without the key, which is Jesus Christ who is the key to understanding all Scripture, he could never figure out what it really meant.

Under the direction of the Spirit, Philip runs up to the chariot just in time to hear the man reading aloud a portion of one of the four servant songs that appear in Isaiah.  “He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before the shearer is silent, so he did not open his mouth”.  Philip hears the words read and asks, “You don’t understand what you’re reading, do you?”  The response of the Ethiopian official is one that we all need to hear and take to heart.  Speaking on behalf of all spiritually unenlightened people he says, “How can I unless someone guides me down the right path?”  That’s all the opening Philip needs, and at once he begins building a bridge.  He tells the official about Jesus, about how Isaiah was speaking prophetically of his suffering and death on the cross, and about how Jesus was the Lamb of God sent to take away the sins of the world.  We don’t get to hear the whole conversation; but we can well imagine the official soaking up the Gospel as Philip expounds upon it and hanging on his every word.  Soon he’s asking to be baptized himself in the name of Jesus.

            The thing I would have you see is that the good news about Jesus itself is the bridge.  That’s what spans the gap between heaven and hell, light and dark, and life and death.  And once those gaps are crossed, all the others that seem so great and wide to us are insignificant by comparison.  Philip and this Ethiopian official go down into the water humanly speaking just about as different as two men can be.  They come up out of the water full blood-bought brothers in Christ, and fellow children of the same heavenly Father.  They share one Lord, one faith, one Baptism, one Hope, and one heavenly home in which they will dwell together forever.

            My prayer this morning is that we all might be inspired by Philip’s example to be bridge builders for the Lord’s Kingdom. I would ask that we all might examine our hearts to see how we may have been turned inward toward our own kind of people either by force of habit, or by pride, prejudice, and fear – and to repent of such shortsightedness and sin as need be.  And having repented and received again the good news of God’s forgiveness in Christ Jesus, that we might reach out across the gaps of class, culture, race, income, social position, or whatever it is that we think divides us from other people with the one thing that has the power to bring us together as one in God’s family:  the Lord Jesus Christ and his Gospel of salvation.  May God give us the grace and the resolve to do this, in Jesus’ holy name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!