Philip got out of God\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s way. He remembered that what makes the gospel offensive isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t who it keeps out, but who it lets in. Nothing could prevent the eunuch from being baptized, for the mountains of obstruction had been plowed down, the rocky hills had been made smooth, and God had cleared a path. There was holy water everywhere.<\/p>\n
Two thousand years later, John\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s call remains a wilderness call, a cry from the margins. Because we religious types are really good at building walls and retreating to temples. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re good at making mountains out of our ideologies, obstructions out of our theologies, and hills out of our screwed-up notions of who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s in and who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s out, who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s worthy and who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unworthy. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re good at getting in the way. Perhaps we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re afraid that if we move, God might use people and methods we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t approve of, that rules will be broken and theologies questioned. Perhaps we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re already afraid that if we get out of the way, this grace thing might get out of hand.<\/p>\n
Well, guess what? It already has.<\/p>\n
— Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday<\/em>, p. 39-40.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Philip got out of God\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s way. He remembered that what makes the gospel offensive isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t who it keeps out, but who it lets in. Nothing could prevent the eunuch from being baptized, for the mountains of obstruction had been plowed down, the rocky hills had been made smooth, and God had cleared a path. There […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,36,44,13,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-acceptance","category-community","category-faith","category-god","category-universalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4045\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}