Imagine that you’re a fisherman, standing on the lakeshore of the hill country of Judaea. You are decidedly minding your own business, mending the nets, or sorting your catch, and all of a sudden Jesus walks by. Jesus calls to you, and you drop your nets, leave your boat, and follow.
You spend the next three years or so following Jesus from town to town. Having adventures, seeing amazing miracles, trying to understand what Jesus teaches, trying to understand who this Jesus is. You don’t know what’s going to happen, but being with Jesus makes you feel like as long as Jesus is there, and with you, you’ll be okay.
And then a passover meal in an upper room, the betrayal by the one you thought was one of you, the arrest, the crucifixion, the burial. But on the first day of the week, the impossible happens: Mary comes running to you, telling you that Jesus is not dead, but alive. Despite yourself, you believe. And then you too see Jesus, risen, standing among you.
The moment Jesus called you from the shore in Galilee, your life was already changed forever. But now there’s no going back. If you personally witness the Son of Man raised from the dead and assumed into heaven on high, you don’t go back to fishing.
So now what? Now what do you do, now that Jesus changed everything, but is gone? What do you do without Jesus? What do you do about being a disciple, how do you organize yourselves? What do you do about the last commission of Jesus, to preach the Gospels to all people? How do you live the way Jesus commanded you to live in this new reality? How do you pray, now that he’s gone? How do you even begin to think about these questions, now that the one who changed your life is gone? How do you navigate this chaos? Now what?
Every life has “now what” moments. When what we thought we knew, what we built our lives upon, changes in the blink of an eye, and we must navigate into uncharted waters. Moments where we wish we could just go back to fishing, but we can’t, because even if we could go back, we’ve been too changed by what’s happened to really ever go back. We are no longer the same person, our circumstances have been irrevocably changed, and so unable to return to our past, we forge ahead, into our unknown and uncertain future.
We are living in a collective Now What moment, a moment where what we thought we knew about the most basic aspects of our lives no longer applies. Our family connections, our community, our common work, our very patterns of life have all been upended. In very real ways, yet to be discovered, there is no going back. We mourn our losses, we mourn the way life was. We look around and ask, “Now what?”
The Book of Acts tells the story of how the disciples answered the “Now what?” question. Acts tells the story of how the disciples became the apostles, and how the apostles became the church. But what Acts teaches us, above everything else, is that the Apostles, even as they navigated unknown territory, were never alone. Jesus, who had changed their lives forever, was gone, and their life was irrevocably changed. But the Holy Spirit came, bursting into their lives, initially like a violent wind, in tongues of flame -- and then cooled down to an ever-present gentle breeze, a flickering candle in the soul. In Acts, the Holy Spirit calls and directs and protects and speaks and nudges and breaks open shackles. The Holy Spirit is responsible for jailbreaks and healing and surviving shipwrecks. Over and over again, the answer to the disciples’ “Now what?” was to be found in the guidance, support and comfort of the Holy Spirit, no matter what the challenges they faced.
This is a story that we need to hear right now. So this Easter season, starting today, the Cathedral is reading the Acts of the Apostles. All of us! From the very youngest, who will hear the stories of Acts in Sunday School and play hide and go seek with the symbols of the Holy Spirit, to our full-grown adults, who are invited to read the whole book, part by part as we head toward the day of Pentecost. There will be ways to go deep spiritually, with weekly prayer practices, noonday prayer reflections, and even adult meditation coloring sheets. There will be ways to go deep relationally, in online small group conversation. There will be ways to go deep intellectually, with bible study. But the most important thing is that we all read this story together.
We read Acts together because the story of Acts is our story. More than just the origin story or history of the early Church, Acts is the story of how to be guided by the Holy Spirit, even when, or perhaps especially when, we stand around asking, “Now What?” The Holy Spirit showed up in real and tangible ways for the Apostles, and the Holy Spirit has never stopped showing up.
Because even in our own uncertain time, the Holy Spirit lives and moves and breathes and acts among us. The Spirit guides us, even now, if we only knew how to listen, if only we knew how to be in better relationship with the Spirit. Reading Acts is a great place to start, because as we trace the story of the apostles, we begin to see our story within their stories, we can begin to hear where God is calling us in our own “Now What” moment.
So download the reading plan from the website. Bust out your bible, use your phone. It doesn’t matter where or how or what translation, as long as you actually read. What matters is that we begin to see and discern that the Spirit is moving among us, guiding us, calling us, forming us. Even now. Especially now.