If you’re paying attention during worship in the next few weeks, you might notice that our first lesson has switched from being an Old Testament reading to a reading from the Acts of the Apostles, a book in the New Testament.

It’s a little strange, in a way, that the lectionary does this during the season of Easter every year. After all, the Old Testament is three-quarters of the volume of the Bible; if you’re going to have three readings and a psalm, wouldn’t you take at least one of those three from the Old Testament instead of having a New Testament lesson from Acts, a New Testament epistle, and a New Testament Gospel?

But it does make a certain amount of sense. The Book of the Acts of the Apostles tells the story of the early church after Jesus’ resurrection, and in fact it’s the second in a two-volume set that starts with the Gospel of Luke. Having told the story of Jesus and his followers in the Gospel, Luke goes on to tell the story of the Holy Spirit and the early church in the Acts of the Apostles.

In a sense, this means that Acts is the most relevant book for us. We spend much of our time focused on Jesus’ life, leadership, and ministry in the four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but we forget that we’re living now in the Easter world of Acts, where Jesus has died, resurrected, and ascended into heaven, and where the Holy Spirit is now guiding the church, through all of us as disciples.

It’s a familiar story, in some ways. The early church lives through the common experiences of the church. The Book of Acts starts with unity and idealism, with a simple, close-knit community that quickly falls apart into chaos and conflict. They have to work through their conflicts, and create new structures and delegate responsibilities—and then they go out and share the message throughout the world. These are ordinary phases in the life of the church: community, conflict, evangelism. They’re the same ones that Paul writes about in his letters to the early churches. They’re the same ones we live through in our own churches. But they’re very different from the content of most of the teachings of Jesus in the gospels.

We’re striving, of course, to follow Jesus, and so the gospels are central to us. But we’re living in the world of Acts. So while I won’t always be preaching on our readings from the Acts of the Apostles, I hope you’ll pay attention to see how the life of the church—and, in fact, individual people’s lives!—are being transformed in them, because the post-Resurrection world of the Acts of the Apostles is the world we live in and pray in today.