Dirty Water
Acts 8:26-40

May 18, 2003

You’ve probably been wondering which dirty word I am going to talk about. After all, you’ve seen more outrageous titles than that on our bulletin board. Last week my elegant calligraphy was transcribed into the bulletin as “Dirty Word.” Charlie Robinson, our caretaker, takes bulletin in hand with the ladder and the letters for our big sign. When did I notice this literary faux pas? - Friday night walking back from the wedding reception for Sonya and Duane at the Hotel Saskatchewan, and it was too late to change.

No dirty word, but dirty water, just any old water by the side of the road, but adequate for a baptism into a entirely different way to understand and experience the world. The anthropologist Mary Douglas has observed that there is no real “dirt” in life; what we term “dirt” or “dirty” is matter out of place. Dirt in a farm field is fertile soil, but take some of that same fertile material and spread it over your living room floor and it is “dirt.” What the Gospel declares to do is to put dirt back into its proper place.

What strikes me about Philip is that he is simply a person of words. He preaches and teaches all over the place - and yes, people are healed, demons are exorcised, the lame walk, the blind see, the deaf hear - but all Philip is ever described doing is talk. The power of the Word is incomprehensible and unlimited.

Yet, talking is such a fragile skill, so easily manipulated and abusive of its listeners. Words are cheap and there are people who can speak eloquently about social justice, yet never come near to help those about whom they talk.

Nevertheless, there is nothing so wonderfully endowed with grace and power than to hear someone speak with conviction and style. Perhaps an exaggeration, but it is said that in Arabic-speaking countries, a skilled orator can send a crowd in ecstasy and rapture reading from the phone book.

Bernard Lewis, the most influential interpreter of Islam in the Western world, recently said on CBC “Ideas” that a major reason for Ossama bin Laden’s influence is his ability to use language, spoken and written. And he doesn’t read the phone book. My university German teacher was a refugee from the 1956 Hungarian revolt, and had been a prisoner in Russian prison camps. He told me there was the most dramatic and persuasive speaker of German he ever heard was Adolf Hitler.

There were no dramatic sentences as our passage begins: an angel of the Lord simply tells Philip to get up and head out on the road going nowhere, that is, through the wilderness. The medium must be the message here, for I believe anything an angel would say is significant, even phone numbers.

Along the road at the same time comes uncoincidentally an Ethiopian eunuch, an official of the Candace, the queen of Ethiopia, indeed the treasurer of all her domain. An exotic man from an exotic and distant land. He was what is termed elsewhere a “God-fearer,” a non-Jew who was attracted to the ethics and ways of life of the One God of Israel. He was returning from worshiping in Jerusalem, going right to the source for an authentic experience. In the United Church of Canada, he would be classified an “adherent,” but perhaps the best analogy is that he is trying to become a member of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church without being Ukrainian.

The Ethiopian is evidently riding in a large chariot, for if he is reading the Hebrew scriptures he does not have his hands on the wheel. Philip is nudged again by the Spirit to join him and running alongside he hears the Ethiopian reading from Isaiah 53 regarding the Suffering Servant. Philip asks an incredibly condescending question. “Do you understand what you are reading?” “How can I,” the God-fearer answers, “unless someone guides me?” He invites Philip along for the ride.

No matter what people talk about, interpreters are required to offer us a perspective, a context, a hill top view from which to comprehend the true meaning of their words. You never have a Prime Minister or Premier or President make a major speech on TV anymore without a bevy of commentators responding and rebutting to the speech to tell us what he or she really said.

The Hebrew words were not profane or dirty for the Ethiopian, but they were puzzlingly begrimed and dusty and didn’t make full sense, so Philip’s task was to put these words back into their proper place. He went through the Scriptures with his host, showing them the hill top perspective of Jesus, the view from Calvary.

Just words again. Philip doesn’t heal his host of any ailment. He just talks to him and teaches and the Ethiopian is changed. Suddenly, he stopped the chariot out in the nowhere of the wilderness because he saw water beside the road. Probably not talking about a pristine pond or lake, but a large low-lying puddle, with the ancestors of West Nile ruling the waves.

“What is to prevent me from being baptized?” is the rhetorical question. The two get down in the dirty water and come out baptized. The Spirit grabs Philip away and he finds himself elsewhere, but he keeps on talking, teaching and preaching the good news. The Ethiopian does not see Philip anymore, but he returns home rejoicing and a new person in a new world.

But that question, what prevents me from being baptized, doesn’t go away because lots of things want to prevent us from hearing the good news, from seeing life differently, and from living differently.

What prevents me from being genuinely baptized is believing that getting baptized is all that matters. To be sure, our baptism is always there, but it’s like you have downloaded the software for a new program, but have not installed it on your computer so that you can use it. It’s not really, live differently as if you are baptized, but because you are baptized you are enabled to live differently.

What prevents me from being baptized is believing that life ends before it ends. You are dealt of hand of so many gifts and so many liabilities and think and act as if nothing can be changed after that. We don’t preach the resurrection because it is a wonderful fairy tale; we preach resurrection for it is a reality we experience and live. Baptism is a new life born again and again.

What prevents me from being baptized is a distorted perception of reality. We expect life to be perfect, to be all in order, for every venture to have a happy ending. Something or someone dirty, out of place, damaged is not good enough, robbing and cheating us by the forces of the universe, if not God.

Baptism uses dirty water to make us clean; the cross was not a sanitary instrument of execution; our words are stumbling and imprecise, but the Good News uses them and its imperfect, sinful speakers to move us to live differently and radically by the love we give away.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan