When I was ordained as a deacon, the Bishop said something I have never forgotten. "Sisters and brothers in Christ, the Holy Spirit will lead you somewhere you don't want to go. If you wanted to go there, the Spirit would be unnecessary."
I thought of those words recently when our First Reading one Sunday was about Phillip and the Ethiopian Eunuch. Philip was one of the first seven deacons selected and set apart by the laying on of hands. I'm pretty sure that hitch-hiking in the wilderness was not what Phillip and the others had in mind when they accepted the call to serve the Lord. After all, the need presented to them was food distribution to the widows – nothing whatsoever was said about going on the road, preaching, baptizing or anything like that. But like the Bishop said, "The Holy Spirit will lead you somewhere you don't want to go," or at least somewhere you never expected to go, doing things you never expected to be doing. "Get up and go," the Spirit said, and Phillip "got up and went." He was told no more than that he should head south to the road between Jerusalem to Gaza, not even what it was he was supposed to do when he got there.
This is a recurring theme in the scriptures; this business of God saying, "get up and go," and people of faith "getting up and going." Let's see, among many others - there are Abram and Sarai, told to leave Ur of the Chaldees and go to "the land that I will show you." There's Jonah, who first "got up and went" the other way, but after that mis-adventure with the fish, the second time God called he came around and got up and went. And most famously, there's Saint Paul who, after his experience of the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus was told to "Get up and go" to the street called Straight. And Paul "got up and went."
We are, I am, a lot more hesitant than Abram and Sarai, or Phillip, or Paul. We are, I am, a lot more like Jonah – apt to run in the opposite direction, or at least to ask for specifics of the job and add conditions for our participation. "I'm available on Tuesdays – after Pilates" "I'll go anywhere – but no, not there, that won't work for me." "I'm not sure I'm suited to working with those people – they push me too far out of my comfort zone."
And do you know how God generally responds to our hesitation and condition making? Pretty much the way our parents responded when we explained to them why we couldn't make our bed, or do the dishes, or mow the grass. God stands there and listens, and then says, "That's nice. Now, get up and go."
Truly, it's a good thing that God does not fully explain things to us before asking us to respond to the call. If God did tell us everything we would face, most of us would not say yes. It would be too frightening. And the reason it would be too frightening is that we would foolishly assume that God was asking us to do these impossible, over-whelming, out of our comfort zone things using our own reason and strength, our own ability and skill; and nothing could be further from the truth. God doesn't tell us what we'll be doing because the main thing God needs from us is our willingness to go, our willingness to trust that when the ministry need appears, the ability to respond to it will appear as well.
This is what happened to Phillip. He got up and went to the south, to the road that runs through the wilderness from Jerusalem to Gaza. And as he stood there, "an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians," came along in his chariot. Now, suppose God had said to Phillip, "I want you to go and talk about Jesus with one of the most powerful people in the world. And by the way; he's not Jewish, indeed he's ritually unclean because of his sexuality, and he's an African." How excited would Phillip have been about that? On the one hand he might have felt overwhelmed and under prepared; on the other hand, he may have been like Paul and Jonah – unwilling to go because he didn't want to be involved with one of "those people." But God didn't give Phillip that kind of choice.
And he doesn't give us that kind of choice either. We are called to go where the Holy Spirit leads us – whether we want to go there or not. We are called to open our doors - our arms, our hearts, and our minds - to all people; not just the people we happen to like and who happen to like us. When God calls us to get up and go, the only faithful response is to get up and go.
In the Biblical story, the eunuch asked Philip, "What prevents me from being baptized?" Here's a similar question for us: Are we preventing others from being baptized, from coming to faith, from hearing the story of Jesus? This is the question the early church had to continually ask itself. The book of Acts is the story of the first Christians learning to break down traditional boundaries between Jews and Greeks, slave and free, men and women, etc. etc. etc.
And the boundaries must continue to fall. Every time we think we're finished, every time we think we have finally gone as far as we can go, every time we believe we have opened our arms as wide as we can open them; the voice comes and whispers in our ear one more time, "Get up and go." And the question is, will it be said of Good Shepherd Church that we "got up and went?"
Peace,
Delmer