Read: Acts 8:26-40
What is to prevent me from being baptized? (v. 37 NRSV)
The Ethiopian Minister of the Treasury was on his way home after a trip to a foreign capital, not to talk finances but to worship. He had traveled to Jerusalem on pilgrimage to seek spiritual wisdom, and on his return trip was reading a scroll of the prophet Isaiah when a stranger ran alongside his slow-moving chariot. The young man, Philip by name, asked the Ethiopian if he understood what he was reading. He answered, “No” and invited Philip to sit with him and help him comprehend the text. The passage, Isaiah 53:7-8, was a starting point for Philip to proclaim the good news of Jesus—how Jesus had been, like a sheep led to slaughter, unjustly put to death.
Upon spotting a body of water, the finance minister asked Philip a question: “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” In other words, does your community include people like me—a non-Jew, a eunuch, someone “unclean”—or not? Philip’s answer is evident in his behavior: he goes down into the water with the man and baptizes him, thereby initiating him into the community of those who follow Jesus. In so doing Philip proclaims that water is thicker than blood. The water of Christian baptism trumps our ethnicity or race or sex or any other marker of humanness.
As you pray, ask God to remind you of your true identity found in Christ.
Steve Bouma-Prediger is the Leonard and Marjorie Mass Professor of Reformed Theology at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. A graduate of Hope College, his Ph.D. is in religious studies from The University of Chicago. His most recent book is Earthkeeping and Character: Exploring a Christian Ecological Virtue Ethic.
When not teaching or writing, he spends as much time as possible canoeing or backpacking in his favorite places in North America or simply hiking among the magnificent trees in southwest Michigan parks.
