27 April 2023 - homily for Thursday of the 3rd week of Easter – Acts 8:26-40

      Sometimes, our readings from Sacred Scripture can be so compelling and so vivid that it may seem like a movie or theater production enfolding before our eyes. In our reading from Acts today, we hear about an Ethiopian Eunuch who receives the call to journey to Jerusalem to worship God, a God whom he really doesn’t know about and doesn’t understand. The Lord sends Philip to greet him, to teach him about the reading from the prophet Isaiah that the Eunuch had been trying to read, to teach him about the Lord of Life. Philip disappears from scene just as quickly as he appeared, just like a super hero in a Hollywood movie. The Lord sent Philip to another land to spread the word of God to others. Yet, before he leaves, Philip baptized the Eunuch in a body of water that they came upon.

       We hear about such miraculous stories of faith in Sacred Scripture, of how the Lord touches the hearts of different people, bringing them to him through great odds and difficult circumstances. At Holy Savior, we had ten adults enter the Church during the Easter vigil Mass.  One of the young men entering the Church, a young man from Meridian, had his high school teacher from St Patrick parish in that city come to be his sponsor.  I had six men come into the Church at the prison in Pearl.  One of the men had another inmate serve as his sponsor; that inmate had been his football teammate at a high school on the coast, and the sponsor’s dad had been their football coach.  That inmate state that the coach and his son and the way they were examples of faith that helped influence him wanting to become Catholic.  

        All of us face challenges in our journey of faith in one way or another. We can see in the story of the Eunuch how we are called to go out of our way to discover more about our faith, to find out more about what we don’t understand. Sometimes, the example of others and their ministry help us tremendously on our journey of faith. May the Lord continue to lead us and guide us along our journey of faith.  May he set our hearts on fire with a love of God and a curiosity and vigor to always want to learn more and to grow in the ways of faith.