Time bending

Acts 8:26-40

Like the first martyr Stephen, Philip was one of the seven deacons selected by the nascent church to tend to the needs of the people. It gives me a little chill to think about how as a lay leader you are connected to a lineage that goes all the way back to the beginnings of Christianity.

The Ethiopian eunuch whom Philip converts in this story has an oddly modern personality. When Philip comes up, the eunuch is sitting in his chariot reading. This sounds so modern—like he’s killing time waiting for something or someone. I picture him reading a book, but books in a modern form didn't exist. So he was reading scrolls? Maybe.

Philip comes up and asks what he’s reading. It’s Isaiah. Philip asks “Do you understand what you are reading?” It’s a direct question, almost like a modern ice breaker. The eunuch’s answer strikes me as having an equally modern tone: “how can I, unless someone guides me?” Philip proceeds to explain how the line about a “lamb silent before its shearer” is a reference to Jesus submitting himself to be sacrificed.

Then they head off, driving down the road in the chariot, the eunuch sees some water and gets a spur of the moment idea to be baptized then and there. It’s got the basic outlines of some sort of road movie. But with…teleportation. Philip baptizes the eunuch, the Holy Spirit shows up, and then snatches Philip away. Philip wakes up in Azotus.

When you let this passage settle in, time starts to play tricks on you. You become aware of how much happened in such a compressed time, so long ago—Christ is crucified and then disciples multiply quickly. The institution of the diaconate gets started, and the first convert is made among the Ethiopians. Some of what I think of as exotic Christian communities, like the Ethiopian Church or the Thomasite Christians in India, have such ancient roots. How far the Church spread so quickly is amazing. I was reading Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez today, and he talks of Irish monks traveling in northern waters around 530. It’s amazing to realize the Church had spread to Ireland by then, let along that Irish monks were getting in a boat and sailing off to Iceland. Those times, the first months and first centuries of the church, is so long ago, so dimly recorded, so hard to imagine. The temporal distance seems vast. But then you see yourself connected across all those years to those people, by virtue of church office, or through glimpses of the people in those stories behaving like people you could know. What was so far away in one second seems close. Time compresses and expands in quick quick alteration.