Epiphany: The Foreigner (Act 8:26-36) by Tara Corneau - Feb 15 2026

Good morning. Today I have been tasked with our final teaching on Epiphany with an emphasis on the inclusion of outsiders. And if I’m being honest, this has been the hardest teaching to write for me so far – and it’s not because the topic isn’t interesting, or because I’m not particularly passionate about what I’m going to speak to, but because it feels so enormous that I’m nervous I won’t get it right, or that I’m going to miss big chunks of this important story because there’s so much to share, or that what I have to share will feel reductive rather than expansive. At one point, I had twelve different long selections of scripture to discuss…but considering that most of us likely want to get home for lunch at a decent hour, I decided against keeping you here against your will for longer than necessary. 

So even though I won’t be expounding on as much as I initially had planned or had researched for this last teaching connected to Epiphany, I am going to briefly touch on several stories from scripture so that we can perhaps get a more comprehensive perspective as to what the Magi reveal about the Christian story. Because, upon inspection, the story of the unexpected finding Jesus is one that has been told over and over again throughout scripture – the stories in which God chooses those often considered outsiders, and invites them to His table. 

The theme of God using unexpected people for his purposes starts early in scripture. For example, God calls Moses, a self-admittedly poor orator, to speak truth to power in Egypt; he calls David, a young and lowly shepherd boy, who becomes a “man after God’s own heart”, to be king of a nation; he calls Ruth, a Moabite, to boldly pursue Boaz after she claims to Naomi “that your God will be my God;” he calls Esther, a beautiful woman, to bravely save her people from the clutches of evil; and he calls Rahab, a Canaanite prostitute, to protect Jewish spies in Jericho. 

So when the Magi, foreigners from a distant land, foreigners who would have been “advisors to [their] king [because they] were really good at reading the language of the stars” (Tim Mackie, TBP) travel to worship Jesus in Matthew 2, they reinforce a common biblical theme: that God calls the unexpected, those often considered outsiders, to worship and follow Him. And these Magi, with no complete understanding of what or who they might be following, are led by a star for two years before they meet Jesus.

Interestingly, Matthew is the only gospel that includes the story of the Magi visiting Jesus, and it also is the only gospel that opens with the genealogy of Jesus which includes many of the outsiders God called in the Hebrew scriptures. Therefore it seems like this gospel in particular immediately establishes that God invites the unexpected – the foreigners, the ill-equipped, the marginalized, and even those with alternative worldviews – into His story. 

In the story of the Magi, we also see the juxtaposition between the unexpected outsiders, and the expected insiders. Surprisingly, “it is non-Israelites who can see the truth about what God is doing in and for Israel, whereas Israel's own king of the time, not only can't see it…but he's threatened by it.” “Consistently throughout Matthew's account, beginning to end, Jerusalem and the chief priests and the scribes are associated with Herod as enemies to what God is doing for Israel through the Messiah.” (Tim Mackie, The Bible Project) And so the Magi show us a flipped script yet again. We expect the Jewish elite, the overtly religious who have been waiting for Jesus for hundreds of years to be the ones to bring him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, gifts only fit for a king, and yet instead, it is foreigners – religious ‘others’ who had not been waiting for the Messiah – who come and worship.

This story, then, is invitational. It invites all those who are outsiders, who are unexpected, who are not the typical “religious types”, who maybe have worshipped other gods or things, who maybe have a story that doesn’t seem appropriate for polite company, who don’t look or speak like we might expect who God calls to Him.

And this story does not end in the gospels. When we get to Acts, when the gospel story moves out of Jerusalem and “to the ends of the earth,” (Act 1:8)  it should not be lost on us that the first convert to Christianity, to the way of Jesus, is an outsider. 

If you can turn with me to Acts 8:26-36 (p. 1086), we’ll read together: 

26 Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Go south to the road—the desert road—that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” 27 So he started out, and on his way he met an Ethiopian eunuch, an important official in charge of all the treasury of the Candace (which means “queen of the Ethiopians”). This man had gone to Jerusalem to worship, 28 and on his way home was sitting in his chariot reading the Book of Isaiah the prophet. 29 The Spirit told Philip, “Go to that chariot and stay near it.”

30 Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked.

31 “How can I,” he said, “unless someone explains it to me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.

32 This is the passage of Scripture the eunuch was reading:

“He was led like a sheep to the slaughter,    and as a lamb before its shearer is silent,    so he did not open his mouth.

33 In his humiliation he was deprived of justice.    Who can speak of his descendants?    For his life was taken from the earth.”

34 The eunuch asked Philip, “Tell me, please, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?” 35 Then Philip began with that very passage of Scripture and told him the good news about Jesus.

36 As they traveled along the road, they came to some water and the eunuch said, “Look, here is water. What can stand in the way of my being baptized?” 38 And he gave orders to stop the chariot. Then both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and Philip baptized him. 39 When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way rejoicing. 40 Philip, however, appeared at Azotus and traveled about, preaching the gospel in all the towns until he reached Caesarea.

In this story, Philip, a Jew, is called to share the gospel with a clear outsider of the faith: an Ethiopian eunuch who was on his way home from a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem despite not being allowed to enter it. Both NT Wright and the Anglican Bishop of Oxford, Steven Croft, suggest that this eunuch would have been excluded from worshiping in the temple due to both his race and his physical disfigurement. He would have been considered a clear outsider.

And yet, Luke “plants this story at the heart of the moment when the gospel is starting to go out into the wider world, to make it abundantly clear that wherever you go, whatever culture you come [from], whatever situation of human need, sin, exclusion or oppression you may find, the message of Jesus as the one in whom all the promises of God [come true] is there to meet that need.” (Wright) The Ethiopian eunuch “is our first reminder that the Spirit is at work beyond the boundaries of the church, beyond what we can see, in the lives of the most unlikely people.” Here it is clear that “the Christian gospel cannot be contained,” (Croft) and that Jesus as the climax of the story of Israel “opens up [the story] to include everybody, including people like…” the eunuch who had been…”doubly excluded and now wonderfully welcomed.” (Wright)

When I first read this passage of scripture, I noticed that this notion of immediate welcome and inclusion of the Ethiopian eunuch by Philip seems contrary to the way so many of us operate. Too often we sequester ourselves with people who look, think, and act just like us. And I suppose there is a comfortability and familiarity to limiting our circle of people that seems justifiable. But I also wonder if we avoid including those who make us feel uncomfortable because we feel morally or theologically superior, and we are afraid that we will be tainted by them. That if we invite outsiders, they will somehow change our carefully constructed communities in ways that make us feel uncomfortable. 

But I’m not convinced that we’re called to be comfortable. 

And this is the exciting part about Philip in this story. He doesn’t pass by the Ethiopian eunuch as an untouchable other; instead he sees him on the side of the road reading Isaiah, and rather than ignoring the prompting from the Holy Spirit, he follows the call and enters into conversation with him – a conversation that ends with the eunuch’s immediate baptism. 

Philip is not bothered by the social mores of the time. He does not look at the eunuch and think that he was not masculine enough or Jewish enough to be included. He doesn’t suddenly remember Levitical law that says that “No one who has been emasculated by crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the Lord,” (Deuteronomy 23:1) and tell the Ethiopian eunuch that he is unwelcome. Instead, he tells him the good news – that Jesus made a way for all people, regardless of their identity markers, to know him. Jesus is not exclusively for Jews, or for men, or for the religious elite. It is not only for those who have followed the Levitical law, or for those who understand scripture without guidance – it is for all. 

And isn’t this scandalous? That the Good News is not limited by our perceptions of who is in and who is out? That we can expect the unexpected in the Kingdom of God? 

This shows the expansiveness of God’s love for us. He is not limited by my notions of who is acceptable and who is not, by my beliefs about who should be in and who should be out. Instead, God continually shows us throughout all of scripture that He is in the habit of welcoming outsiders, of seeing them as necessary for His purpose by inviting them to become part of the community of believers. 

Can you imagine if we loved like God does? If we were invitational like He is? If we could sit at a table with political rivals like a tax collector and a zealot, calling them both dear friends, expecting them to work alongside one another despite their differences, expecting them to belong to each other?

Perhaps this is what Paul meant when he wrote in 1 Corinthians 12 that we are one body with many parts. That we are to create spaces in which people are treated as necessary to the whole, regardless of their status within the community. In this same passage, Paul also says that we should not devalue our own contributions to the body – wishing we could be like another part – molding ourselves to function as the hands or the eyes if we instead are supposed to be feet or ears. 

At the risk of being vulnerable, I often feel like an outsider myself, and therefore I often wish that I could be a little more like people who seem to naturally fit. I guess sometimes I see myself as the gall bladder of the body of Christ…it’s nice to have one, but you can function just fine without it too. And I think this likely stems from several experiences of feeling like an outsider when I have worked and volunteered in Christian spaces. 

When I first started teaching in Alberta, I got hired at a Christian school, and over time it became apparent that people who asked questions, who challenged the status quo, and who asked their students to do the same made a certain subset of people nervous. Even though I foundationally believed in the same tenets of the faith and had a deep desire to follow Jesus, I was seen as progressive and dangerous because I read and loved Harry Potter, because I wanted to show a film with swearing in it, because I wasn’t too sure about rapture theology, and because I have hesitations about the ethics of taking students on short terms mission trips. Eventually, the loudest voice, a pastor’s wife, questioning me to the administration resulted in me losing my job; it was a deeply painful and formative experience. 

And yet, when I look back, I see that this particular experience has made me more kind, more open, more inclusive. It has made me a better teacher, and a better friend because I know what it is to feel not good enough for a place and people that you desperately wish would walk alongside you. And, upon reflection, I wouldn’t change anything about my experience there – I would ask the same questions, share the same stories, and challenge the status quo in exactly the same ways because it was the right thing to do. Because in the moments when I have been questioned most by insiders, I have found the most significant connection with outsiders.

I sometimes wonder if when we seek to do the will of the Father by asking hard questions regarding the status quo, if we are inviting the Holy Spirit to actually make us outsiders, so that we can have the courage to do what He calls us to do, even when it seems strange, or hard, or when we know it could result in personal hurt. 

So maybe our goal shouldn’t be to mold ourselves to others’ expectations, nor should it be to make everyone fit our expectations. Instead, perhaps we should remember that God seems to choose the unexpected more often than not. That he often invites outsiders to the table, and I wonder if he is compelling us to do the same – to build a longer table rather than erect higher walls. 

And therefore I wonder if we should be looking to the unexpected, to the people who don’t seem like they quite fit, who have ideas that make us feel uncomfortable, and at the very least, entertain the idea that God might just be preparing them for a task that is beyond our wildest imagination. And perhaps, if you are that outsider, He is already preparing you to bring His Kingdom here. 

In closing, let me leave you with three questions:

• Are we wise enough to recognize the unexpected people in whom God is already at work?

• Are we creative enough to imagine a kaleidoscope of persons welcomed and serving in the Kingdom of God?

• And finally, are we brave enough to be boldly invitational to those we consider outsiders?