How often does this happen to you?
You’re minding your own business, and you get a call: “Quick, head out to route 206, where it goes through the Pine Barrens.”
So you do, and you see a convertible cruising slowly by, with someone listening to an audio Bible, and you run up to them and say, “Hey, want to talk about that book?” and they invite you into the car and you have a life changing conversation and they ask you to baptize them. And you do.
And suddenly, you find yourself vanishing from the car and reappearing in Ocean City,
Never happens, right?
This is Mission From God stuff raised from the Blues Brothers to the James Bond level: from the call to drop everything and go, through the amazing coincidences and results, to the transporter beam that whisks our hero away…
Never happens to you and me, right?
Except I suspect it does happen, more often than you might think. Maybe even all the time.
Because the story we heard today about Philip – meeting with a stranger on the road, sharing his own great discovery of faith, and leaving that stranger with a life transformed – is not really so much a story about Philip himself, but about God at work. About Jesus being present in that place and time, through Philip. And the Ethiopian eunuch.
Many of the stories in the Acts of the Apostles are like that: stories about how after Jesus’ resurrection the community of disciples over and over had experiences in which they were God’s incarnate love for other people. Just as Jesus himself had been God’s love incarnate for them.
Extraordinary things happen to these new Christians – they heal the uncurable, see visions, break iron chains, raise the dead, make miraculous conversions, and get teleported by the Spirit. And they are very clear that it’s not they themselves who do these things. It’s Christ.
For a moment or an hour or a day, these particular followers of Jesus become Jesus, become the presence and power of God, through whom God helps someone else, or changes the world.
And that – exactly that – happens to you and me, too.
We just don’t always realize it.
Somewhere in your life, in however long or short a time you have loved God and tried to follow Jesus yourself, there is a conversation you have had with someone which opened their eyes or ears or heart to receive a gift from God.
You might remember seeing and feeling the insight or the joy or the healing in someone else’s eyes or words or actions as they responded to something you said or did.
Or you may have absolutely no idea what conversation that was. It may even not have seemed like a conversation at all. It may have been a short encounter with a stranger. It may have been a long, deep, discussion with someone you love that never seemed to be about God or faith at all.
It may have left you full of the presence of God, or you may not have noticed it at all.
It’s often easier to remember the conversations, the actions, the moments, where someone else was Christ for us.
Several years ago, I got into a taxi in Kenya with a handful of other church people – a theologian, another priest, a church communications professional – and we noticed that the windscreen had “Psalms 121” written across the top in large letters.
We promptly started quoting the first verse of that psalm to one another “I lift my eyes to the hills – from where will my help come?” and thinking how appropriate that desire for help might be on the potholed mountain roads we were traveling.
And then someone asked the driver “Is that why your car says ‘Psalms 121’”?
“This Psalm says ‘The Lord will watch over your going and your coming, from this time forth forevermore.’” he said.
There was a moment of silence in the car, as that assurance of God’s presence and protection was suddenly present – physical and tangible.
All the church professionals had focused on the one line of Psalm 121 that expresses uncertainty or need.
And then our ears and hearts were opened to the promise and assurance that are the whole heart and truth of that psalm. The expression of profound trust painted on the windscreen and voiced by the driver made the whole cab the vivid presence and protection of God, in that place and moment.
In that moment, my own sense of trust in God woke up. And that psalm has stood beside me as deep assurance any number of times in the last eight years that I have needed to know that God is watching over me, and us.
I suspect that taxi driver doesn’t remember it at all.
Unless we gave him a really bad tip, or a really large one.
It has happened to you, too. I am sure of it.
Someone has been the teacher, the love of God made physical for you. Anyone from a stranger met in passing to a beloved lifelong friend. And you have been the rabbi, the interpreter of God, the presence of Christ for someone else.
Sometimes, it’s really clear in the moment that God is inspiring and using you. You may really feel as if the Spirit has spoken into your ear, like Philip’s, telling you exactly where to be and what to do.
Other times – most of the time, I suspect – you or I would tell the story of those moments as accidental. It was a conversation with someone you met because we had to get a job done – not because God rang your phone with directions to the wilderness road.
I was just curious about that book she was reading, we might say, and then she told me so much about her life, and asked what I thought. I don’t know what I said, or where she went afterwards.
But if the Holy Spirit tells this story about you, it might sound quite different. “I called her to go out to the Home Depot that day,” the Spirit might say.
Writing your story in a modern-day Acts of the Apostles, Luke might say, “God spoke to him and told him to ask how he could help.”
And it would be true.
Even Philip might have told the story of his being whisked by the Spirit to Azotus as “I kept thinking about the conversation we’d had, and didn’t notice how far I’d come. Suddenly, I’d arrived in town, and it seemed like no time had passed since I left that man on the river bank.”
These miracles that God does with us and in us often seem entirely commonplace.
The choice we have is to pay attention ourselves, so that we can hear the story God may be telling with us.
It’s a gift to notice those moments when we have been Christ for someone else – intentionally or accidentally. When something you did or said (or didn’t say or do) conveyed God’s healing or hope or power, and you get to witness the insight or the joy or the change.
We can prepare ourselves to see, to notice, to experience that presence of God in us by the everyday practices of our faith.
By reading the stories of God in scripture, so that we just might recognize something similar when it happens to us.
By praying, so that we practice opening our own hearts and needs to God’s healing and hope and love, and asking God’s guidance.
By simply looking for God’s presence in the everyday around us, so that we may also recognize God’s work when we see ourselves in the mirror.
By seeking out and listening to other people’s stories of God at work. By telling our own stories of feeling God’s love and care – tell them to yourself, and tell them to others.
God is going to use us this way.
Our choice is to practice what keeps us open to God, so when – not if, but when – God does, it will feel natural and joyful, not awkward or strange. To use the practices of faith to tune our eyes and hearts and ears to notice what God is up to in us, so that we, with Philip and the eunuch from Ethiopia, can share in God’s present and eternal joy.
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