Born Eunuchs

Last Sunday, the pastor of one of the largest churches in America stood up and took a question a lot of pastors won’t touch. Somebody asked him what God thinks about homosexuality, and he didn’t duck it. He didn’t joke his way past it. He opened his Bible, he gave his answer, and before he did any of it he laid down a ground rule that I want to steal right here in front of everybody. He said we start with what the Bible says. Not with what’s popular. Not with what the culture has already decided. What the Bible says.

I want to be plain about this. I honor that man for taking the question. Most don’t. And I honor the ground rule, because it’s a good one. In fact it’s the only one worth having. So that’s exactly what we’re going to do today. We’re going to start with what the Bible says. All of it. Not the six verses everybody already has memorized. The whole sweep, the parts that get skipped, and I’ll tell you up front that the parts that get skipped include some words of Jesus himself, and they’re going to surprise some of you.

And one more thing before we start, because I know this room. Some of you love people on both sides of this question. You love the man in the pulpit across town and you love the kid who stopped coming, and Sunday is hard because of it. This sermon is for you too.

Here’s where I think the mistake gets made, and it gets made on both sides of this question. We read the Bible like a rulebook, and we go looking for the verse. Find the verse, quote the verse, case closed. But the Bible isn’t a rulebook. It’s a story, a long one, the story of God chasing down a world that keeps running from him, and if you lift six verses out of a story you can make them say almost anything. So today we’re going to stay inside the story. And the story has a character in it that almost nobody preaches on, because the character is awkward. The character is the eunuch.

Who the eunuch was

You need to know what a eunuch was in the ancient world, because the whole sermon hangs on it. A eunuch was a man who could not father children. Sometimes that was because he’d been castrated, sometimes because he was born different, and I’ll come back to that second kind in a minute, because Jesus does. But whatever the cause, here’s what mattered: in the law of Moses, the eunuch was out. Deuteronomy 23:1 says it flat. No eunuch could enter the assembly of the Lord. Not punished, exactly. Just barred. Whatever else he was, whatever he believed, however he prayed, he could stand outside the fence and look in, and he could never come in.

Think about what that meant for a real person. Your whole life, the house of God has a sign on it and your name is on the sign, in the law, in black and white. Everyone around you can go in. You can’t. And the law says it’s permanent, because the thing that excludes you is your body, and your body isn’t going to change.

Now hold that person in your mind, and let’s go see what God says to him.

The prophet

Isaiah 56. Isaiah is preaching to people who are looking at exile, who are worried about whether there’s going to be a future at all, and in the middle of it a foreigner and a eunuch both speak up. Listen to the eunuch’s words, because if you’ve ever been on the outside of the church looking in, you have said these words in your heart: “I am just a dry tree” (Isaiah 56:3). That’s what he calls himself. A tree with no future, no shade, no fruit, nothing coming after it. Cut off from the house of God, and cut off from any hope of being remembered, because in his world your name lived on in your sons. He has none. He is a dead branch walking.

And here is God’s answer. I want to read it exactly as it stands, because it’s one of the most staggering sentences in the Old Testament. “To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off” (Isaiah 56:4-5).

Sit with that. God doesn’t say, sorry, the rule’s the rule. God doesn’t say, come back when you’re fixed. God looks at the very category his own law excluded and he hands them a promise the rest of the crowd doesn’t get. Better than sons and daughters. In a world where sons and daughters were everything, God says, I have something for you that’s better than the thing you were told your whole life that you could never have. An everlasting name. And do not miss the wordplay, because Isaiah didn’t: a name that shall not be cut off, spoken to a man who was. God takes the exact language of the wound and turns it into the language of the promise.

And then God keeps going, and the next verse is the one you’ve heard before without knowing where it lived. “These I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples” (Isaiah 56:7). Jesus quoted that verse when he turned over the tables in the temple. It’s the verse about who the house belongs to. And here it is, in its original home, sitting right on top of a promise to the eunuch that God would accept him on the altar.

Now, some honest questions. Did God break his own law? I don’t think that’s the right way to put it. I think the law was a fence for a season, and God, in his own voice, through his own prophet, announced where the fence was headed. The exclusion was real. And the promise was more real. God named a people the law had ruled out, and he claimed them, out loud, in writing, before anybody asked him to. The direction of that sentence matters. Nobody lobbied for it. The eunuch didn’t organize. God just gave it.

That’s the first thing the Bible says when you start where the pastor said to start.

The Messiah

Now I want to take you to Matthew 19, because Matthew 19 was quoted from that stage last Sunday, and I want to read the rest of the chapter. The pastor quoted Matthew 19:4 and 5, where Jesus is asked about divorce and answers by pointing back to Genesis. “Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh?” That’s a true quote and a true reading. Marriage, as Jesus frames it here, is the union of a man and a woman, and I’m not going to stand up here and tell you otherwise. That’s what Genesis 2 says and that’s what Jesus says it says.

But here’s the thing. Jesus doesn’t stop talking. And what happens next is the part that got skipped.

The disciples hear the standard. One man, one woman, one flesh. Matthew’s Jesus does allow one narrow exception for unfaithfulness a verse earlier, but the bar is so high that the disciples do the math out loud. “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is better not to marry” (Matthew 19:10). If that’s the bar, why would anybody aim at it? Some of us have had that same thought about the whole Christian life, if we’re honest.

And Jesus answers the disciples’ complaint, not with a softer standard, but with something nobody was expecting. “Not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it is given. For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let anyone accept this who can” (Matthew 19:11-12).

Read the middle of that sentence again. Eunuchs who have been so from birth. From their mother’s womb, the old translations say. Jesus, standing in a conversation about marriage, about Genesis, about male and female, names a category of men who were born outside the Genesis pattern. Born that way. And those are Jesus’ words, not mine, not a psychologist’s, not a cable news anchor’s. He says some people, from the womb, do not fit the pattern he himself just finished describing. And he does not call them broken projects. He does not hand them a fix. He lists them alongside people who made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom, which was a holy calling in his sentence, and then he says, let anyone accept this who can.

I’ve heard people work very hard to explain that verse away, and I understand why. It’s an uncomfortable verse if your system is tidy. But we agreed on the ground rule, remember. What does the Bible say? The Bible says that when Jesus was asked about marriage, he affirmed marriage, and then three breaths later he blessed a category of people born outside of it, into the same sentence as kingdom renunciants, and told the disciples to let anyone accept it who can. The fence had a gate in it all along, and it’s been sitting in plain sight in this chapter for two thousand years.

And notice, please, what he did not say. He did not say the born eunuch must become un-eunuched. He did not prescribe a program. He named them where they stood. Whatever you believe this verse means, it has to mean at least this much: the people born outside the pattern are on Jesus’ lips, in Jesus’ vocabulary, and he does not sound surprised by them.

The church

From there the story moves fast, because the book of Acts is the story of the fence coming down one group at a time, and I want to show you the scene where it comes down for the eunuch.

Acts 8. Philip, one of the seven, is sent by an angel down a wilderness road, the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. Out in the middle of nowhere he spots a chariot, and in the chariot is the treasurer of Ethiopia, the man in charge of the treasury of a whole kingdom, and he is a eunuch. Luke calls him a eunuch five times in a few short verses, in case we missed it. He had come up to Jerusalem to worship, knowing the whole time what the law of Moses said about him, and he came back anyway, and he’s reading the scroll of Isaiah in his chariot on the way home. He’s reading the suffering servant passage, Isaiah 53, and he has no idea who it’s about.

Philip runs alongside and asks, do you understand what you’re reading? And the eunuch says the thing every serious Bible reader has said: how can I, unless someone guides me? So Philip climbs up into the chariot and tells him the good news about Jesus, starting with that very passage. And somewhere out there on that desert road the eunuch believes it.

And then comes the verse I named this sermon after. They come to some water, and the eunuch says, “Look, here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” (Acts 8:36).

What is to prevent me. He’s holding his own exclusion in his hands when he asks it. He knows the law. He knows what he is. Somebody told him his whole life, probably, and the scroll in his lap told him again. What is to prevent me?

And watch what does not happen. Philip does not say, first, let’s talk about your body. He does not say, first, the committee will review your case. He does not schedule a follow-up. In the oldest copies of Acts there isn’t even a gap there. The question comes out of his mouth, and the very next thing in the text is water, and Philip baptizes him on the spot, in the middle of nowhere, in the water that happened to be there, and the eunuch goes on his way rejoicing. The Orthodox Church in Ethiopia traces its founding, to this very day, back to this man in this chariot. That’s their story, it’s an old story, and I find I cannot blame them for it. One of the first people from outside the family of Abraham to come into the story of Jesus is a man the law said could never come in. And the Spirit of God arranged the whole meeting. It was the Spirit who sent Philip down that road. The Spirit went and got the excluded man and dragged a preacher out to meet him. You do not do that for somebody you’re planning to keep out.

“What is to prevent me?” is still the question. It’s being asked in this town this week, probably in this congregation, quietly, by people who have heard the sign their whole lives and love God anyway. And the story of the church’s own scripture is that when the question went up, heaven did not produce a list of preventions. It produced water.

The hard verses, read honestly

Now. I know what some of you are holding right now, and I’m not going to pretend I don’t. You’re holding the other six verses. The ones that get quoted at this topic every single time. And here is where the ground rule matters most. If we’re really going to start with what the Bible says, then we read those verses too, all of them, in their own language and their own context, which is exactly what the pastor across town told us to do. So let’s do it. Quickly, but honestly.

Sodom. Genesis 19 is an attempted gang rape, a mob trying to assault visitors, and the story itself is about hospitality and violence, not marriage. And when the Bible later explains what Sodom’s sin was, it says so plainly. Ezekiel 16:49: “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.” Pride and plenty and cruelty to the poor. That’s Sodom’s sin according to scripture, and I’d suggest a city full of churches ought to sit under that verse a while before we spend it elsewhere.

Leviticus. Two verses in the holiness code, the law that governs ancient Israel’s set-apart life: no mixed fabrics, no pork, no tattoos, and those two verses. I take Leviticus seriously, which is why I don’t preach from it as Christian law. It is the constitution of a nation we are not, and it says so itself, right at the head of the list: you shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, where I am bringing you (Leviticus 18:3). And notice it speaks of acts between men, in the context of cult prostitution and purity, because that was the world it governed. Nobody in the ancient world had a word for a fixed sexual orientation. The idea is younger than my grandmother. You cannot condemn a category the verse’s authors did not have a word for, and the honest reader admits that.

Romans 1. Paul’s heaviest passage, and we don’t dodge it. Paul describes pagans who exchanged the worship of God for idols, and he says their passions were dishonorable and they burned in their lusts one for another, doing things “against nature.” Here’s what’s honest to say about it. First, it’s a description of a descent, an escalating picture of idolatrous excess, not a discussion of people who loved each other and wanted to marry. Second, the phrase against nature, para physin in Greek, is the same phrase Paul uses in Romans 11:24 when he says God grafted the wild Gentile branches onto the cultivated olive tree contrary to nature. Now let’s be fair to the other reading. In Romans 1 the phrase describes something sad, a world turned over. But the same two words on Paul’s lips describe what God did to graft us in, and he called that salvation. So the phrase by itself is not the verdict. You still have to ask what it’s describing. And what Romans 1 describes is a descent into lust and idolatry. It is not a conversation about two people who love each other, keep their vows, and want to sit at the Lord’s table.

First Corinthians 6. Two Greek words appear in a list of wrongs. One of them is so rare that Paul seems to have coined it on the spot, and what exactly it covers is argued over by serious scholars to this day. And the English word homosexual, the word everybody quotes, did not show up in an English Bible until the middle of the last century, and careful translators have been rethinking it ever since. The verse condemns something real, exploitation and abuse, and I’m not here to excuse that. I’m here to tell you the case is not what the sound bite says it is.

And then the verse everybody stops at, verse 11, “and such were some of you.” I’ve heard it used as a door slamming. But read it standing up. Paul is writing to a church and telling them, you were a mess, all kinds of a mess, and you got washed, and you’re family now. It’s a verse about how wide the washing was. That’s not a verse to keep anybody out. That’s a verse about how nobody in the family earned the seat.

There. Six verses, read the way the pastor said to read them, in their context, in their language. I’m not telling you that settles every question in five minutes. I’m telling you the case is not what the sound bite says it is, and any Christian who tells you the Bible is simple on this has not done the reading they’re asking you to trust.

The fruit

Let me give you Jesus’ own method for settling a question like this, because he gave us one. Matthew 7, in the sermon on the mount, warning about false teachers: “You will know them by their fruits. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit” (Matthew 7:16, 18). Not by their arguments. By their fruits. That’s the test the Lord of the church handed us, and he wouldn’t have handed it to us if we weren’t allowed to use it.

So let’s use it, on both teachings, including my own. Fifty years of the traditional teaching, the one that says these folks must surrender the desire itself and live alone forever: what has it borne? It has borne some faithful celibate saints, and I want to stop and honor them properly, because they deserve better than a passing clause. I have known them. Men and women who took this book seriously, believed what they were taught it said, and chose alone, for life, for Jesus. Some of them are the holiest people I have ever met. And I want you to see what their calling has cost in churches like ours. They carry a loneliness most of us never think about. There is no Sunday on our calendar that blesses their vow. No ritual for their promise. No casserole sign-up that assumes them. Jesus said some people make themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, and he said let anyone accept this who can, and the church has spent two thousand years mostly not accepting it, and mostly not even noticing it. Their calling is real. If this sermon is right, it does not erase that calling. It only means it cannot be forced on everybody as the price of a seat in the pew.

And it has also borne a measurable harvest of kids on the street, families torn down the middle, and young people who sat in pews like this one, heard themselves called an abomination by the people who were supposed to tell them about the love of God, and left, and never came back, and some of them are not alive to come back. I’m not saying the teaching caused every one of those things. I am saying a tree is known by its fruit, and we are allowed to look at the orchard. Fruit does not get the last word over the book. The book judges the orchard, not the other way around. But when the Lord himself tells us how to recognize a tree, he does not forbid us to walk in and look.

Now the other orchard. Congregations that welcome gay Christians into full membership and full ministry. What grows there? People who stayed. People who pray, who tithe, who teach the children’s classes, who show up when somebody’s in the hospital, who raise their kids to love Jesus and stay married and serve the town. The Spirit’s fruit, the list Paul gave us, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, is growing on those trees. I have looked. I’ve met the orchard. And I’ll say something against my own side while we’re here. An open church can slide into telling people whatever they came to hear. The way we guard against that is the same way we guard everything: keep reading the whole book, and let scripture sit in judgment on our experience, not the other way around. And Peter’s question at the Jerusalem meeting rings right down the centuries at anybody who wants to prune this orchard anyway: “If God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?” (Acts 11:17).

Where that leaves us

Before I say what I’ve come to say, I owe you one more thing. I have not always believed this. I preached the other sermon, more than once, from this very book, and I meant it when I preached it. Nobody handed me the new position at a conference. I went slow. I read the six verses harder than I had ever read them. I sat across tables from people the church had wounded and I listened longer than was comfortable. And I’ll tell you plainly, I could be wrong. I have prayed about that more than about anything I have ever preached. But I have come to believe, and I have to tell you what I believe.

Is homosexuality a sin? I have come to believe the answer is no, not the orientation, not the faithful committed love between two people of the same sex. What is sin is what sin has always been: lust, exploitation, faithlessness, cruelty, worship of the self. Those are available to every human being on earth, and the married straight couple down the street has no easier access to holiness than anybody else.

And I want to be honest about what I just did. Faithful Christians have read those six verses the old way for two thousand years. Many of them were better people than I’ll ever be. I have just told you I think they read them wrong, and I do not say that lightly, and I have not pretended, this morning, that the folks who disagree with me are fools. If you walked in believing what the church has mostly taught, I’m asking for one thing only, the same thing the pastor across town asked: take the whole book, read it in its own words, and see.

The famous pastor said our goal isn’t to be right, our goal is to be more like Jesus. I agree with him all the way down. And the Jesus I find in the book said the sign on the door of the house of God was coming down, named the people born outside the pattern with his own mouth, and rode in a chariot’s worth of grace down to a desert road to answer one excluded man’s question before the man could even finish asking it.

What is to prevent me?

Nothing. There is water. Come on in.

Amen.