Telling the Gospel Story with Philip (Acts 8)

I wonder if anyone here experiences glossophobia. It’s one of the most common types of situational anxieties. One study estimated that 3 out of 4 people are affected by it. It’s the fear of public speaking. If you experience this fear, there are plenty of avenues for improvement: you might see a therapist or perhaps join Toastmasters. But I’d also bet that some people listening now experience a similar condition, one I’ve nicknamed evangelophobia. That may sound like a silly made-up word, but it points at a very real, very serious experience for us. For various reasons, we struggle to tell others about Jesus. Often fear plays a part. Perhaps we fear mockery from someone who responds with hostility, someone trained in the “new Atheism” (anti-theism, really) of Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris. Perhaps in a more personal context, we fear a damaged relationship with a family member, close friend, neighbor, or colleague. Or we might fear being embarrassed if we don’t know enough, that the person we talk to might raise tough questions or opposing data or a conclusion we’ve never heard before. How do we overcome fears like these?

Today, I want us to look together at Acts 8 and ask if Philip’s gospel proclamation can provides us any help. (Spoiler alert: I believe it will.) We’re going to draw two observations about this chapter. First, we’ll take a deep look at what Philip’s Gospel message was about. After all, it’s the same message we re-orient everything around and that we share today. Second, we’ll notice how Philip tells the Gospel story and draw out some practical ideas about how we can share that same message. I hope this will help us remove some of the fears and obstacles that impede our gospel efforts.

The Message of the Gospel Story

In Acts 8, Philip travels to Samaria, where he preaches the Gospel. The Samaritans believe and are baptized, but what exactly is it that they believed?

The Authoritative Story

Luke repeatedly describes Philip’s ministry with the word “proclaim” (4, 5, 12). This word “proclaim” comes from the Greek word for “herald.” An ancient herald repeated the message from the king wherever the king wanted; the herald was just a mouthpiece for the authoritative message of the king (or emperor, or tetrarch, or governor, etc). The first thing to notice about Philip’s ministry is that he tells an authoritative story.

The Royal Story

Let’s look at v5 and consider that the word “gospel” (“good news”) is part of this “royal” context as well (v12). Like “herald,” this observation draws on Luke’s Greco-Roman context. The word “evangel” was used in the first century to describe the “good news” that a caesar had come into power. A Greek inscription describes Caesar Augustus with the words, “But the birthday of the god was for the world the beginning of tidings of joy (gospel).” Though he ended badly, even the proclamation of Caligula’s reign was hailed as gospel: “When Gaius assumed the imperial power, … from our city … the good tidings sped to the others.” A gospel is a royal story.

The Old Testament Story

As Luke continues, he fills in more details. In verse 5, the “message” is about the Messiah, the anointed one, the Christ. The message of Philip (and of all the apostles throughout Acts) is that Jesus is the grand finale to Israel’s story, not the start of something different. Luke further emphasizes the connection to Israel’s story in v12: “Philip … was proclaiming the good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus the Messiah.”

The narrative of Israel fills hundreds of years of stories and scrolls. Without it, Jesus would make very little sense. Let’s start at the beginning. In the Ancient Near East, when a king acquired new territory, he set up statues (images) of himself to remind everyone who he was. In the beginning, God acquires a brand new kingdom and puts humanity in it to display God’s image, to be royal representatives. We know what happens next, though: the perfections of Eden soon give way to the broken, painful, violent, sin-poisoned rest of the story: the story we still live in today. Along the way, however, God is always present. God is not content to let go of the very good creation (especially humanity, sculpted to be the king’s image), so God works with and through humans: patriarchs, prophets, deliverers, elders, judges, eventually even human kings. Many fail, some walk in faith, most do both, and God’s plan to redeem all of creation steadily advances. And yet, at the end, we find ourselves dissatisfied. At every turn, the people of God failed to live up to their calling to be God’s royal images on earth. We turn the last page of the Hebrew Bible, on the edge of our seats, the air electric with anticipation, as we wonder, “Can any human can actually be the kingly representative God designed us to be?”

Philip knows the answer to that question: he proclaims that Jesus is that king. The message is a herald’s authoritative repetition of royal good news that Jesus the Messiah is the perfect human fulfillment of the royal image of God. As such, Jesus rescues us from our failures to display God’s image and empowers us to succeed in showing the world what God looks like.

Summary

I love how N. T. Wright’s summary of Paul’s gospel perfectly aligns with the way Luke has described Philip’s ministry:

The gospel “is not, then, a system of how people get saved. The announcement of the gospel results in people being saved… But ‘the gospel’ itself, strictly speaking, is the narrative proclamation of King Jesus. [Paul] can speak equally of ‘announcing the gospel’ and of ‘announcing Jesus’, using the term kerussein, ‘to act as a herald’… When the herald makes a royal proclamation, he says ‘Nero (or whoever) has become emperor.’ He does not say ‘If you would like to have an experience of living under an emperor, you might care to try Nero.’ The proclamation is an authoritative summons to … ‘the obedience of faith’.”
What St. Paul Really Said (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 45

In summary, here is the apostles’ Gospel: the story of God’s people has reached its fulfillment in Jesus, the ultimate King, the perfect God-man. The story of God’s rescue mission on earth reaches its triumphant conclusion in Jesus. That summary guides us as well: if we ever find ourselves struggling to recognize our gospel witness in this description of the apostolic message, it’s time to recalibrate.

The Delivery of the Gospel Story

Now that we’ve seen what Philip’s message was, let’s draw some observations about how he delivered it.

The Story Told by Anyone

Let’s consider Philip himself. He’s actually not an apostle (though he is ordained to a needs-based ministry in Acts 6), but he’s out there doing Gospel proclamation. Likewise, we don’t need to be ordained to tell others the Good News about Jesus. Sure, a few New Testament passages talk about special Spirit-gifting for and occasionally a vocational ministry of evangelism, but telling the story of King Jesus does not require ordination, a unique charism, or a specific role / position in the church. We’re all allowed to tell the Gospel story!

The Story Told for Everyone

Everyone, without Ethnic Prejudice

We skipped over this detail earlier, but I to call attention to what a huge deal going to Samaria was. As we typically note when reading about the Good Samaritan parable or the woman at the well, Samaritan and Jewish people were not remotely on good terms. At this point, the growing church still felt very much like a Jewish sect. Jesus was the long-awaited Jewish Messiah, who fulfilled Jewish Scriptures, and commissioned a dozen Jewish men to share his message. And yet somehow, despite a centuries-long rift, we find the Samaritans responding to Jesus’ message. In John 4, the woman at the well brings most of her village to meet and believe in Jesus; here in Acts 8, there’s widespread acceptance at Philip’s preaching.

Everyone, without Socio-Economic Prejudice

We find Philip sharing the Gospel with “normal people” in Samaria, as well as with two higher-status men: “Simon the Great” in v13, as well as the Ethiopian official in v26ff. The Good News calls out to both haves and have-nots.

Everyone, without Gender Prejudice

I also want us to slow down for a moment at the phrase that describes those baptisms: “both men and women” (v12). The church is breaking down traditional norms about gender. For Luke to note there that women are included right alongside men would’ve caught the attention of his readers, startling more than a few of them.

Summary

This reminds me of Paul’s statement of equality in Gal 3.27–28:

As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

There’s a growing consensus that these words may have been part of an early baptismal liturgy, spoken aloud with each new convert. Whether explicitly liturgical or not, Paul’s threefold affirmation of equality (ethnic, economic, gender) flows from the same stream where we find Philip baptizing in Samaria.

The relevance of this observation to our evangelism is right at the surface. As we share the Gospel story, we do so without any taint of exclusivity or superiority. Regardless of gender, orientation, identity, political or religious affiliation, ethnicity, socio-economic status, or any of the other markers that divide us, the Good News about Jesus is good news for all.

The Story Told as Story

Hopefully, by observing that the Gospel story can be told by anyone to everyone, we’ve broken down at least a couple fears and barriers to our own efforts to spread the Gospel. As a final takeaway, I want us to consider a word I’ve used almost twice a minute on average during this sermon. That word is “story.” I’d like us to focus on Gospel-proclamation as story-telling and to call out some modern misconceptions that may impede our own evangelism.

The Gospel Is Not Propositions

As Christians who have been thinking about the Bible for two millennia, give or take, we’ve got a lot of highly nuanced (sometimes dangerously so!) ways of organizing our thoughts about the God we see in Scripture. That leaves us prone to forget the fact that the vast majority of the Bible is written as narrative, as story. The book God has given us really wants us to experience God through story, not to distill our God-thoughts down to a series of mere “facts.” I’m not diminishing “fact” or denying in any way that we can know truth about God (I heartily affirm that we should constantly pursue truer and truer thoughts about God!), but I am concerned that if we content ourselves to exchange the Bible’s narratives for a list of bullet points summarizing “correct theology,” we empty the Bible of its rich beauty and end up spiritually starving ourselves. God is not a doctrinal statement, a creed, a systematic theology, or set of organized abstract truths. Turning the Bible’s stories into mere theological propositions leaves us with big heads, but shallow hearts. The Scripture itself tells us a grand, sweeping story of the God who gets close to us, the God who acts with and for us, the God who enters our experiences, the God who rescues us and enjoys living in relationship with us. The Gospel is that story: all of God’s presence, God’s humility, God’s rescue plan, God’s delight in us, that’s King Jesus, the fulfillment of all the stories of old, the yes and amen to every ancient promise, the eternal reconciliation of God and humanity.

While I’d love to settle here for a while and consider myriad ways that God’s self-revelation through narrative shapes our own spiritual experience and richly blesses our own hearts, I’ll stay on topic and talk about how we share this story. Just as our knowledge of God comes primarily through narrative, our witness should also be a story-telling witness, as we see among Philip and the apostles.

After all, whether we direct our attention at a favorite author, a TV series, a film franchise, or even just regaling one another with that weird thing that happened at work on Tuesday, reality is unavoidable: we humans are creatures of stories. Ignoring that reality, however, there’s a whole apologetics industrial complex in conservative Christendom that’s devoted itself to merely proving conclusions about God or about Scripture. That way of thinking and talking about God thrives on logic, reason, proofs, arguments, debates. But what has it done with God’s grand story?

Friends, if you feel intimidated by the amount of rationalistic apologetics that seems to have side-loaded itself into evangelism, you’re not alone, and you’re not wrong. Allow me to commend to you a helpful book called Narrative Apologetics, by Alister McGrath. McGrath explains the tension between modernism and postmodernism, including the church’s attempts to talk well about God without capitulating to either philosophical trend. He advocates that we set aside merely logical, rationalistic methods of evangelism, and instead share the Gospel through story. He identifies three kinds of story that enable us to witness: the Bible’s story (God’s own authoritative narrative), our own stories about our experiences with God, and stories from our culture that reflect and re-tell the same narrative arcs as God’s story.

To remove a potential obstacle to evangelism, please don’t feel pressure to memorize logical arguments or a series of complicated proofs for the existence of God. Instead we can tell people the big story and the individual stories of Scripture. In fact, we do that every week downstairs with our kids. Godly Play makes the Bible’s stories tangible, allowing our children to experience God through those narratives. Our communion liturgy is an invitation for all of us to re-tell and live out the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection, as well as the story of how Jesus rescues and empowers us today. In addition to the Bible’s stories, we can also tell our own stories of our experience with God in Jesus; by doing so we testify that our lives make the most sense when we live them as little stories contained by God’s big story. Instead of evangelism based on intellectually convincing people of theological propositions (true as those propositions might be), what if we told our personal Jesus stories in a way that invites people to actually try experiencing God’s story too? An invitation to church would no longer be an invitation to a single event or sermon, but an invitation to repeatedly experience the big story with us.

The Bible invites us in with this same language of experience:

O taste and see that the Lord is good; happy are those who take refuge in him (Ps 34.8).

Hear, everyone who thirsts;
come to the waters;
and you who have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price (Isa 55.1)

The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.”
And let everyone who hears say, “Come.”
And let everyone who is thirsty come.
Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift (Rev 22.17).

God invites us to step into lived experience, to enter a narrative, to live our lives under the big story. Why not simply extend that same invitation to our family, friends, loved ones and neighbors?