I was reading through this wonderful post over at Queermergent by Nadia Bolz-Weber and a couple things jumped out at me that I hadn’t considered when reading this in the book of Acts 8:
….I was always told that the message of this text was that we should tell everyone we meet about Jesus because in doing so we might save them. We might convert them. We might change them into being us.
….But when Phillip joined this person who sought to worship God despite his exclusion form the tent, maybe it was Phillip himself who was converted to the faith.
….The only commands came from God and the command was go and join. Go and join the other. What we don’t know is if the Spirit also gave the Eunuch a command to invite. Invite this nice Jewish boy – representative of all that clings to the law and rejects you from God’s house. Invite him to sit by you. Go…join…invite…ask questions. Perhaps Phillip in his encounter with this gender transgressive foreigner learned what seeking the Lord looks like.
A lot of what I read is from what I was told to read and how to view those scriptures, never was there an alternative perspective that was looked upon with respect toward the individual who was giving it. However, as I have gotten older I have come to realize that the world isn’t picture that my parents portrayed and neither is the spiritual world that my pastors and teachers taught about. Instead when we read the bible we should look at the verse not from just the writer’s POV or the primary actors POV but also and in many cases, from the POV of the person who is looked down on,humiliated or considered a second-class person.
So many times those that are not the primary actors in the story are invisible to us, the ones we don’t like are ignored and so on. The same is true for gays, we are either invisible or ignored and yet our love for God is there in spite of this disrespect. Occasionally someone will notice the struggle that we are overcoming and be converted to God again and again. That is why it is so important that no matter our rights in this world, we need to continue living as a citizen of God’s world, where we know we are called “children of God.”
