Three Stories

Once upon a time, there was a eunuch riding back to his home in Ethiopia from Jerusalem, reading his Bible. The Evangelist Philip was going the same way, and when he met up with the eunuch, he heard him reading aloud from the Book of Isaiah.

"Hi, there," Philip called in greeting. "What's that you're reading?"

"The Bible," the eunuch replied, "but I can't make head nor tail of it. It's all Greek to me!"

"It is Greek," Philip replied. "Personally, I prefer Latin. It's easier to learn because it doesn't have all those funny college fraternity letters."

"Me, too," the eunuch agreed. "This Chapter 53, for example. I can't figure out whom the prophet is talking about, himself or someone else."

"Oh, that's easy," Philip told him. "He's talking about Jesus of Nazareth. I'm a famous missionary. I can tell you all about him."

"Well," said the eunuch. "Climb up here and lay it on me."

So Philip climbed into the eunuch's chariot and told him all about Jesus.

"Wow!" exclaimed the eunuch at last. "That is heavy stuff! Hey, look, there's a river over there. What is to prevent my being baptized?"

"Plenty," Philip told him. "First you have to go to inquiry class, and then find a church and join an RCIA group and get a sponsor who is a certifiably devout practicing Christian, and..."

"But I'm a busy man," interrupted the eunuch. I'm the queen's treasurer. I've barely got time for my wife and kids as it is. I don't have any extra for night school."

"Yeah," Philip remarked scornfully. "A eunuch with a wife and kids. Riiiiiiiiiiiight!"

"Why can't I have a wife and kids?" the eunuch asked him petulantly. "Just because I'm a eunuch doesn't mean I don't like girls. The kids are hers from a previous marriage, of course, but their dad only sees them about four days a year."

"Well, that's another problem," Philip responded. "You can't be married to a divorced woman. I guess you're just out of luck!"

"Screw it!" the eunuch retorted angrily. "I'm going to start my own religion, one with a little more tolerance. I'm going to call it 'Eunuchtarianism'."

"Well, suit yourself," Philip yelled at him as he jumped down from the chariot. "Personally, I think your problem is that you just don't have any balls!"

Once there was a man named Saul, who hated Christians with a passion, and did everything he could to destroy them. He even participated in the stoning of the first Christian martyr, Saint Stephen.

One day, when he was on his way to Damascus on one of his Christian hunts, Saul was suddenly knocked off his horse and struck blind. Nobody around him knew exactly what had happened, so they took him to Damascus to find somebody who might be able to help him.

That somebody turned out to be a Christian named Ananias, whom God sent to cure Saul. Ananias initially refused, but God reminded him what he'd better do if he knew what was good for him. So Ananias eventually found Saul, blind, sick, and so weak that he couldn't eat or drink.

"Brother Saul," Ananias intoned with a deep, sonorous voice, "the Lord, even Jesus, that appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost."

Saul was about to tell him to quit talking like a damned fool when something like scales fell off of his eyes and he could see clearly. "Holy crap!" he exclaimed. "Maybe these Christians are right after all!"

So Saul got baptized and ate a hearty lunch and went to stay with Ananias and his friends. For several days afterward, he went to all the synagogues in Damascus every day and preached to all the Jews that Jesus is the Son of God.

The Jews, of course, didn't take kindly to this at all, and decided they'd have to shut Saul up for good. When his friends found out about it, they smuggled him out of the city in a basket and took him to Jerusalem where the apostle Barnabas introduced him to the other apostles.

"Just who the hell do you think you are?!" they demanded. "Gettin' baptized without a single RCIA class, irritatin' the Jews, preachin' without our permission! We've got enough trouble with the Jews as it is; you've always been a royal pain in the butt, that's for sure! You're worse now then you were before!"

"But I've been converted," Saul protested. "I found Jesus! He's my personal savior!"

"Well, you just keep it to your damned self!" they warned him. "You may have got away with that with those Baptists up there in Damascus, but not here in Jerusalem. If you want to be a Catholic like us, you have to take instruction, go through RCIA, get confirmed, admitted to a congregation..."

"But I want to be preacher!" Saul told them. "I've always been a pretty good theologian..."

"Out of the question!" Peter interrupted angrily. "You'd have to go to Catholic school for twelve years and then take additional instruction and be ordained a deacon. We'd only let you preach a few times a year, and mostly to prisoners even then. If you wanted to do it full time, you'd have to spend years and years in the seminary before your bishop ordained you a priest. I'm the pope around here, and I'm just not going to permit that! Case closed!"

"But, I have a calling, Your Holiness," Saul replied, trying to sound respectful. "I'm to be the Apostle to the Gentiles."

"Gentiles!" Peter exploded." Let me tell you, sonny, you'd do well to stay away from those vermin! They're all a bunch of filthy, uncircumcised dogs! If you want to do something useful, start a new life, change your name to something more Roman, and get a job. Tentmaking is going to be big around here; you ought to get involved in that."

As Peter suggested, Saul changed his name to Paul and took up tentmaking. But he stayed and argued so much that Peter decided to send him out to preach to the Gentiles as he had suggested, as far away from Jewish Jerusalem as possible. "Take your time and go as far away as you can," Peter told him privately. "Western Europe wouldn't be too far. These idol-worshipers are going to be a tough nut to crack."

So Paul packed up his tentmaking business and headed off to Greece on his way west.

At Ephesus, he encountered twelve Greeks who had already been baptized. Paul asked them if they had been confirmed in the Holy Spirit.

"We're mostly nondenominational around here," one of them told him. "We take Jesus as our savior, believe in his name, get baptized, do unto others as we would have them do unto us, that's about it."

"Well, we'll have to change all that!" Paul responded angrily. "You're all going to have to get Christian sponsors, find an established congregation, go through RCIA, maybe go on a retreat or two, attend Cursillo, then you'll have to get baptized all over again."

"Why?" one guy asked him. "We were taught that there was 'one baptism for the forgiveness of sins...'"

"Well, if you don't have a baptismal certificate, you don't have jack!" Paul replied. "For all I know you guys could be a bunch of Muslim terrorist spies!"

"Muslims won't be invented for over five centuries, another guy replied. "You don't have to worry about them."

"Where Muslims are concerned," Paul assured him, "you just can't ever be too careful!"

So Paul set up a church in Ephesus, started an RCIA class and a Catholic school, and eventually accepted the candidates into the Church and baptized them. Then he laid hands on them and they received the Holy Spirit and began prophesying and speaking in tongues and preaching in the synagogues and giving nightly motivational speeches at the local lecture hall and doing all sorts of other really weird stuff that attracted the attention of just about everyone in Asia Minor.

One of these was a silversmith named Demetrius who sold miniature statues of the temple of Artemis. He started a huge riot by convincing the people that Paul's preaching was a mortal threat to the Ephesian tourist and religious trinket industries. This so infuriated the Ephesians that they almost lynched Gaius and Aristarchus, Paul's traveling companions.

Paul decided this was a good time to go preach in Macedonia for awhile, and communicate with the Ephesians only by mail.

John Lindorfer