Our first lesson for this coming Sunday is a little vignette from the Acts of the Apostles. An angel of the Lord appears to the apostle Philip in Jerusalem and tells him to go on the road down to Gaza, on the border with Egypt. On the road, he encounters the chariot of an Ethiopian eunuch, an official who’s traveled from the court of the queen of Ethiopia, down at the southern end of the Nile, all the way up through Egypt and to Jerusalem to try to understand who this God is who the Jewish people worship. He’s been at the Temple, and he’s on his way home, and he’s got a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. The Holy Spirit leads Philip to go and ask him, “Do you understand what you’re reading?” Not just “can you read Hebrew?” but, “Do you understand the prophecy you’re reading?” And he replies, “How can I understand unless someone guides me?”

So Philip sits there and rides in his chariot for a few minutes, and he explains the whole story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and what this new Christian movement is all about. And the eunuch says, “Look, here’s some water! Why don’t you baptize me now?” So he does.

And then—this is my favorite part—“When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing.” (Acts 8:39) And that’s the whole encounter. That’s the whole story. That’s the whole relationship. They never see each other again.

You may or may not know that Ethiopia was one of the earliest countries to embrace Christianity. Before there were even any Anglo-Saxons in the land we now call England, Ethiopia was a Christian country. Around the same time that the Roman Empire was becoming officially Christian, Ethiopia, too, had Christian kings. You can’t give all the credit for this to the Ethiopian eunuch, but there’s a long tradition that says he was the first one to bring Christianity back to his home in Ethiopia.

This is a turning point in the whole Book of Acts. Jesus had told the apostles, “you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth,” (Acts 1:8) and the story’s followed them in these concentric circles, as they spread the good news in Jerusalem, then in the surrounding areas, and now—finally—to the whole world.

What strikes me, for such a world-historical encounter, one so significant in the Book of Acts and in the whole history of the Church, is how brief it is. An angel appears to Philip. The Holy Spirit leads him to get into the chariot. And then the spirit of the Lord snatches him away as soon as the baptism’s over.

In my own life, there have been those moments where I suddenly—for no good reason at all—took a slightly different turn from what I was expecting. Where I encountered somebody, had a conversation, and soon moved along. It’s only ever in retrospect that I’ve seen what the Holy Spirit was doing right then, in those moments.

So I wonder, as you think back on your own life: What have those surprise encounters been? When have you suddenly changed direction? When have you asked for a guide to help you understand? These are the moments, as the Holy Spirit leads us down a wilderness road, when God is most present with us.  

And I wonder where you might be headed next.

It may take a long time to see those chance encounters bear fruit—hopefully not centuries!—but this is the way the Holy Spirit works: in small moments, between us, at the least-expected time.

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.

There were three things that I particularly loved about our outdoor worship on Easter morning at the John Harvard Mall. (There were many things I loved, not least just getting to be there with some four dozen of you for worship, but there were three I want to mention!)

The first was the birdsong. It struck me as I sat there, listening to the songs of the woodpecker and the robin and the sparrow (and the occasional dog) that it was almost as if all Creation were joining together in worship and praise to God—as if the sun and the trees and the birds themselves were giving glory to the same God we were praising in those services.

The second was that we were joined, not only with one another in worship, but with others across time. As one parishioner pointed out to me, we were located very near the site of the original church in Charlestown of which John Harvard himself was the minister, at a location and in a city in which people have been celebrating the resurrection for some four centuries, and that united us with them in that moment.

And the third thing was that we were joined in worship not only by animals of other species and by people of other generations, but by neighbors of our own time and place and species, people who just happened to be walking through and picked up a bulletin and stood for a minute, or sat for a minute, or joined in the whole service, whether they’d registered or not!

These three things—community across species, community across time, community outside our own community—are signs of the resurrection. It’s no surprise that Jesus appeared in his resurrected form in a garden full of nature. It’s no surprise that Jesus’ followers looked back on their ancient scriptures to try to understand what had happened. It’s no surprise that they then went and shared the good news outside their own small circle of followers. These are the things that we do when Easter happens. We look back, into our own history. We look around us at the world. And we go and share that good news with others.

I think “Easter in the Park” will be here to stay. We’ll probably, in the future, have Easter in the church, as well! But Christmas Eve and Easter were opportunities for us to worship in a beautiful place, a historic place, and—most importantly—in our place, in our own community, with people who’d never walked through the doors of St. John’s Episcopal Church but were happy to stop and worship while they were walking the dog.

I hope that we can embrace these signs of the resurrection. I hope that we can bring them with us, not only through this fifty-day season of Easter, but into our futures and into the future of this church, as we go through our own resurrection.

The tradition of holding special services on different days during the week between Palm Sunday and Easter—in other words, the tradition of Holy Week—began almost seventeen centuries ago, in the city of Jerusalem. Early Christians there, two or three hundred years after Jesus’ death, had begun celebrating a series of services at different locations that were important in that last week on the days when they would have taken place. So on Thursday night, they went to the upper room where Jesus had his Last Supper with his disciples before he died. On Friday, they went to the site of the crucifixion; on Saturday and Sunday, the site of the tomb and the resurrection. At each place, they’d hold a service, in a kind of pilgrimage to those important places in Jesus’ final week.

Holy Week is a kind of pilgrimage for us, too; not in space, but in time. It’s a way of methodically and slowly walking through these events of Jesus’ last days and the completion of his ministry: his death, his resurrection, the precious last moments with his disciples, and the anguishing last moments of grief and loss.

But like any pilgrimage, this isn’t about the past. It’s not about the places or the times we’re visiting. It’s about the present. It’s about our own lives.

There’s a beautiful invitation in the Easter Vigil before the long series of readings and psalms begins: “Let us hear the record of God’s saving deeds in history, how he saved his people in ages past; and let us pray that our God will bring each of us to the fullness of redemption.” (BCP p. 288)

In the events of Holy Week, we always balance those two halves: hearing the record of God’s saving deeds in history, and praying that God will bring to each of us the fullness of that redemption. As year after year we re-enact these moments in Jesus’ last days, it’s important for us to remember that they’re always about what Jesus is doing in our present day. It’s not so much that we need to be like Jesus and wash one another’s feet; it’s that we need to understand what it means for Jesus to wash our feet. We don’t offer the sacrifice of Jesus again on the cross; we try to understand what that sacrifice on the cross two thousand years ago means today. And while we proclaim the resurrection Sunday after Sunday, we mark our Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday services with special celebration because there’s a reminder for us of the greatness of that triumph over all the powers of death and evil in the world. So I invite you, this Holy Week, to join in however much of that pilgrimage you can, whether it’s just Palm Sunday and Easter, or the full Triduum from Maundy Thursday to Good Friday to the Vigil. Let us hear the record of God’s saving deeds in history; and let us pray that God will bring each of us to the fullness of redemption. Amen.