April 30, 2020
Angels talking to Philip. Well, that doesn’t happen every day.
Giving him instructions and directions.
Head south.
Take the desert route.
So he got up and went out.
Splendor in the grass (well … dust)
Philip speaks to the Ethiopian as Jesus did the Emmaeans, with authority. He began with the black man’s question, he continued with the good news of Jesus. And then in the desert, they found water.
What is to prevent me from being baptized? And he ordered the chariot to stop.
Down in the water
God pours out, pours over him
Life! Out of thin air
I want what you’re having, Philip. What joy came upon you right there in the middle of the road.
When we went to Danville Correctional Center on Sunday nights – who got blessed, the helpers or the seekers? We learned more from them than they learned from us. The residents, the inmates were so glad to see us, and they sang at the top of their lungs. But we were filled to the brim with the joy of being where the angel told us to be.
Many of them were from the south side of Chicago. Many of us, students at the University of Illinois, were from the suburbs around Chicago. Often they were black. Usually we were white. Limited as we were by space and time, we mingled with each other and felt made clean.
Bless our God, he has given life to our souls and has not let our feet slip.
A chaplain at Graham Correctional Center told our ministry team, “The only difference between you and the guys on the inside is that you have exercised your self-control. You have said no when that was the right thing to say.”
He has not let our feet slip. (Acts 8 and Psalm 66)
With his stories, John draws out the mystic in Jesus. I am the living bread that came down from heaven, and if you eat this bread you will live forever. Jesus draws out the mystic in me. The Pharisees might have been more interested in the horizontal nuts and bolts of everyday life. Jesus healed his neighbors, what could have been more practical? But then he carried on like a desert monk, disregarding convention, ignoring the Sabbath, and with his words wrecking our already-tenuous relationship between heaven and earth.
Live forever? I’m happy just to get to the end of my seventy years, or eighty if I have the strength, and fly away.
Fly away where?
Whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Of life eternal.
Lift up your heads, ye mighty gates. Let us in. We are believers, and we have eaten the bread of life. Jesus invited us, and here we are.
Let us in where? (John 6)
Don’t ask for answers, David. You wouldn’t understand them. My son, Rilke the poet said it well, “Try to love the questions themselves. You would not be able to live the answers. And the point is, to live everything.”
Tell that to the Pharisees.
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