Easter 5B (Acts 8:26-40)

Our oldest son was baptized when he was six. For two years before that he’d been asking questions about who God was and praying prayers of his own making. So his mother and I set him upon the road of discipleship. He was old enough to remember the immersion into that watery miracle, but young enough to accept our reminders that it was God’s work, not his (or ours—at least this was what I imagined). My vision for his life included long walks with his parents, times when he would ask us questions about who God was and about what his life’s calling might be. I imagined pondering curious questions about scripture together. Eventually, I might offer him an answer, for he was a precocious child with lots of questions, and I loved being someone with answers. I thought this was part of my calling as a father.

My son is 13 now and thankfully he still asks questions. But they are not the questions that I had imagined. “Dad,” he’ll say, “why are people so dumb?” (he uses another word) or, while reading scripture together, “Why does God tell some of the Israelites to stay away from the top of the mountain? Seems kind of petty.” There are so many questions lurking beneath the surface of his words! Yet I can see that many of the questions of his soul remain unuttered, and on many occasions I do not push him further because I know I don’t have the answers.

When I read the story in Acts about the eunuch and Philip, I am reminded of my years as a young father. Ten years ago I would have read this story as a story of Philip’s boldness and willingness to go even to the stranger to declare the truth of God’s presence in the world. But reading it as a parent I understand just how little Philip knows. It is God who tells him to go, sending Philip along on a strange road where he came upon an Ethiopian eunuch reading a book. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked, and the eunuch replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?”