St James' Church of Scotland, Lossiemouth

For Christ, For You

Lossiemouth Church of Scotland

Prospect Terrace, Lossiemouth, Moray IV31 6JS.

The Union of the former Parishes of St. Gerardine's High Church and St. James' Church

Minister: Rev. Geoff McKee.

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You are here: Home / Baptism / Why Christians must share the Good News of Jesus without partiality or prejudice

Why Christians must share the Good News of Jesus without partiality or prejudice

April 30, 2018 by 2

Rev. Geoff McKee’s Scripture for the Fifth Sunday of Easter (29 April 2018) is the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, from Acts of the Apostles (Acts 8:26-40). Geoff explains how the central message of this passage is not the “easy” one – about the Gospel spreading out to foreigners and foreign lands – but, instead, that the Good News of Christ is truly for everyone. And Christians must discard any partiality or prejudice in spreading that message.

You can download a PDF version of the sermon by clicking here.

Acts 8:26-40 (New International Version)
Philip and the Ethiopian
26 Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Go south to the road—the desert road—that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” 27 So he started out, and on his way he met an Ethiopian eunuch, an important official in charge of all the treasury of the Kandake (which means “queen of the Ethiopians”). This man had gone to Jerusalem to worship, 28 and on his way home was sitting in his chariot reading the Book of Isaiah the prophet. 29 The Spirit told Philip, “Go to that chariot and stay near it.”

30 Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked.

31 “How can I,” he said, “unless someone explains it to me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.

32 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.
33 In his humiliation he was deprived of justice.
Who can speak of his descendants?
For his life was taken from the earth.”

34 The eunuch asked Philip, “Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?” 35 Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.

36 As they travelled 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 baptised?” [37] 38 And he gave orders to stop the chariot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip baptised him. 39 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, but went on his way rejoicing. 40 Philip, however, appeared at Azotus and travelled about, preaching the gospel in all the towns until he reached Caesarea.

The following open letter was published in the lead up to the Southern Baptist Convention in the USA in June 2014, when a motion would be proposed condemning transgender identity.

“Dear Southern Baptist Convention,

I know that you are considering passing a resolution against transgender identity this week at your meeting in Baltimore. In anticipation of this vote, I write to you as a fellow believer in our Lord Jesus Christ, the saviour of the world, the person to whom I have given my heart and soul and whom I spend my life serving.

I was raised Southern Baptist in Stanly County, North Carolina, in a devoted Christian family.

My dad grew up in Nigeria, the son of Southern Baptist missionaries who taught there. The theology and worship of my Southern Baptist church was a core part of my identity as a child, and in many ways, it continues to form the person I am today.

Growing up, I was desperate to be a good Christian and to earnestly give my life, my heart, and my soul to the Lord. I was also trans. I knew I was a girl from a very young age, even though the world saw me as a boy. It wasn’t easy. I fought against this. I fought with every tool I had. I prayed and I prayed and I begged.

I went through the act of being saved over and over, thinking each time that if I was perfectly contrite and sorrowful, Christ would save me from being trans, from being a girl.

When I was about 16, I was on a youth retreat up near Liberty University. My youth group was staying in cabins out in the woods. At one of the evening praise and worship times I fell down on the floor praying that God would fix me. My minister prayed over me. I hoped, I hoped incredibly hard that that would be the moment where I was fixed, but of course it wasn’t.

I couldn’t “fix” being trans because it’s how God created me.

Isn’t it the role of Christians to minister with those who are excluded and marginalised?

I ask you, as fellow believers, to join with us in the Episcopal Church and other traditions as family in standing with trans and gender non-nonconforming people rather than against us.

Don’t make the world harder for trans folks. Instead, let’s explore together the ways that our gender, in all its beautiful diversity, is a blessed gift from God.

Thank you for listening.

Your sister in Christ, Vivian Taylor”

In March this year, the Church of Scotland published a pastoral aid resource entitled: “Diverse Gender Identities and Pastoral Care”.

This was with the intention of offering support to ministers and members of the Church of Scotland, to inform and to assist those offering pastoral care.

Now, you may wonder, in our series of sermons on the Acts of the Apostles texts offered to us by the lectionary at Easter, what this subject has to do with the text before us today.

Well, I would want to emphatically state – everything.

It is very easy to read the Acts’ passage today and miss the central issue…

…or, if not missing the central issue, then only glancing past it.

I can remember this story being read to me in Sunday School and the emphasis was very much on the Ethiopian element of the story.

The man in the chariot was an Ethiopian. He was a foreigner.

He was very likely a Jewish exile or convert and that was by no means unusual in the ancient world. The Jewish diaspora had spread far and wide after the upheavals of exile in the centuries past. There were thriving Jewish communities in Egypt for example. That was not made clear to me as a child and so I understood the story in terms of the gospel spreading out through national boundaries by the faithful witness of the apostles and, of course, that is perfectly true.

But it’s not the central issue.

In fact, the so-called Gentile Pentecost is recorded in Acts 10, when the emphasis is clearly on the gospel moving to the Gentile world. That is yet to come in Luke’s story at this point (Luke being the author of Acts).

A closer reading of the text will leave us in no doubt what the issue is.

We are told that the Ethiopian was a eunuch. That fact is not simply an interesting aside.

Eunuchs would usually be servants or slaves who had been castrated in order to make them reliable servants of a royal court where physical access to the ruler could wield great influence.

Seemingly lowly domestic functions—such as making the ruler’s bed, bathing him, cutting his hair, carrying him in his litter, or even relaying messages—could in theory give a eunuch “the ruler’s ear” and impart de facto power on the formally humble – but trusted – servant.

We learn that the Ethiopian eunuch was in charge of the treasury of the queen of Ethiopia. His a-sexual nature would perfectly suit the trust required of a man in his situation.

And here comes the telling point.

When Philip arrived at his chariot, the eunuch was reading from Isaiah 53:7-8.

It’s interesting that reading, back then, was always audible – out loud. There was no such thing as the skill of reading into oneself until monks perfected it in the fifth century AD.

So Philip heard the words and – no doubt – the angst of the cruelly emasculated man, as he read them.

“He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.”

This man had been cruelly sheared.

He would have been deeply aware of the words of Deuteronomy 23:1 –

“No one who has been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the LORD.”

Here was such a man, returning from the assembly of the Lord in Jerusalem. He had not given up on his faith but we can feel the personal angst in his question to Philip about the Isaiah passage – “about whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?”

“Is this about me too?”, he was asking.

And of course it was, but not in the way that the eunuch thought it was.

Isaiah would go on in his prophecy to state: “For this is what the Lord says:
“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
who choose what pleases me
and hold fast to my covenant—
to them I will give within my temple and its walls a memorial and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that will endure forever.”

That everlasting name would be immortalised through the name, Jesus Christ: the good news of Jesus Christ.

The good news for the eunuch was that Jesus was led to the place of exclusion and humiliation.

The place that the eunuch knew – and could do nothing about.

There, Jesus endured and overcame, in order that the eunuch would overcome too.

And, to celebrate the reality of that new start, he saw the water and asked for baptism. It was Philip’s joy to help him and send him on, in the same joy.

In Acts 1:8, we read the words of Jesus:

“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

“To the ends of the earth” is both literal and metaphorical.

We are to share the good news without partiality and prejudice and only in that manner can we remain faithful to the one who was excluded and humiliated for us.

To their shame, on 10 June 2014, the Southern Baptist Convention passed the resolution condemning transgender people.

May God challenge our hearts.

Amen.

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Filed Under: Baptism, Mission, Sermons

WELCOME

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Jesus Ascends to Glory

May 28, 2025 By 2

Sunday 25 May 2025 is Ascension Sunday.

Christians celebrate the time when Jesus ascended to heaven. Ascension Day itself is generally observed on a Thursday, the fortieth day after Easter.

Today’s Main Scripture

Jesus speaks to his disciples, following his resurrection at Easter and shortly before his ascension:

John 14 (from The Message Bible Translation)
The Road
14 1-4 “Don’t let this rattle you. You trust God, don’t you? Trust me. There is plenty of room for you in my Father’s home. If that weren’t so, would I have told you that I’m on my way to get a room ready for you? And if I’m on my way to get your room ready, I’ll come back and get you so you can live where I live. And you already know the road I’m taking.”

5 Thomas said, “Master, we have no idea where you’re going. How do you expect us to know the road?”

6-7 Jesus said, “I am the Road, also the Truth, also the Life. No one gets to the Father apart from me. If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him. You’ve even seen him!”

8 Philip said, “Master, show us the Father; then we’ll be content.”

9-10 “You’ve been with me all this time, Philip, and you still don’t understand? To see me is to see the Father. So how can you ask, ‘Where is the Father?’ Don’t you believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I speak to you aren’t mere words. I don’t just make them up on my own. The Father who resides in me crafts each word into a divine act.

11-14 “Believe me: I am in my Father and my Father is in me. If you can’t believe that, believe what you see—these works. The person who trusts me will not only do what I’m doing but even greater things, because I, on my way to the Father, am giving you the same work to do that I’ve been doing. You can count on it. From now on, whatever you request along the lines of who I am and what I am doing, I’ll do it. That’s how the Father will be seen for who he is in the Son. I mean it. Whatever you request in this way, I’ll do.

The Spirit of Truth
15-17 “If you love me, show it by doing what I’ve told you. I will talk to the Father, and he’ll provide you another Friend so that you will always have someone with you. This Friend is the Spirit of Truth. The godless world can’t take him in because it doesn’t have eyes to see him, doesn’t know what to look for. But you know him already because he has been staying with you, and will even be in you!

18-20 “I will not leave you orphaned. I’m coming back. In just a little while the world will no longer see me, but you’re going to see me because I am alive and you’re about to come alive. At that moment you will know absolutely that I’m in my Father, and you’re in me, and I’m in you.

21 “The person who knows my commandments and keeps them, that’s who loves me. And the person who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and make myself plain to him.”

22 Judas (not Iscariot) said, “Master, why is it that you are about to make yourself plain to us but not to the world?”

23-24 “Because a loveless world,” said Jesus, “is a sightless world. If anyone loves me, he will carefully keep my word and my Father will love him—we’ll move right into the neighborhood! Not loving me means not keeping my words. The message you are hearing isn’t mine. It’s the message of the Father who sent me.

25-27 “I’m telling you these things while I’m still living with you. The Friend, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send at my request, will make everything plain to you. He will remind you of all the things I have told you. I’m leaving you well and whole. That’s my parting gift to you. Peace. I don’t leave you the way you’re used to being left—feeling abandoned, bereft. So don’t be upset. Don’t be distraught.

28 “You’ve heard me tell you, ‘I’m going away, and I’m coming back.’ If you loved me, you would be glad that I’m on my way to the Father because the Father is the goal and purpose of my life.

29-31 “I’ve told you this ahead of time, before it happens, so that when it does happen, the confirmation will deepen your belief in me. I’ll not be talking with you much more like this because the chief of this godless world is about to attack. But don’t worry—he has nothing on me, no claim on me. But so the world might know how thoroughly I love the Father, I am carrying out my Father’s instructions right down to the last detail.

“Get up. Let’s go. It’s time to leave here.”

Sermon by Rev. Anne-Marie Simpson

To get straight to beginning of the sermon, click here.

Sermon Text

For 40 days after Easter morning, Jesus remained on earth.

We know of several occasions when he met with some of his disciples.

Mary Magdalene in the dawn Garden, the two walking the road to Emmaus. appearing more than once to those in the upper room. On the shore at sunrise, and now in this final time of parting.

We can only surmise how Jesus spent the rest of this time before his departure. How many others did he meet with, perhaps, who did not record the fact? How many lives did he touch in those final 40 days on Earth?

Just as it was vital for Jesus to prove his resurrection to his followers, so it was very important that he took his leave properly.

His appearances to them could not just stop suddenly. That would leave too much uncertainty in the minds of his friends. Nor could the story that we’ve heard today of this awesome ascension be omitted from the narrative.

People at the time needed to know this part most fully. Indeed, we need to understand exactly where Jesus has gone.

There have to be witnesses. There is much mystery to this story, ascending into a cloud seems, well, rather vague. We desperately want more detail.

Luke gives us a brief description in his gospel and another in the book of the Acts of the Apostles.

Yet, however brief this story is, it is so important for both the disciples and for us today.

The disciples needed closure for them. This is an ending, the end of their time spent with Jesus – i.e. the end of Jesus amongst them present here in this world.

Yet it is also a beginning. The beginning of a brand new chapter for the disciples.

Now they have been given final instructions. Wait here in Jerusalem and show you are empowered by the Holy Spirit, then go out and preach the good news of repentance and salvation to all the world.

They must continue Jesus’ work of justice and compassion, healing and acceptance, but now they must also preach their testament, make new believers and baptise them in the Holy Spirit, not just the people of Israel, but everyone, right around the world.

They are witnesses. They have a testament to share.

And if this work seems impossibly huge to undertake, so very difficult to achieve, then Jesus has promised them a helper. That will be given power through baptism in the Holy Spirit. And so the disciples are not overwhelmed by the task in hand, or cowed under the weight of their commission. Instead, they go back into Jerusalem filled with joy at what Jesus has promised. Filled with joy at what they have seen.

They know exactly where Jesus has gone. They’ve witnessed him rising to heaven with their very own eyes, and there is no room for doubt. Now they have a friend in heaven, a friend whom we believe presents our prayers at the throne of God and intercedes on our behalf. A friend who has sent them a helper, a friend who has always present with us, always available when we need help.

The human Jesus could only be in one place at any given time, but now as a heavenly being, Jesus transcends the spatial and the temporal qualities of this world.

He can be constantly with his disciples. He is constantly with us.

Furthermore, Jesus has promised them that they will follow where he has gone.

Before the crucifixion he has told them that he goes to prepare a place for them. Those words that we say at every funeral, I go to prepare a place for you. Now they understand what that means. One day they too will be in heaven, where they will see Jesus again and live in the presence of their Heavenly Father. They also know that Jesus is listening to their pleas and prayers. He might be out of sight, but he isn’t out of their hearing.

And Jesus has promised to return, to come back one day when everything will be put right, and the whole of creation will be restored to its original state of balance.

The early church watched patiently and diligently for the coming, believing it to be imminent.

But God’s time is not our time, as we are reminded in the second letter of Peter: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a day.

The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness.

But we must keep watch and be prepared for this coming, for this event, so that we are ready to meet with Jesus on his return. Ready for whatever that will mean for us.

Jesus speaks of how his ascension has been written into Hebrew scripture in the laws of Moses, in the writing of the prophets, and in the Psalms, as we’ve heard in Psalm 93, and in Psalm 47.

The signs have always been there, but it would have been impossible for human minds to comprehend what was meant.

The story of death and resurrection and ascension is too full of wonder, too full of awe for us to fully understand. Jesus has ascended to sit enthroned at the right hand of the Father, where, as Paul tells us, he reigns supreme.

In the meantime, the disciples returned to Jerusalem in great joy to spend their time giving thanks in the temple, praying to God, knowing that they are heard, and knowing that whatever happens to them, Jesus awaits them with a place prepared.

And so what does this day of Ascension mean for us?

We’ve been promised everything that the disciples were promised.

We know that God, Jesus has gone before us, and we live in the hope that this and every other promise He has made will be fulfilled. that, through repentance, our sins will be forgiven, and we will go to take up that place, which He has prepared for us in his Father’s house, where we will live forever in the presence of God, reconciled and beloved for eternity.

And the second coming, what will that be like?

The angels in Acts have told us that Jesus will return in the same way as he left, descending from a cloud, perhaps, to the awestruck gaze of the people below.

Will you be there, as generations’-worth of prayers are answered, watching and waiting in joyful expectation, as your Lord and Saviour descends to bring the Kingdom that we pray for to come?

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

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Our Minister is Rev. Geoff McKee.

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