The Gospel According to Me. And You. And you, and you, and...

Philip baptizing the Ethiopian eunuch (image generated by Google Gemini with prompt)

I grew up in a conservative, evangelical Christian denomination where sharing the gospel broadly meant convincing a nonbeliever or sinner to confess their sins, pray the sinner’s prayer, accept Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior, and become a part of the church in order to avoid eternal torment in the lake of fire. Lord have mercy on your soul if you later sinned and died without repenting because that meant an eternity of pain and agony for you.

Now, in daily practice, our church was not very much like that. The people were kind and supportive of one another. They welcomed strangers and withheld judging “sinners” such as divorced people and unwed mothers, at least to their faces. In our house, religious talk was more about doing what was right in the world through kindness and generosity than it was about hell and torment. For that, I am very grateful.

But as I grew older and ventured outside the bubble of family and local church, I encountered more evangelical followers, and the message when it came to the gospel was mostly the same: repent or spend an eternity separated from God; in other words, turn or burn.

Thankfully, my opinion on what the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ is has radically transformed over the years, due in large part to my coming to terms with my sexuality and accepting myself for who I am, then finding fellow followers of the Way of Jesus who accept me for who I am. It has also been transformed by my interactions with people who love and follow Jesus outside of the evangelical world. I no longer see the kin-dom of God (here I use kin-dom instead of kingdom to be more gender-inclusive and to de-emphasize monarchical metaphors because I live in 2026 CE and not the first century AD) as a far-away, yet-to-be-realized spiritual world, but a here-and-now reality accessible to anyone who will choose love over fear and greed (two things which I personally believe are at the root of all sin, which is anything which separates us from God, who is love). The Good News of Jesus Christ is that God loves us, wants us, and desires us to love one another (and God’s creation, I believe) without condition. Jesus gave us two commandments: love God with everything we are, and love others as we love ourselves. And Jesus made it very clear that this kin-dom includes everyone: Jews, Gentiles, Samaritans, men, women, slaves and free people – everyone. Period.

As a gay man, the story of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts chapter 8, verses 26 through 40 resonates especially strongly. In the story, a high-ranking official from the land of Kush, which covered what is present-day Sudan and southern Egypt, has traveled about 1000 miles to Jerusalem to worship. In that time, Gentiles who worshipped the God of the Jews were known as God-fearers. However, this eunuch was excluded from full participation in the life of the Jewish faith for two reasons: first, he was a Gentile foreigner, not of any tribe of Israel; and second, he was a eunuch, so he had to remain with Gentiles and other “unclean” individuals in the outer courts of the temple. This resonates with me because for hundreds of years, LGBTQIA+ individuals have been excluded from full participation in the life of the church. Even today, Christian denominations split up because some congregants simply cannot accept anyone who is not heterosexual or cisgender into their community. Sad. They are missing an immense blessing from the talents and gifts of LGBTQIA+ people.

Back to the story of the eunuch: while travelling back to his homeland from Jerusalem, the unnamed eunuch is reading a scroll upon which is written the book of Isaiah, which contains prophesies about the Messiah. Philip, one of the disciples of Jesus (not the apostle Philip who personally knew Jesus) is called by the Holy Spirit to catch up with the eunuch. When he does, the eunuch invites him into his chariot to explain the writings of Isaiah to him. When they come upon a body of water, the eunuch exclaims, “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” So Philip takes him down to the water, baptizes him into the church, or the body of Christ, and the eunuch goes on his way, carrying the good news to his people in Kush and thereby further spreading the gospel to Gentile lands.

It's important to note that Isaiah 56 prophecies that faithful eunuchs would receive “a monument and a name better than sons and daughters.” No doubt the Ethiopian eunuch had read this prophecy and viewed it with great hope for the future of others like him. Little did he know that he would be one of the first individuals baptized into the full fellowship of the body of Christ, thus fulfilling the prophecy he had been reading about! This is very significant on several levels. The Ethiopian eunuch not only represents a sexual or gender minority, but also foreigners, Gentiles, and dark-skinned peoples. The eunuch was also embedded in a socially stratified system in which he gained some privileges and power but would have never been accepted as a fully equal member of his society. You see, the gospel or good news to the Ethiopian eunuch was full inclusion and acceptance, not after some ridiculously time-consuming study or a majority vote by the members of a governing council or congregation, but already by God’s love and grace through Christ. He didn’t need a council’s seal of approval; he only needed God’s, which had already been given to him.

The story of the Ethiopian eunuch is an illustration of God’s radically inclusive love and acceptance of every kind of human being. Whether the eunuch was made a eunuch or born a eunuch is irrelevant. No one needed to see his birth certificate. No one asked him to lift up his robes and prove anything. No one expected him to stop being a eunuch or looking like a eunuch or acting like a eunuch. He had already been accepted by God, and his baptism by Philip was symbolic of his acceptance into the church, the body of Christ.

How many other people have been marginalized by the church through the centuries? Differently abled people. Racial and ethnic minorities. Women. The poor. People struggling with mental illness. Single parents. Divorcees. The list could go on. I guess the church of the first few centuries after Jesus’ time grew so fast because it was so welcoming and inclusive. Women held leadership roles. Gentiles and Samaritans were welcomed. The sick and the poor received help. The hungry were fed. The unhoused were sheltered. The church was a movement, not an institution. And move it did, all across the ancient world, with its emphasis on love and community…until the pagan Roman emperor Constantine fucked it up by making it the official religion of the empire, and we’re still putting it back together today. But that’s a topic for another essay.

To the sick, the good news is healing. To the poor, the good news is abundance. To the hungry, the good news is food. To the marginalized, the good news is community. To the doubter, the good news is validation. To the unemployed, the good news is work. And overarching all of these is the good news of God’s love, grace, and acceptance of us. All God asks in return is our love for God and for each other.

We each receive the good news of Jesus Christ through the lens of our own life experience, just like the Ethiopian eunuch did. For me, it was the good news that I was accepted and loved by God for who I am. For all of us, it’s the knowledge that Jesus abolished whatever barriers kept us from full kinship with God, whether those barriers were of our own creation or were imposed on us by ungodly systems like imperialism, patriarchy, racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and transphobia.

My life in Christ is the Gospel According to Me. You have the Gospel According to You. If others won’t hear your good news, then do as Jesus instructed his apostles: shake the dust from your feet and move on. Jesus also instructed his followers not to cast their pearls before swine, lest the pearls be tramped down in the mud and muck of the pigsty. Not everyone is ready to hear your good news. Many are still enslaved to ways of thinking that are rooted in the lies and manipulations of those who hold power and wealth. So don’t waste your time trying to convince people whose minds are already made up about you and your testimony. God will deal with them in God’s own way and in God’s own time. Forget them and go share your good news with those who are ready to hear it.