Today's Old Testament lesson comes from the book of Isaiah, chapter 56, verses 3 through 8.
Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord say,
The Lord will surely separate me from his people.
And let not the eunuch say, Behold, I am a dry tree.
For thus says the Lord, to the eunuchs who keep my Sabbath,
who choose the things that please me and hold fast to my covenant,
I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters.
I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.
And the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to him,
to love the name of the Lord and to be his servants,
everyone who keeps the Sabbath and does not profane it and holds fast my covenant,
these I will bring to my holy mountain and make them joyful in my house of prayer.
Their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar.
For my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.
The Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, declares,
I will gather yet others to him besides those already gathered.
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Well, as I said at the beginning of the service, we're so glad that you are here,
especially if this is your first Sunday with us.
We want to do everything we can to make sure you feel welcome,
and I trust that that has already happened to some extent.
There will be an opportunity to hang around after the service if you'd like a chance to meet some people,
to shake some hands, and to make some connections here before you head out.
Certainly, if I've not met you, I'd love the chance to do so.
We started a series last week called Church, God's Family in the World.
And as the title would indicate, we are looking at these places in the Bible where we see very clearly
that the church, God's people, is really meant to be thought of as a family.
That of all the images that are used to describe God's people,
the image of family is perhaps the most helpful, the most comprehensive.
It runs from the beginning to the end of Scripture.
And we're doing this for a lot of reasons.
I mean, I think, first off, the idea of family or the topic of family is immediately evocative to us all.
A lot of you went and traveled to see your family over the holidays not too long ago.
Maybe you were freshly reminded both of the joy and also the struggle of family.
Maybe some of you had no family to visit.
And maybe every time the concept of family comes up, you feel the ache of that absence.
But certainly family and the idea of family is evocative to us all.
But there's a deeper reason that we're talking about this.
And that is that I personally believe that the church, especially in the West,
has largely lost sight of the fact that we're called to be a family.
Because we don't operate that way.
And what I hope that we will see over the course of these few weeks of looking at this
is that we are called to be a family in the deepest sense of the word.
And so last week we looked at this place where God promises a family.
He comes to a man named Abram in Genesis 12 and he says,
I see all the brokenness in the world.
I see all the tragedy.
I see all the injustice, all the heartbreak.
And here's what I'm going to do about it.
You know, people say, well, what's God's response to the suffering in the world?
God says, here's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to build a family.
It's going to be a new family, a new humanity.
And through this family, all the families of the earth will be blessed.
So that's what we saw last week.
And then this week, we're going to learn a little bit more about what this family's like.
We're looking at Isaiah chapter 56, verses 3 through 8.
And at this point in Isaiah, Isaiah's just talked in chapters 52 and 53
about this servant who's going to come, the servant of the Lord.
And he's going to suffer on behalf of the world and God's people.
And then in chapters 54 and 55, Isaiah says that because of his suffering,
God is going to pardon and forgive sin.
And that this grace is going to be open to all who come.
Chapter 55.
And so it could end right there.
You know, Isaiah, forgiveness for everybody.
End of the book.
But it goes on.
And chapter 56 begins to show us the so what.
So now that this servant, whom the early church immediately recognized as Jesus,
now that the servant has done this, so what?
What changes?
And that's what chapter 56 is all about.
As a result of the servant of the Lord coming and suffering,
God's family in the world becomes unlike any other family.
And so we're going to see a couple of things about this family.
First, we're going to see why we need a new family.
And then second, we're going to see what's so new about God's family.
What makes it different?
And then at the very end, there'll be a little word on how we join God's family.
So why do we need a new family?
What's so new about God's family?
And then lastly, just a little bit on how we join God's family.
Let's pray.
Lord, we do recognize that this is a topic fraught with emotion, fraught with struggle.
It evokes specific memories.
Lord, as we think about potentially the fragmentation, the division, the brokenness that we experience in our own families here,
those of us with families, and also those of us who struggle because we don't have family, we feel alone in the world.
May this speak to all of us, Lord, and give us a kind of hope that can only be found in you.
We pray this in your son's holy name.
Amen.
So the first question we want to ask is, why do we even need a new family?
Why would this be good, relevant news for any of us here?
The fact of family is this.
Family is necessary.
To some extent, family is necessary.
It was necessary to bring you into the world.
And it's very important and very central to what it means to be human.
But there's one Achilles heel in every family.
One weakness inherent to all families.
And that is this, that families are by definition exclusive.
By definition, families are exclusive.
What makes you family is that you share a unique family lineage, a unique bloodline, a unique DNA.
And while in some ways you can marry into and be adopted and all of these things,
there's still this sense that blood ties us together more closely than anything else in the world.
And there's no way to get that DNA unless you're born in.
There's no way to really, truly be family in the DNA sense of the word unless you're born into it.
And over the course of human history, what history has shown us, if anything,
is that we have inherited a tendency to prefer people who are like us,
to prefer people who are family,
to prefer people who are similar,
to prefer the closer kinship ties over people who are not.
We give preference to our family over anybody else.
And most people in the world would say, as it should be.
But by definition, family is exclusive.
And that way of thinking had become entrenched in Israel.
They not only preferred personally Israelites to anyone else,
but they had actually come to believe that God was the same way.
That the family of Israel, the nation of Israel,
occupied a special place in God's economy.
That they were uniquely blessed because they were Israelites,
descendants of Abram.
And so we have this place in Isaiah 56,
where God addresses this very thing.
It says this in verse 3,
Let not the foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord say,
The Lord will surely separate me from his people.
And let not the eunuch say,
Behold, I am a dry tree.
So here we have two groups of people,
two categories,
who under the old covenant,
the old standard of relationship between God's people and God.
According to the old covenant,
these are people who were not allowed into the temple.
They were not allowed into the presence of God.
They were not allowed to have fellowship with God's people.
They were excluded from the family of God.
They were on the outside.
And I want to look at each just in a little more detail to help you understand this.
First of all, we have this category of foreigners.
We need to understand that originally God, as we said a moment ago,
God came to Abram and said,
Here's my plan.
I'm going to make out of you a family and a nation.
And through your family, all the families of the earth are going to be blessed.
So it was important for a while to make sure that Abraham's family remained distinct
so that it would be clearly seen when God fulfilled his promise.
If the family became diffuse and ceased to be a family,
how could we ever see whether or not God fulfilled his promise?
And yet, we see this progression.
Abraham and Sarah miraculously get pregnant.
They have kids, and they have kids, and they have kids,
and eventually this becomes a huge family.
Abraham, a small nation.
And so naturally, by Isaiah's time,
many Israelites had come to believe that they were somehow favored by God
because they were related to Abraham, were sons of Abraham.
So their racial identity had become an idol.
Right?
You ask a Jew in Isaiah's day,
What is your hope of salvation?
What's your hope of fellowship with God?
Well, you have to be born an Israelite.
You have to be of the right race.
It's salvation through race.
And if you're not, well, tough luck.
And still today, this doesn't exist in the same form today,
but still today, I would say that the church, God's people,
our world, our society in general, is deeply divided by race.
As we all know, I don't have to make that case for you.
We're reminded of it again and again and again in the news.
We're reminded of it when we look around this room.
Deeply divided by race.
Here in D.C. there are white churches and African-American churches
and Hispanic churches and Korean churches.
Because of our tendency to want to be around people who look and act like we do.
And there's been a tendency all through the history of the church
to assume that God must be with you more.
That God must prefer your kind of worship music more.
That God must be more glorified by your culture of worship than anyone else.
That God, the way you talk about God, that you must have it more right.
Now, we don't say this, but many of us think it.
On some deep level.
So that's foreigners.
But also, it goes on, and it doesn't just address people who are of other races.
It addresses eunuchs.
Let not the eunuchs say, behold, I am a dry tree.
Now, eunuch in the Bible is a complicated category.
It's a very broad category.
It can refer to any number of situations.
In the ancient Near East, you don't have a free market society.
Right?
You have the entire political and economic sphere was governed largely by kings and emperors.
Who had, you know, it was monarchy.
And many of these rulers had harems.
And one of the ways that you could, if you were just an average guy,
and you wanted to climb the ranks and have success in your career,
one of the ways that you could really put yourself, you know,
one of the things that would make your resume stand out from the pile,
is if you were castrated.
Because if you castrate yourself,
that king who has that harem,
knows, well, I can trust this guy,
not to fool around in the harem.
And so eunuchs would get promoted.
They would be put in positions of great trust and great responsibility.
They were given enormous amounts of power because these monarchs could trust them.
And it was one of the only ways you could climb the ladder of success,
was to castrate yourself.
But beyond that, there's also references, like Jesus says in Matthew 19,
that there are other kinds of eunuchs.
There are eunuchs who have been so from birth, he says.
People who are either asexual, or they lack sexual attraction,
or because of any number of sexual desires other than the opposite sex,
they would never procreate.
And what we need to see here is that in Isaiah,
the focus is really on procreation.
So when we hear the word eunuch,
and we think about people,
we think about any number of people who, for any number of reasons,
will not go on to procreate.
And the reason that that's the focus is because in the ancient Near Eastern culture,
I know I'm giving you a lot of context here,
but it's really important to understand this.
In this culture, family was everything.
Now we can't imagine that really in the same way because of the society we live in.
We're much more individualistic.
But in this society, if you had a family,
if you had kids, if you had a lot of kids,
and you could pass on the family name and the family land,
that was everything.
That was all of your hope.
To not have a family, to not have kids,
to be barren, to be unmarried,
to be a widow,
was a death sentence.
A death sentence.
To not have a family was a death sentence.
You were a nobody.
You were worse than a nobody.
So let's think about how this would apply today.
I mean, luckily today,
castration isn't as necessary
for career success and ascension.
Luckily, that's not really required for most jobs.
But here in D.C.,
here in D.C.,
we still have plenty of people
who have so prioritized career and success
that they have forsaken family.
They're not castrated,
but they're people who have basically said,
I can either choose to invest in a family
and finding somebody and getting married,
or I can invest in my career,
and I choose my career.
And that's a very viable choice today.
More and more and more people are making that choice.
And they get older and older and older,
and at some point,
their ability to get married,
their ability to have kids is gone,
and they're married to their career.
So this happens a lot.
Also, some of us are here and we're single,
and maybe we want to get married,
but for whatever reason,
it hasn't happened.
You just haven't found the right person.
It just hasn't worked out.
And though many people who are single
who want to get married
will end up getting married probably one day,
there will probably be some of us who don't.
And we're looking at life
as a single, unmarried person.
So there's also some people who have been married,
but you got divorced.
And so because you got divorced,
that's the reality that you face,
and you may not ever get remarried.
Some of us are married.
Some of us are married
and we really want to have kids,
but we struggle with infertility.
And no matter what you do,
no matter how hard you try,
no matter what methodology you employ,
no matter how much you research it,
for whatever reason,
doctors don't fully understand it.
You just aren't able to get pregnant.
Now I bring all these things up,
and you do a list like this,
and I want to recognize
each one of these things
is a source of great pain and great struggle.
Great pain and great struggle in our church.
These are very relevant issues
in our community right now.
So whether you've forsaken these things
because of your career,
or you haven't been able to get married
and you want to,
or you were married but divorced,
or you're unable to have children,
they're all categories of people
who would in some way fit
what Isaiah's talking about.
Because here's the thing.
Even though our culture is very individualistic,
I'll make a contention here.
You can feel free to disagree with me.
This is an observation.
Even though we're individualistic,
I think that paradoxically,
we still have a high idolatry
of the nuclear family.
I think they both coexist in our culture,
and it's a weird paradox.
But we still have a kind of paradoxical
idolatry
of the ideal
of getting married and having kids.
It's as though
the only valid way
to grow up
is to get married and have kids.
I don't know if that resonates with you at all,
but I know that
at least in the conservative church world,
this is very much encouraged,
this way of thinking.
Not overtly,
I think largely unintentionally.
But in the conservative church,
Christians have perpetuated this.
They've put the vision
of traditional family
kind of up on this pedestal.
And it said,
here's this ideal,
and they've defended it
from onslaught,
from all sides, right?
And what this does unintentionally
is it sends a message.
It says,
the only valid way
to become a grown-up
is to get married and have kids.
But,
unless you're marriageable
and fertile,
this is not for you.
And so then the question becomes,
well, what is there for me?
Silence.
Well,
I don't know.
You can join our singles ministry.
So if you're single or divorced,
or you're married but you're infertile,
or you're a gay or lesbian person
or transgender person
who's chosen to remain unmarried,
or you're an orphan,
you're a widow,
if you diverge in any way
from the ideal,
then you're made to feel
somehow incomplete,
like a second-class citizen,
like there's really not a place
for you here,
like you're somehow less than.
So this is why God,
from the beginning,
promised to establish
an entirely new kind of family.
This is why
the concept of nuclear family,
as good as it is,
is not good enough.
Because there are
way too many people in the world
for whom that's not going
to be a reality.
That's a huge need
right here in this city,
right here in our congregation.
So that leads us
to the second question,
what's so new
about God's family?
And I just want
to read you this.
Remember,
in light of the fact
that the servant
of the Lord has come,
in light of the fact
that Jesus has come,
here's what God says.
To the eunuchs
who keep my Sabbath,
who choose the things
that please me
and hold fast my covenant.
In other words,
to those who bind themselves
to the Lord
and say,
your way is my way,
I trust you,
I want to belong to you.
To those people,
I will give in my house
and within my walls
a monument and a name
better than sons and daughters.
I will give them
an everlasting name
that shall not be cut off.
So in other words,
you're worried about
not having kids?
In my house,
in my family,
in the family of God,
you're going to have
so many kids,
you're not going to know
what to do with them.
You're worried about your name
not being passed
to the next generation?
I will give you a name
and a monument
greater than sons and daughters.
Whatever blessing you think
that you might have
through a nuclear family,
you're going to find
so much more
in the family of God.
And then he goes on
and says,
and the foreigners
who join themselves
to the Lord
to minister to him,
to love the name of the Lord
and be his servants,
everyone who keeps the Sabbath
and does not profane it
and holds fast my covenant,
these I will bring
to my holy mountain
and make them joyful
in my house of prayer.
So what's he saying here?
Jesus came to establish
a new family.
And it's a family
that unlike nuclear families
is radically inclusive
in a way that no other family
on earth could be.
And you see this
regarding foreigners,
regarding racial division.
Regarding racial division,
this is why when Jesus came,
one of the first things he did,
and he did this multiple times,
in John's gospel,
he does it early,
in the other gospels,
he does it later in his ministry,
and what that means is
he probably did it multiple times.
He goes straight
to the temple in Jerusalem,
and he goes into the area
called the Court of the Gentiles,
where foreigners
were allowed to come.
You couldn't come in the temple,
but you could come
to the Court of the Gentiles.
It had been filled
with money lenders
and vendors
and animal sellers,
and so the Gentiles
couldn't get in to pray.
And so Jesus comes
and he kicks all those people out,
and what does he do?
He quotes this passage.
For it is written,
my house shall be a prayer,
a house of prayer
for all people.
In other words,
he's blatantly accusing them
of racism.
He's saying,
you're racist.
You've forgotten
what you're about.
You've forgotten
that this is meant
to be for everybody,
not just you,
but a global family.
Let not the foreigners say,
I am a second-class citizen
in God's family.
And the early Christians
got this,
and it's so beautiful
when you see
how the early church
lived this out.
I've said this before,
but one of my favorite
illustrations of this
is the story of Antioch,
which is the place
where Christians
were first called Christians,
and it was a derogatory term.
But in the city of Antioch,
when they built Antioch,
they didn't just build walls
around the city,
but they built large walls
to separate all of the ethnic groups
from one another.
And so there were at least
18 distinct
walled-off sectors
of the city.
So life was completely divided
along racial and ethnic lines.
Now, if you looked at a map of D.C.,
now we don't have physical walls,
but you could probably draw
some pretty strong lines,
and you'd see the same thing.
And guess what?
Until the Christian gospel came,
that was the way it was.
But when the Christian gospel
hit Antioch,
what the Christians began to do,
because they recognized
that the purpose
of the family of God
was to be a family
inclusive of all people,
they began to climb
over the walls.
And they began to share
the good news of Jesus
with everybody.
And so that's why
in that great place in Acts,
when we see the leaders,
the leaders who represent
the church in Antioch,
it's leaders from
all different races,
all different backgrounds,
who represented the leadership
of the church in Antioch.
And you know,
this is especially important
to remember on this weekend,
Martin Luther King weekend
of all weekends,
and to recognize
how much work
there is still to do.
So there was an overcoming
of racial division
because God's family
was never meant to be limited
to one race,
one ethnicity,
one culture,
one country.
All of the rhetoric
about America being
God's kind of chosen
Christian nation,
it completely
loses sight of this.
But then he goes on
and it talks about
all the people
who for various reasons
don't have a nuclear family
or a spouse
or they're not going to have
kids of their own.
It says,
let not the eunuch
say I'm a dry tree.
So it's saying this,
to all of us
who are single
or who are infertile
or who are divorced
or who have lost
our parents,
for whatever reason
we don't have
a nuclear family,
God is saying this,
that even the best family
in the world
is only a shadow
of what the family
of God is
and is becoming
and will be.
Even the best family
in the world
is only a shadow,
a preview
of what God's family
is going to be
in the world.
The family,
the church,
is our family.
The reality
of the church
is this,
everybody around you
who's a part of the church,
this is your family.
So all of the people
who are older than you,
those are your mothers
and your fathers.
They took this literally.
All of the people
who are younger than you,
those are your children.
You didn't know
you had so many children.
Why do you think
every week we pray
for our children together?
Have you ever thought
about what we pray?
We pray together
for our children
and then we pray
for ourselves
that we would be able
to raise them
knowing the Lord
and loving the Lord
because we recognize
that we share
in the responsibility
for raising our kids.
So when my five-year-old
is dancing up here,
for those of you
who can see him,
you know,
everybody should be thinking,
I wonder if he should
be doing that, right?
Not just me.
But I think it's great.
I love to see him dance.
But we should all
have a sense of responsibility
over one another's kids.
The people who are
your same age,
those are your brothers
and sisters.
You have many, many,
many brothers and sisters.
Everybody in here,
if you keep the Sabbath,
in other words,
if you have put your life
in God's hands
in Jesus Christ,
we are family.
And again,
the early church got this
and it radically changed
their lives.
You know,
Rodney Stark,
the sociologist,
historian,
researched the early church
and he says,
this is one of the main reasons
the church grew so quickly
in Rome.
It's because they took in
and cared for widows
and orphans
and eunuchs
and slaves,
people who didn't have
a family.
The Christians said,
we will be your family.
Right?
So they would say to widows,
you don't have to remarry
unless you want to
because we will
be family for you.
They said to the orphans,
we will be your mothers
and your fathers.
You know,
they said to the eunuchs,
here you're going to have
more children
than you know
what to do with.
And they believed it
and they lived it out.
Christian households
were full of people
who were not just
biological family,
but people who had been
taken in and adopted
and become a part
of their household.
This is a vision
for what the church
needs to be today.
It's a commitment
to rethinking
what it means
to be family.
See,
most of us think,
I have a family
and I go to church.
This is saying,
no, no, no, no, no.
The church is your family.
That is the source,
that is the locus
of your primary loyalty
if you're a Christian,
is to the Christian community.
Now,
if you have a family,
that's great,
but that's a part
of a larger thing.
And that's why
it's so amazing
when you see guys
like Stanley Hauerwas
talking about
how radically
this redefined
the concept of family.
He says,
the thing that made
Christianity unique
among all the
traditional religions
is that this is
the only place
where you see
singleness
and marriage
as two equally
viable vocations.
No longer
is marriage necessary.
No longer
is it the only vision
for a way
to be an adult
in the world.
Then all of a sudden
you have singleness
and marriage
and they both
represent something
about God
and they both
represent something
about the Christian community
and they're both
necessary.
And in fact,
a lot of the early writers,
the church fathers
would say that
singleness was preferable
to marriage
for all of these reasons
because they recognized
that in the church
they had gained
a family
that is unimaginably
large
and inclusive
more than you could
ever dream of.
There's a great example
of this in C.S. Lewis'
The Great Divorce.
If you haven't read
The Great Divorce,
it's a shorter book.
It's essentially
about a field trip
that some people
take from hell
to heaven
and it essentially
becomes a kind
of character study
and you see
a series of characters
excuse me
you see a set
of characters
who are all
kind of on the edge
of a choice
between the self-absorption
of hell
and the joyful loss
of self found
in heaven.
And so the narrator
is witnessing
all of these people
and also seeing
these heavenly beings.
And at one point
the narrator turns
and sees this
beautiful procession.
You know,
think of the greatest
bridal possession
you've ever seen.
It's this glorious
procession with singing
and dancing
and all of this
and down either side
of the street
streams of children.
Boys on one side,
girls on the other,
these children dancing.
And at the very center
of it all
is this beautiful woman
who's surrounded
by attendants.
And so he says,
he asks who she is
and his guide
says this,
his guide says,
it's someone
you'll never have
heard of.
Her name on earth
was Sarah Smith
and she lived
at Golders Green.
And the narrator
says,
well she seems
to be a person
of particular importance.
And the narrator
says,
aye,
she is one
of the great ones.
You've heard
that fame
in this country
and fame on earth
are two quite
different things.
So the narrator
says,
and who are
all these young men
and women
on either side?
Who are all
these children?
And the guide
responds,
they're her sons
and daughters.
And he says,
well she must have
had a very large
family, sir.
And listen to
what the guide
says,
every young man
or boy
that met her
became her son.
Even if it was
only the boy
that brought the meat
to her back door,
every girl
that met her
was like her daughter.
And the narrator
still not fully
getting it says,
isn't that a bit
hard on their
own parents?
No,
says the guide.
There are those
that steal
other people's
children.
But her motherhood
was of a different
kind.
Those on whom
it fell
went back
to their natural
parents loving
them more.
And here at the
end,
here is the
summation,
the explanation
of how this
is possible.
The abundance
of life she
has in Christ
from the
father
flows over
into them.
So what is he
saying here?
That there's this
woman who nobody
had heard of,
who likely
didn't even
have kids.
We meet her
husband,
but we hear
no mention
of them
having children.
Her husband
is a little
wispy ghost
who ends up
choosing hell
rather than
choosing to
remain with her
in heaven.
And,
but we never
hear of any
earthly kids,
and yet in
the heavenly
reality,
which is
more real
than the
earthly reality.
That's one of
the things
about this
book,
that the
heavenly reality
is more
real.
She has
countless
sons and
daughters.
Why?
Because of the
way she loved
them.
They weren't
biologically her
own children,
but the love of
Christ flowed
through her
into them
and joined
them to her
as a family,
a family that
is more real
than her
nuclear family.
We see her
husband
disappearing,
withering,
into this
hellish existence.
But we see
her as this
beautiful,
radiant queen
attended by
children for
miles and
miles.
Let not the
eunuch say I'm
a dry tree.
See,
though Jesus
Christ has
established,
or through
Jesus Christ,
God has
established an
entirely new
kind of
family.
So the
question becomes,
how do we
become a part
of this
family?
And I said
this would be
very quick
because we're
out of time.
I knew we
would be out
of time.
So how do we
join God's
family?
I'm not
going to get
into all
kinds of
bullet points.
I just want
to tell you
a story.
I want to
remind us
as we close
here of the
story that we
see in Acts
chapter 8.
You heard it
read a little
while ago.
I just want
to remind you
of the story.
Here's how you
become a part
of this
family.
You read
Acts chapter 8
and you see
the story of
this Ethiopian
eunuch.
Double whammy,
he's a foreigner
and he's a
eunuch.
And we see
that he's this
great high
official in the
Ethiopian court.
He's over all
the money.
Israel.
And he's
obviously been
reading and
hearing about
this God of
Israel.
And he's been
studying and so
he wants to
come and see
is there anything
that this God
has to offer me?
Is there anything
that this God
has that's
relevant to me?
And if you know
anything about that
journey, it was
incredibly long,
incredibly perilous,
incredibly dangerous,
incredibly expensive.
Travels all the way
to Jerusalem.
What would have
happened when he
got to the temple?
Can't come in.
Sorry.
So Acts 8 tells
us that he's
returning from this
trip and he's
reading in Isaiah.
He's reading in the
chapter in around
the 50s.
No chapter
numbers back
then, but he's
reading around the
50s where we are
in Isaiah.
Why is he reading
Isaiah?
Because he's trying
to figure out why
they wouldn't let
him in.
And he's reading
it and he's
reading about this
suffering servant in
chapters 52 and
53.
And it says he's
reading about this
person and surely
he's read a little
bit later when it
says, because of
this servant, because
of what the servant
has done, let not
the eunuch say, I'm a
dry tree.
I will give the
eunuch a name and
a monument.
And so you can
imagine him reading
that, going back to
the servant, reading
that, going back to
the servant, and
wondering who in the
world is this servant?
And so Philip shows
up and he says, do you
understand what you're
reading?
And he says, no I
don't because I need
somebody to explain it
to me.
And I almost think
that's a veiled
reference to the
people in Jerusalem.
I want to understand
this.
And they slam the
door in my face.
Who is this servant?
And he says, is it the
prophet or is he
talking about somebody
else?
And what does
Philip do?
And Philip began
to share with him
the good news of
Jesus Christ.
And what does the
eunuch do at the
end when he hears
about Jesus?
He sees water, maybe
nothing more than a
little puddle on the
side of the road.
And he says, well
there's water.
Baptize me right
now.
Now why does he say
that?
Because of what it
says in Isaiah 56.
Let the eunuch who
binds himself to me, who
throws his lot in with
me, who says I want
your way to be my
way, I want your
people to be my
people, I want your
name to be my name, to
replace my name.
Let not that person
say, behold I'm a dry
tree, I will give you
a monument better than
sons and daughters, an
everlasting name.
And he says, I want
that, I need that, and
Jesus can give that to
me, and what does it
require of me?
It requires that I
repent, that I accept
his forgiveness, and
that I'm baptized.
Why?
Because baptism is what
marks our entry into the
family of God.
It's baptism.
baptism.
That's the distinguishing
family characteristic.
And so he says, I want
that right now.
So what we see here is
this, the new family of
God is not a family of
blood, it's a family of
faith.
And what this story shows
us here is this profound
truth that we're going to
continue to unpack over the
next several weeks, that in
God's family, water is
thicker than blood.
Water is thicker than
blood.
God, let's pray.
Our Father, we're talking
about things that are big
and maybe even seemingly
abstract.
May we not hear this and
simply think it's something
curious to ponder, but
rather, Lord, I pray that
whatever of this is from
you, that it would strike
us, that it would strike
our hearts, that we would
look at our own houses, our
own families, our own
friendships, that we would
look, those of us who are
a part of this church, that
we would look at the way we
think about this community
and that this would kindle
and inspire our imaginations
to wonder what would it look
like if we lived this out?
What might our church, what
might our community, our
friendships, how might our
houses look different if this
became more real to us?
We pray this in your son's
holy name.
Amen.