I was on vacation last week. It was really good to be away and to see my family at the wedding of a nephew. On Sunday, a little bleary from a night of festivities, most of my siblings and our families showed up at church for the 8:30 service. It was the fifth Sunday after Easter. We heard the account in Acts of Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian Eunuch. I love that story.
The lay reader did not know what a eunuch was or at least how to pronounce that word. It is simply not part of her world. There are no eunuchs in her experience. At first I was a little put off by her mangling of the word. The term shows up several times in the text. But then I started thinking about it. It is a good thing that she does not know so much about eunuchs. It is a good thing that this is an alien concept and word for her. It is good to live in a world in which we do not do that to people in order to render them no longer a threat to those who are in power. We still do plenty of other things which are wrong and degrading. But not that. That is a good thing. I am glad the reader did not have that word as a familiar word in her vocabulary.
