Dark and Lovely

Sara Golish

Propers: The Fifth Sunday of Easter, A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Africa is the great blind spot on our map. It is a continent so enormous that we often struggle to understand just how big its countries truly are. You could fit the US, Mexico, Eastern and Western Europe, India, China, and Japan all inside the borders of Africa and still have room to spare.

In our literature we represent it as primordial savanna or the heart of darkness, but in truth Africa is home to widely varied cultures and peoples, with not just many languages but many language families. The peoples of Africa built empires and cities and trading networks while Europe was still sussing out the fall of Rome. The wealthiest man in history, Mansa Musa, was a medieval West African Emperor, whose country became the largest producer of gold in the world.

The richness and depth of African history is so great, and its stories so astonishingly variegated, that it should come as no surprise to us that Judaism and Christianity were well established in these lands long before the faith was legalized in Europe. We don’t often associate Judaism with Africa, outside of the Exodus, but in fact Jewish believers—or rather I should say Israelites—have roots in Ethiopia running so deep that no one can quite agree on just how long ago they got there.

Ethiopia is an ancient kingdom south of Egypt along the Red Sea, part of the Horn of Africa, just across from the Arabian Peninsula. The Bible calls it Nubia and Kush. Some say that the Black Jews of Ethiopia—Beta Israel—came down after the Exodus, led by sons of Moses. Others say that they came over after the Babylonian Exile. But the most famous and beloved story has to do with the Queen of Sheba.

Perhaps you remember this one from the Bible. Solomon, son of David, was the greatest and the wisest king of Israel. His father had been a man of war, of conquest, but not Solomon. While he had blood on his hands, as it seems all rulers must, he was at heart a man of trade, of peace, and of profit. Under his rule, God’s people Israel flourished as never before.

And in that time, few people were better at trade than the Saba to the south. They were an Arabian tribe, so close to Africa that they were noted for their darker complexions. Ancient peoples had many faults, but racism seems not to have been one of them. If you were pretty, and wealthy, they would happily marry you regardless of the color of your skin. The Saba, or Sheba, controlled a great trading network, and appear to have held a monopoly on frankincense, which was well worth its weight in gold.

The Queen of Sheba came from Saba to see if the tall tales told of Solomon were true, and indeed both his wealth and his wisdom exceeded all expectations. They seem to have been quite taken with each other. Legend has it, though the Bible is somewhat coy, that the King of Israel and the Queen of Sheba fell in love. The Song of Solomon, the great love poem of Scripture, praises the king’s beloved as both “dark and lovely,” and goes on about her enthusiastically and at great length. It’s rather steamy for the Old Testament.

She bore him a son, or so the story goes, and that son led the people of Sheba across the Red Sea—a quick jaunt next door—to settle in what is today Ethiopia, a land that still speaks a Semitic language, and even claims to have the Ark of the Covenant hidden away, passed on by Solomon to his son for safe keeping.

No matter how you slice it, no matter how literally one takes these tales, Ethiopia already possessed a thousand-year tradition of proud Black Judaism before Jesus Christ even arrived on the scene. And so when we read today in Acts that a royal eunuch of the Ethiopian court—a man of great wealth and power and prestige—has come to Israel to worship at the Temple, and goes home reading the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah, we should not be in the least bit surprised.

We may wonder at first glance how this man from Africa has found himself in possession of such a scroll, in a seemingly alien context. But in fact Ethiopia is far closer to Israel than we are, and they knew of the One True God two thousand years before our own ancestors finally put down the spear of Odin to take up the Cross of Christ.

Ethiopia is in fact the oldest Christian nation on earth, long before Greece, long before Rome, coming to Christ hundreds upon hundreds of years before nations like Russia and England were even dreamt up. Only the Armenians can claim a pedigree of comparable nobility and length.

And the churches of Ethiopia—ah, the churches! Instead of building great cathedrals up from the ground, stone upon stone, they dug them down into the living rock, towering houses of worship hidden in manmade canyons, built in the shape of a cross. They are astonishing to see, unlike anything else in Christendom. And they are laid out to recall Jerusalem, the site of Jesus’ Crucifixion and Resurrection, and the home of their ancestor Solomon from some three thousand years ago. African Christianity is not new. It is as ancient as ancient can get.

So what’s my point? Why tell you all this?

Because, brothers and sisters, we are but one small branch on an ancient and life-giving Vine. That Vine is Jesus. And for as long as we abide in Him, we flourish, even in the midst of adversity, even under the harshest of persecutions. We are proud of our traditions, our histories, the expressions of our faith. And insofar as these reflect the Life and Truth and Way of Christ, we should be proud, rightly proud. If we boast, we boast in the Lord.

But the Vine is ancient and deep and strong, with tendrils reaching out all across this marbled sphere. The Christians of Russia with their astonishing literature. The Christians of Japan with their ancient strength. The Christians of India with their witness of peace. The Christians of South America with their passion for justice. The Christians of the Middle East, witnessing in an ecumenism of blood. The Christians of China, 100 million strong, who now outnumber members of the Chinese Communist Party some five or six to four.

And of course the Christians of Africa, the eldest of our brothers, who still worship in beauty and truth, who still maintain traditions older than Christ, and whose synthesis of things African and Middle Eastern, Jewish and Christian, reminds us all that the barriers we erect to define ourselves—barriers of race and class and wealth and creed—are one and all broken down in the Church, the Body of Christ. Here, our worth is not determined by such things. Here, we all have equal value, infinite value, the value of Jesus Himself offered up for the world.

We are not alone, dear Christians. We have never been alone. This congregation, this nation, this Lutheran Church—we stand amidst a great cloud of witnesses stretching throughout time and space, history and geography. Wherever we go, whomever we meet, there is Christ. There is God in the flesh. There are poor to be fed and sick to be healed and truth to be told and injustices to unmask. There are sinners in need of forgiveness, and there is a Savior who lifts us out from death.

The forms are different, the shape of things different, but we are all of us part of one whole. We are all the Body of Christ. We are all members of the Risen Jesus still at work in this world, no matter where we are or whence we come. There is one God; one Baptism; one Lord, one faith, one birth. We are all branches of Christ the true and living Vine. And that Vine will continue to grow, to take deep root and bear good fruit, until at the last, as the Psalmist sings:

All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord; all the families of the nations shall worship before Him … To Him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down … And future generations will be told about the Lord, proclaiming His deliverance to a people yet unborn.

We are all links in this chain, branches of this Vine, whose root is Resurrection and whose fruit is the healing of the nations for the redemption of the world.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.