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Sermon for the week of Trinity 15
Deuteronomy 6:4-7 + Acts 8:26-39
In God let us trust. Jesus urged His disciples, in Sunday’s Gospel, to turn away from our trust in Mammon, and to turn away from the worry that comes with trusting in Mammon, and to put our trust in God, our heavenly Father, who cares for us more than we can fathom, and who has promised to provide all that we need for this body and life, so that we don’t have to worry about it. We can give it to God to worry about it for us. Jesus’ words in Matthew 6 focused on our bodily needs. But what He said applies just as much to our spiritual needs, as we heard in our two Scripture Lessons this evening.
First, we heard about God’s usual way of providing for the spiritual needs of children. It’s through godly parents who have received His word, and who are now instructed to pass on that word to their children, to make it an integral part of their upbringing. These words which I command you today, said Moses, shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. Just as our heavenly Father sometimes provides food and clothing through the kindness of others, so He has set it up within His Church to provide spiritual teaching to Christian children through the diligence of Christian parents who love Him.
In addition to that—not in place of, but in addition—He provides pastors to teach the children of the congregation. “Feed My Lambs,” Jesus said to Peter, as the representative of the apostles. Pastors are part of God’s plan of providing for children spiritually.
Then, in our second Lesson, we heard how God provided for the spiritual needs of a grown man, a non-Jew, by ethnicity, an Ethiopian eunuch from the court of Queen Candace. Now, just to be accurate, the Ethiopia referred to in the book of Acts was not the modern country of Ethiopia. It was farther north, along the Nile River, the kingdom of Kush, or Nubia, in the northern part of what we now call the Sudan.
So we know roughly where the Ethiopian was from. We know he was a high court official, a “eunuch of great authority.” What else do we know about him? Well, we’re told that he had made the long journey to Jerusalem “to worship.” He was what was known as a proselyte, a Gentile who had adopted the religion of the Jews—adopted it so deeply that he made the long journey to Jerusalem to seek God in His temple, so deeply that, as he rode in his chariot—maybe more like a covered wagon, where he sat in the back—he was reading from the prophet Isaiah, which means he had spent the money to get a copy of it, which was no small feat in those days.
So here was a man who had come to know the true God, was devoted to worshiping Him and learning His word, but who had no teacher. He had not yet heard what the Old Testament prophecies were all about, or how Jesus of Nazareth had fulfilled them, how Jesus was the promised Christ, the Son of God, and the Savior in whom all men must believe if they are to be saved.
God didn’t allow this faithful man to return home still ignorant of the Gospel, to return home without a teacher. No, God provided exactly what he needed, and He did it miraculously, through a man named Philip.
Now Philip, later called an Evangelist, is first introduced to us in Acts chapter 6. He was one of seven men chosen and ordained by the Church in Jerusalem to help the apostles, specifically to serve the needy among the Gentiles in Jerusalem who had become Christians. Stephen, the first martyr, was one of those seven. But what do we find both Philip and Stephen doing? They’re not just waiting tables. They’re both out there preaching the Gospel, Stephen among the Jews in Jerusalem, and Philip here with the Ethiopian, where the Holy Spirit had personally sent him.
Go near and overtake this chariot, the Spirit somehow communicated to Philip. Now, either the chariot was going very slowly, or Philip was miraculously enabled to run and catch up to it. He heard the man reading aloud from the book of Isaiah, chapter 53, and asked, Do you understand what you’re reading? How can I, he replied, unless someone guides me?
Philip became that guide, provided directly by God. He explained how Jesus was the fulfillment of that very passage, led as a sheep to the slaughter and put to death, just as Isaiah had prophesied. But He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities. And then He was raised from the dead, as Isaiah also prophesied in that same chapter, to give repentance, and forgiveness of sins, and eternal life to Israel and to all who believe in Him. Philip ministered to the spiritual needs of the Ethiopian man. And his teaching obviously included the teaching about Holy Baptism, too, because, as soon as they came to a little water there in the desert, the Ethiopian asked to be baptized. And Philip baptized him, and then miraculously disappeared. What became of that Ethiopian man after that, we don’t know. Scripture is silent. But we have this important testimony to the fact that God provides for the spiritual needs of those who seek sincerely seek Him, as the Ethiopian man did.
We’ve seen God’s extraordinary spiritual providence among us in a similar way. He’s provided a faithful congregation with a pastor, and a pastor with a congregation, both absolutely devoted to the Word of God and to confessing the truth of the Gospel. Neither can function without the other. And when Christians in other parts of the country sought the ministry of the Word, God provided for them, too, bringing them into our little church from afar. And there are other faithful ministers and congregations out there, too, some of which we know and are in fellowship with, others of which we don’t, yet. There is a tragic scarcity in the world, both of faithful pastors and of faithful Christians who are willing to make the sacrifices required to remain outside of the larger but less faithful churches. There are many Christians in the world who wonder, who maybe even worry, how can the ministry survive in such a hostile environment? Where will the pastors come from who aren’t false teachers, who have bound themselves to heterodox church bodies? Where will the congregations come from who don’t want programs or gimmicks or entertainment, but just the genuine ministry of Word and Sacrament?
In God let us trust. He knows those who are His. He hears the prayers of His children, begging Him to put them in contact with other Christians and with the ministry of His Word that’s untainted by falsehood. And you can trust in Him to provide.
But remember: Do not worry about tomorrow. Tomorrow’s church, tomorrow’s ministry is beyond what we can see, beyond what we can plan for, and certainly beyond what we should worry about. Use the ministry you’ve been given today, and give thanks for it today. Keep studying God’s Word, as the Ethiopian did, and place the spiritual needs of tomorrow into your heavenly Father’s wise, loving, and capable hands. Amen.
