BIBLETELLING
Below is the Narrative Lectionary passage for the coming week. It is followed by Bruce’s notes on the text which aim at a general understanding of the text and some notes on the structures and techniques used by the Biblical storytellers.
Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip,1 “Go south to the road—the desert road—that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.”2 So he started out, and on his way he met an Ethiopian eunuch, an important official in charge of all the treasury of the Kandake3 (which means “queen of the Ethiopians”). This man had gone to Jerusalem to worship,4 and on his way home was sitting in his chariot reading the Book of Isaiah the prophet.5 The Spirit told Philip, “Go to that chariot and stay near it.”
Then Philip ran up to the chariot6 and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked.
“How can I,” he said, “unless someone explains it to me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.
This is the passage of Scripture the eunuch was reading:
“He was led like a sheep to the slaughter,
and as a lamb before its shearer is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
In his humiliation he was deprived of justice.
Who can speak of his descendants?
For his life was taken from the earth.”7
The eunuch asked Philip, “Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?”8 Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.9
As they traveled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?”10 And he gave orders to stop the chariot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip baptized him. When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again,11 but went on his way rejoicing.
Acts 8:26-39
THREE STORIES
The following three stories pair well with the Narrative Lectionary passage for the coming week. They are followed by Danny’s sermontelling footnotes which explore the stories’ theological connection to the passage as well as insights into craft and performance. Our advice is to read the story first before digging into the footnotes.
Bakos the Beloved
There is a hush in the streets of Jerusalem as an enclosed chariot, trots down the main road to the gate. People stop what they’re doing to see the rare sight. A very wealth man in true purple robes was rare enough. His dark black skin was rarer still. He had the air of a prince. Who was he?12
Ethiopian Christians have long venerated the man we westerners often call the Ethiopian Eunuch. They credit him bringing Christianity to their part of the world and their tradition has given him the name, Bakos.13 And because nobody should simply be reduced to where they’re from or how they are different, and because everybody deserves the dignity of a name, we too shall call him Bakos.14
This is just as well, because Bakos wasn’t actually from modern-day Ethiopia. He was from Cush, the African Kingdom just south of Egypt. Bakos was a personal servant of the Queen. He was selected at a very early age to be the Queen’s servant, and he was castrated to serve in her court. He quickly showed promise and rose through the ranks to become the Queen’s personal treasurer. This meant two things: Bakos was good at arithmetic and he had the Queen’s absolute trust. As a result of this, Bakos was very wealthy. So wealthy that he rode around in an enclosed chariot. So wealthy he could afford to check out books from the Library of Alexandria. So wealthy he could wear clothes dyed in purple! In Cush, Bakos was the ultimate insider.
But here in Jerusalem, Bakos is the ultimate outsider.15 Here in Jerusalem, he is a curiosity. He seemed so foreign and exotic to them. Bakos didn’t mind it though. The people were always friendly and, if he was honest, Bakos found Judea’s to be equally strange and exotic. But he was strangely drawn to these people and to their God. Having grown up with a complicated pantheon of gods, there was something about the one God of Israel that seemed so pure and simple to him. It was the sort of God that Bakos longed to worship. But he was not able to. Earlier in the day, he had tried.
Bakos had discovered in his diplomatic dealings with people that worshipping with them and acknowledging their God was a good way to build a relationship. But he was unable to in Jerusalem. They had very strict rules about who could worship in the temple. Eunuchs were not allowed. Something Bakos was politely but firmly told when he disrobed to become ceremonially cleansed. It had something, they said, to do with ‘the mark of the covenant.’ Whatever that meant.
Bakos was used to being excluded from certain activities because of his difference. He had been castrated at a very young age. It had been done to him so that he wouldn’t be a threat to his female sovereign and because it was believed that Eunuch’s inability to reproduce made him more trustworthy.16
But this same difference that made him an insider in the palace had made him an outsider everywhere else. His difference made Bakos more effeminate than other men. He often was not included in their society. He couldn’t shake the feeling that they found him icky and gross. At the same time, he would never enjoy the romantic company of women. In Egyptian scrolls, Eunuchs were listed as a third category somewhere between male and female. Bakos walked between worlds, never feeling fully included or fully accepted.
Perhaps that was why his mind was so focused on Spiritual matters. Perhaps Bakos longed to find the acceptance in the divine realm that he would never fully find in here in the human one.
Before he left for Jerusalem, Bakos obtained a Greek copy of the scroll of Isaiah and he’s been reading it. Now, as he leaves on the wilderness road to Gaza to catch his ship back to Cush, he’s on chapter 53: the song of the suffering servant. And he can’t make heads or tails of it. Who is this passage talking about? Who suffered for the healing of the people? So strange.
Bakos is thinking this to himself when he looks out his window and sees a man17 jogging alongside his chariot.
“Friend!” the man called out, “I couldn’t help but overhear you reading to yourself from the scroll of Isaiah. I know that particular passage is confusing. Do you understand what you are reading?”
The Eunuch stared at the Jewish man jogging along side him and it occurred to him that this might be an opportunity to talk to someone who could answer his questions. So he called back. “How can I understand unless someone explains it to me?”
So Bakos’ chariot slows down and the man comes inside and sits down next to him. “Hi, my name is Phillip,” the man says, “What is your name?”
“Bakos.”
So the two begin to talk about the scroll. Bakos reads aloud the part about the lamb:
He was led like a sheep to the slaughter,
and as a lamb before its shearer is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
In his humiliation he was deprived of justice.
Who can speak of his descendants?
For his life was taken from the earth.“Tell me,” said Bakos, “Who is the prophet talking about here? Is he referring to himself or someone else?”
Phillip is actually impressed. This is a pretty insightful question for an outsider. This is the sort of question rabbis might debate. Phillip wasn’t a rabbi but he just happened to know the answer.
“Someone else…,” Phillip says.
And then he tells Bakos all about Jesus of Nazareth. How God sent him to teach us how to live and love and how, though he was innocent of all wrong doing, he died for the sins of humanity. He told Bakos that all of us are the sheep who have been led astray because we do things that are contrary to God’s plan. He told Bakos that because of our sin and brokenness, we are in need of healing and redemption. Phillip then explained that Jesus was no ordinary man. In fact, he was God himself made flesh. He explained that when Jesus was executed on a cross by the state and the religious establishment, he was not only dying for their list of made up crimes, he was also dying for all our real crimes. He explained that Jesus did this out of love and that if we trust in his sacrifice, we can be forgiven of all our sins.
“See,” said Phillip, “that is what it means when it says: ‘He was pierced for our transgressions’ and ‘by his wounds we are healed.’”
When Phillip got done explaining all of this, there were tears in Bakos’ eyes. At first, they were a few solemn respectable tears but soon he was weeping.
It’s hard to say why Bakos responded the way he did. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that this suffering servant was different from any god he’d ever encountered.
The suffering servant certainly wasn’t like the gods Bakos grew up with. The Cushite gods were basically the Egyptian pantheon with a fresh coat of paint. These gods were angry and punitive. They generally didn’t care about the people down below. All they cared about was being fed by sacrifices. If you wanted one of those gods to bless you in some way, you had to rouse them from their slumber with a sacrifice of some kind. But here was a God who was the complete opposite. This God is the sacrifice. He is the one who rouses us and gets our attention. Who gives us his body and blood.
The suffering servant wasn’t like the gods of the Cushites but he also wasn’t like the god of the philosophers. The Eunuch had read all the works of the Greek philosophers who spoke of God in such abstract terms. They called the deity things like a ‘first cause’ or an ‘unmoved mover.’ Unlike the Cushite gods who were passionate and irrational, the philosopher’s God was rational but passionless. He had created everything and then sort of receded from the picture. He didn’t really feel one way good or bad about his creation.
But the suffering servant was both rational and passionate about his people. He was a God of love who was ready to lay down his life to see his people healed and restored. A God like that was something Bakos saw as a reason for hope and a cause for Joy.
Perhaps it was even more basic than that. Maybe in that moment Bakos didn’t feel so much that he finally understood God. He was too wise and learned for that. No, in this suffering servant, Bakos had finally found a God who understood him.
Bakos must have seen something of himself in the suffering servant. This eunuch, who was castrated at an early age so that he could be made a servant to the King and who endured his own humiliation to be of service to his people, was a suffering servant, himself. He could remember being led like a lamb to the slaughter. In Jesus, Bakos saw his own story. He was finally able to encounter a God that had less in common with the humiliators and despisers of the world and more in common with the rejected and castoff. In the suffering servant, Bakos finally had a God who understood his shame— who knew what it was like to be marked forever.
So Bakos commanded the chariot to stop. And he said to Phillip, “Look out the window, friend. We have come to some water. Tell me: what is to prevent me from being baptized?”18
Bakos knew in his heart that he wouldn’t be rejected by this God. He knew in his heart that he could disrobe and walk into the waters and this God would accept him as part of the family. Bakos could never be on the outside of that again. He’d encountered a God who loved him unconditionally and so now he was all in. What’s to prevent me from being baptized? Surely a God who was despised and rejected wouldn’t despise and reject Bakos. Certainly a God who faced his own humiliation would not sneer at his. What’s to prevent me?
So Phillip baptized Bakos that day. He plunged Bakos into the cold waters and he came out a new man. The Holy Spirit filled his heart and he knew that by the wounds of Christ his soul had been healed. Now he knew for the first time in his life what it meant to be a beloved child of God. And because nobody should simply be reduced to where they’re from or how they are different, and because everybody deserves the dignity of a name, we too shall call him Bakos the Beloved.19
The Invalid
Chalotte was an invalid.20 We don’t use that word now for someone who has to spend most of their day in bed, but in Victorian England that’s what they were called: invalids.21 And Charlotte was one of them.
Around her thirtieth birthday, Charlotte contracted an illness that caused her chronic pain for the rest of her life. Most days, she was unable to get out of bed. This really hurt Charlotte because there were so many things she wanted to do but couldn’t. Sometimes she would make plans and save up her strength to go out and then the day would arrive and her body just wouldn’t let her.
Today, was one of those days. Chalotte’s church had organized a bazaar to raise money to start a college fund for the children of preachers and missionaries. Charlotte cared about the project so much and had been looking forward to helping. But she was just in too much pain to leave her room. So once again, her family was leaving her behind. Charlotte, the invalid.
Charlotte wept as she heard the sound of the front door closing from in her room. She began to feel much like she had in the dark days when she had first become homebound. In those early years, she had watched all her dreams come to a sudden end which had sent her spiraling into a deep depression. Soon she had become bitter and angry with God. If he existed at all, she thought, he must not love her every much. What kind of a loving God would allow her to suffer as she had? Allow her to become an invalid?
Her, family, worried about Charlotte’s attitude, introduced her to a visiting evangelist named Dr. Milan.22 Dr. Milan had sat by Charlotte’s bedside all those years ago and had patiently tried to have a conversation with her about Jesus. After she told him where to go and how to get there, Dr. Milan said, “I’ll leave, Ms. Charlotte, if that’s what you really want, but I would encourage you to think about this: Jesus is calling you to come to him. How will you respond?”
“Calling me to come?” Charlotte laughed darkly, “I can’t come across this floor! What would Jesus want with an old invalid like me?”
Dr. Milan said, “I don’t know, Ms. Charlotte, I only know that he calls each of us just as we are.”
All those years ago, Charlotte had heard those words, and they had cut through her despair. She had found hop in Jesus Christ. So now on this day, she found that hope again. Charlotte didn’t know why God would allow her to be an invalid— why she had to miss the bazaar she had been looking forward to —but she knew that Jesus had called her to something. Feeling consoled and encouraged by this memory, she began to write a poem.
She had no idea as she wrote this afternoon that the poem she was writing would rekindle her spirit, and that she would write another, and another, and another, and that they would eventually be published into a book that would raise more money for the scholarship fund than ten bazaars.23 She had no idea how her pain would be used to console hundreds of millions of souls all over the word as they came to the altar. She only knew that Jesus had called her all those years ago and that Jesus called her still.
And so there in her bed, Charlotte Elliot wrote:24
Just as I am, without one plea,
but that thy blood was shed for me,
and that thou bidd'st me come to thee,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.
Just as I am, and waiting not
to rid my soul of one dark blot,
to thee, whose blood can cleanse each spot,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.~ My telling of a classic hymn story
Puppies for $10
The sign in the hardware store window read, “Puppies for $10”25
Billy ran in and saw the box on the counter. Sure enough, there were about 5 little puppies crawling all over each other in that box. But one of the puppies is smaller than the others. It’s sickly looking and keeps to itself— the runt of the litter. Billy takes a liking to that one.
“How much for that puppy?” he asks.26
“Oh that one,” says the man behind the counter, “That’s the runt. You can have him for $5 or you can have one of the others for $10.”
Billy is indignant. “Sir, that Puppy is worth every bit as much as those others. I will pay full price. I’ll be back in a week.”
So Billy went home and asked his neighbors for some chores. He worked for a week until he finally had the $10. As soon as he had it, he was back at the hardware store. He proudly put the $10 on the counter and said, “I’ll take the little one please.”
Now the hardware store owner looked down at Billy and smiled. “Look. It’s a kind thing you wanting to buy that puppy, but you need to understand. He’s a runt. He may die. Besides the bones in his legs aren’t going to develop properly. Why don’t you take your $10 and buy one of these other dogs. This dog will never be able to run, or roll over, or play with you.”
The little boy quietly rolled up his pant leg and revealed the metal braces on his own leg beneath. 27
“Sir, I can’t much do either of those things myself… this little dog is going to need a master who understands.”28
~ Old preacher story
SERMONTELLING NOTES:
As we mentioned in last week’s post, the storyteller at work in the book of Acts enjoys introducing key characters before they appear in their own major narratives. Paul is introduced to us in Acts 7:58, well before he takes center stage in chapter 9. Philip is mentioned as a preacher and miracle worker with a handful of verses in Acts 8:4-8. This mention is followed by a story featuring Peter and John and a sorcerer named Simon, the Philip reappears as the main character in today’s narrative beginning in Acts 8:26
The construction of this sentence in Greek places a special emphasis on the fact that this road passes through the desert. The wilderness in the Bible is often used in a symbolic sense to speak of a time or place of testing.
The land described as Ethiopia in this translation is known elsewhere in the Bible as Cush. In the generation immediately before the birth of Jesus, the queen of Cush had invaded southern Egypt and put a halt to the advance of the Roman Empire, maintaining Cush’s independence. The queen served by the eunuch in this scripture passage is probably the direct successor to that queen. Her tomb was discovered and looted in 1834, yielding considerable treasure.
The eunuch is evidently a God fearer, one of many gentiles who had taken up worship of the Hebrew God during this period in history. This is striking in contrast to his queen, who is represented in sculpture of the time as a priestess of the goddess Amesimi.
As a Eunuch, the man will have not been allowed to actually enter the Temple precincts. The fact that he has made this trip to simply be close to the place of worship displays a high level of devotion.
Actually owning an Isaiah scroll in this age before the printing press is another mark of the man’s wealth and devotion.
I like to picture Philip jogging along next to a moving chariot as he initiates this conversation. This goes a bit beyond the text, but I find the word ran at least suggestive of such an interpretation.
The text in question appears in Isaiah 53:7-8. More precisely, it is a quote from the Septuagint, an early translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek. This is why if you look up Isaiah 53:7-8 in the NIV, it will read a little differently than how it is quoted here in this passage.
The eunuch likely has more in mind than the couple of verses quoted here. The larger passage surrounding these verses explores themes which will have struck a chord with the eunuch; especially being cut off from God’s people and the hope of offspring and inheritance. Isaiah 53 is one of several Isaiah passages which refer to a figure scholars call the “suffering servant.”
Philip has a fairly easy job, here. The early church had been very quick to understand Jesus as a fulfillment of the suffering servant passages. It’s almost as though Philip has been brought alongside the chariot at the precise moment this passage was being read.
In its original context, the suffering servant is a symbol for Israel, whose persecution and suffering is portrayed as bringing redemption to the world at large. The early church saw Jesus acting as the embodiment of Israel and fulfilling these promises.
To Philip’s credit, he does not seize upon any of the obvious reasons why an Ethiopian eunuch should not be baptized. He accepts this gentile servant of a pagan queen, a person of strange ethnicity and permanently unclean to enter into the family of God as marked out by Jesus the Messiah.
Philip’s sudden disappearance seems to echo the disappearance of Jesus at the end of the Emmaus Road narrative in Luke 24:31. Like Stephen during his stoning, Philip is portrayed as one who imitates Christ.
Jesus’ disappearance in Luke 24 was connected to “the breaking of the bread,” while Philip’s is connected with baptism, underlining between them the two foundational sacraments of the church. Communion is understood as a celebration of Christ’s presence among us, while Baptism represents acceptance into the fellowship of the people of God.
Bakos the Beloved
It’s important when telling a story to get the hearer’s story camera going. We need to give them something to visualize. Especially when we are about to dump some exposition.
Often he is given the full name, Simeon Bakos because he was very early on conflated with Simeon Niger in Acts 13:1. But because there is no Biblical warrant for this (and no reason we shouldn’t have multiple North African Christians in the story of Acts), I have followed modern commentators in simply using the name Bakos.
When retelling a Biblical story, I find that it is best to choose one point of view to tell the story from. The longer your retelling, the more true this is. You want the hearer to latch on to a protagonist and go with them on their journey of change. This will be the character whose thoughts and background the hearer is privy to. Other characters will enter into the story as they enter into the life of the protagonist.
For this telling, I have chosen Bakos. I find it best to follow the character that experiences the most change. Bakos goes on a journey from being an outsider to being accepted into the family of God. This retelling will follow that arc. One could certainly tell the story from Phillip’s point of view. You could ask how God prepared him for the moment when he would say ‘yes’ to Baptizing a Eunuch from Ethiopia. Perhaps he learned some important lesson when he ministered among the Samaritans about accepting outsiders. That would be beautiful story to tell, but saying yes to one story means saying no to all other possible stories.
Important to Bakos’ arc is describing him as an outsider. One way to think of a character arc is in terms of opposites. If the character is an outsider at the beginning of the story, they must be an insider by the end of the story. All of the background information is in service of establishing this so that when Bakos finds acceptance, the hearer will be moved by what it means to him.
The logic is that a man with a family will be tempted to usurp the throne and start a new dynasty or embezzle wealth and land to pass on to his progeny. Anything a Eunuch is rewarded in life will go back to the sovereign upon his death and thus a favorite Eunuch will not be a threat to the stability of the dynasty. Ironically similar factors motivated the move toward a celibate priesthood in western Christianity. In addition to religious factors, the desire to keep wealth and land concentrated in the Church played a role in making celibacy official church law at the Second Lateran Council in 1139.
Because this story is being told from Bakos’ perspective, we don’t learn Phillip’s name until he introduces himself. Now of course, the hearer will likely know this is Phillip from the lectionary reading but telling the story this way helps keep the hearer seeing things from Bakos’ perspective. This technique of revealing things only as the main character learns them helps keep the hearer in the moment.
Again, there’s a version of this story that would dwell on Phillip’s response to this question. He would have to come to the realization that there is nothing to prevent this effeminate Cushite from being baptized. But this isn’t that story. We want to stay locked on Bakkos’ experience.
Notice the deliberate echoing of the beginning of the story. This creates a full circle effect that is satisfying for the hearer.
The Invalid
Many congregations love ‘hymn stories’ and there are books of them. The truth is that most of these so called ‘hymn stories’ aren’t stories so much as biographical information and publication histories. A set of occurrences in chronological order is not the same thing as a story. Once you figure that out, you are well on your way to becoming an excellent storyteller.
Stories are about over coming adversity and finding the power to change. Watch a successful biopic of a famous musician and you will see this. A good biopic is principally about what an artist no one knew had to overcome (trauma, drug habit, ego etc.) to be the artist everyone knows today.
This telling gives Charlotte Elliot the biopic treatment. While it is true to the facts as I understand them, I have to imagine some of what she was thinking. I also have to exclude information that doesn’t tell the story.
On another week, I might not be hitting the invalid label so hard in this story. But invalid like eunuch is a dehumanizing label. While technically true, both labels reduce a three dimensional human being to the one difference which separates them from normal society. There might be a moment to ask the congregation to contemplate what their label is. What is the one thing (true or untrue) that everyone sees when they look at them. Is that what God sees?
My survey of hymn stories about Charlotte Elliot tended to separate into two piles. Pile one was the stories that credited the idea of the hymn to Charlotte’s encounter with Dr. Milan. Pile two is the stories that focus on Charlotte being left behind at the Bazaar. I have smushed the two together by creating this flashback.
The thing that makes a good hymn story work is that the lyrics of the hymn come at the end, as a surprise to most people who didn’t know the story. This can be like a jolt of lightning when done right. So many preachers give up great surprises like this by starting their stories something like:
Most people are familiar with the hymn, “Just As I Am” but few people know about the person who wrote it…
Why!?!? Why would you do that!?!? When you’re holding an Ace, you don’t show it to everybody before the betting starts. You save it for the big reveal!
Puppies for $10
This is an old preacher story. Who knows where it came from or if it happened. It’s one of those stories that lives in the oral tradition of pastors. I remember my Dad telling this one (and the one above, come to think of it) many times from the pulpit while growing up. The numbers have been adjusted for inflation. If there’s a tariff on puppies, you might have to adjust again.
I’ve not talked about voices in a couple weeks. My best advice is don’t try to do voices when storytelling. High chirpy voices for children can be distracting. The best thing to do is suggest a voice. If you pitch your own natural voice up a little higher when you speak as the child and a little lower when you speak as the adult, then that will be enough to suggest to the hearer who is talking. They will supply the child’s voice in their own imaginations (don’t ask me how that works but it does). For a masterclass in this, listen to an audiobook read by a professional narrator. You will notice that they suggest voices with subtle changes to their natural voice rather than go all in on cartoony voices with outrageous accents.
Once again, we have a beautiful surprise that if told right can provoke an emotional response. It would be ruined by beginning the story by saying something like:
A boy with metal braces on his legs walked into the hardware store…
Save that Ace for the end!
I have found that children love this story as well and I have told it in Sunday School or at Camp. It’s good to know some stories that kids like even if you don’t communicate to children on a regular basis. You never know when the opportunity will present itself.