Acts tells the story of how the promise that Jesus gave his followers came to be fulfilled. The promise, as recorded in the first chapter of Acts, is this: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

Here, we get a foreshadowing of “to the ends of the earth”, as Philip encounters an Ethiopian eunuch. “Ethiopian,” in that era, referred to anyone with dark skin, particularly to persons from the territories to the south of Egypt – what were considered by those who lived around the Mediterranean as “the ends of the earth.”

For the first readers of this account, the Ethiopian represented everything exotic and strange. His dark skin alone is enough to excite the imagination. Difference in skin tone can have that effect on people – when Christie and I travelled in southern India some years ago, we spend several days in Madurai, a city of several million people. We never saw another Caucasian the entire time, and when we visited orphanages and elementary schools, it was clear that we were an oddity to the children. In the same way, this Ethiopian is exotic and strange to Luke’s readers. But he was exotic and strange in another way, too – as a court official to the queen of the Ethiopians, in charge of the royal treasury – the Robert Geitner of his day – he represented power and authority and learning and status. And at heart he is a seeker, an inquirer who earnestly reaches out to get to the bottom of life’s deepest mysteries.

Our Ethiopian is strange, but I would submit to you that he really is no stranger to any of us, and certainly no stranger to us than anyone else we might happen to run into in the course of our days. For the truth of the matter is that for all the polls which say that we are a Christian nation and a society of church-goers, you and I know that there are many people in our families, in our neighborhoods, in our towns, across the Cape, who are not church-goers, who are not members of a religious community, who have not found a faith home. Some of these may have been brought up in families who never introduced them to a faith community, and some of them at some time or another became so disillusioned and turned-off by faith communities that they left and never went back. But many of these are seekers and searchers still, longing for an outlet for deep-felt spiritual yearnings, desperate for a place of authentic, welcoming community, filled with a sense that their true home lies elsewhere than at the mall, or on the athletic fields, or at home in front of the tube. And like the Ethiopian in the chariot, their question is this: “How can I understand unless someone guides me?”

Enter Philip, and enter us folk, too. Here is a model for church growth that all of us who were ever turned off by an in-your-face, pushy, tactless fundamentalist can cotton to. Philip finds himself in the company of this stranger, a fellow engaged in a bit of summer reading on the road. After an exchange of pleasantries, Philips is surprised to find himself invited into his chariot. He is invited – the door is opened, the opportunity is presented, and all Philip need do is respond to the invitation, and enter into the conversation, speaking from the heart. Which is what he does, and the next thing you know, this Ethipian, once a stranger to God’s all-encompassing love, finds that everything has changed for him.

I know a bunch of you get it. Just this week I bumped into Lynn Parker, who told me of an incident this past week. She ran into a woman at the supermarket, and somehow they got talking, and next thing you know she tells Lynn that she is new to the Cape and has had a hard time meeting people. Were these words from Acts lurking in Lynn’s subconscious?: “And he invited Philip to get in and sit beside him.” Whatever the case may be, Lynn, bless her heart, hears the invitation, and so she tells this woman that what she needs to do is find a church just like the one Lynn attends, and then fills her in on the West Parish women’s retreat she attended two weeks ago. “Gee, I would have loved to have gone on that retreat,” the woman responded. Will she come to worship here? God knows. But Lynn did her part – meeting a fellow traveler in the course of her daily rounds, she responded to an invitation to conversation, she shared out of her own experience about her faith and why it was important to her – and then she left the rest up to the Spirit.

I know, I know, many of get the willies when we think about speaking with others about our faith, or talking with them about our church, or sharing with them how what goes on here actually makes a difference in your life. Maybe you think you don’t have the right gifts for this, or would not know where to start.

For you, the good news today is that if the gospel is being preached, if the good news is being shared, be it out in the desert to an Ethiopian court official in the time of Philip, or at Stop and Shop on Cape Cod with Lynn Parker, it is the work of God, not of people.

Look at Philip – it is noon-day in the Middle East, and any pedestrian in their right mind is indoors out of the blistering sun – and it is not his idea, but the Spirit of the Lord, which prods him to get up and go out into the desert heat. Philip is a nobody in the eyes of the world, certainly not socially on par with Egypt’s secretary of the treasury, and yet the Spirit prompts him to go over to the chariot and strike up a conversation. And the result – the Ethiopian learns about the power of Jesus Christ to change his life, he responds to the good news, he is baptized, and he goes on his way – what was that word? – rejoicing.

God’s power will not be hindered, not even by our natural reluctance to share our faith with others, or to talk about why church is important to us, or to suggest to another person that they might want to give a try to something that has meant so much to us. The Holy Spirit is the catalyst of church growth, always has been, always will be.

The trick for us, therefore, is not to re-invent the wheel – the trick for us is to be alert for those ways in which the Spirit is speaking to us, calling us out of our comfort zones, calling us to encounter the stranger, whether they be on a chariot in the middle of the desert, or poking through the produce at Stop and Shop, or sitting on the beach with their toes in the water, doing some summer reading.