Thoughts on...
May 10: 5th Sunday of Easter
New Testament Lesson: Acts 8:26-40

Our Lesson this week is a message for those who...
believe they are not good enough
have done too many wrongs
ask the question, how can anyone love me?
experience humiliation and who have been ostracized by society.

The Ethiopian Eunuch was beautiful, rich and powerful yet in the eyes of the Jewish tradition he was an outcast and was forbidden to even enter the temple. No one was allowed to talk with him, or have a meal with him, or even touch him.

He had gone to Jerusalem to worship, he knew there was something there that he wanted and yet he did not find the very thing in which he sought. Only in the desert did he find Philip, a deacon walking along the road, who the Spirit of God had placed there for just such a time as the Eunuch's passing.

So it was in this right place, at the right time, reading the right scripture that the Holy Spirit changed the Eunuch's life. All the shame, humiliation, desperation, and rejection was erased and he felt the acceptance of Christ through the words and actions of Philip as he explained the Isaiah passage, (the suffering servant text) to him.

Thank God for Jesus Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.