Eastertide
April 23, 2018
Scripture Reading: Acts 8:26-40
Then an angel of the Lord said to Philip, ‘Get up and go towards the south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.’ (This is a wilderness road.) So he got up and went. Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning home; seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah. Then the Spirit said to Philip, ‘Go over to this chariot and join it.’ So Philip ran up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, ‘Do you understand what you are reading?’ He replied, ‘How can I, unless someone guides me?’ And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him. Now the passage of the scripture that he was reading was this:
‘Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter,
and like a lamb silent before its shearer,
so he does not open his mouth.
In his humiliation justice was denied him.
Who can describe his generation?
For his life is taken away from the earth.’ –Acts 8:26-33
Are we open to being led by the Spirit? How do we discern the Spirit from other voices whispering in our minds and hearts? My pat answer is that if we are called to do something that is not an act of love it is not of God. In our world where the word love is tossed around loosely regarding everything from our sneakers to ice cream, it is hard to identify what love is. More particularly we sometimes get caught up in identifying lust and greed with love. The prosperity gospel has a whole theology supporting that effort. Women and men end up in dire circumstances having been led astray by a pledge of love that had nothing to do with love.
1 Corinthians 13 provides the best faith-related definition of love that I know.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (verses 4-7)
Greed an lust never have these traits continuously. Evil cannot remain evil if it adopts these behaviors.
Prayer: Lord, help me to love as described in 1 Corinthians 13 and guide me in discerning your call to serve based on the measure of your love in the response needed. Amen.