All during this month of May we are continuing our celebration of Easter. The word “Easter,” as I never tire of telling people, is the name not only of a single day on the Church calendar, but is the name of an entire season, the Great Fifty Days that make up a week of weeks until the celebration of Pentecost. The thirty-one days of May this year fall entirely within the Fifty Days of Easter—so the whole month of May is one long continuation of our Easter festival!

One of the things we do in our church services to mark the special quality of the Easter season is to read the First Lesson every Sunday from the Book of Acts. Typically, in other seasons of the Church year, the First Lesson is taken from the Old Testament—stories from the history of Israel or the words of the prophets that show us the deep roots of our spiritual tradition before the time of Jesus. But during Easter we read from the Book of Acts—stories that tell how the first generation of those who came to believe in new life in Jesus lived that new life, and spread the good news of that new life, all across their known world.

The Apostles had received something wonderful from Jesus, and they couldn’t wait to share it with the world. They witnessed Jesus’ presence with them even after his Crucifixion; and they came to understand that Jesus had broken the powers of death and destruction, and they were now free to live their lives with generosity and compassion and without fear. They received the gift of the Holy Spirit; and the Spirit working within their spirits gave them the ability to forgive and to reconcile and to proclaim—the ability to build new relationships in which the love of Jesus was made manifest in and through and by means of their own love for each other.

And the gift of new life in relationship with the Risen Christ was something the Apostles couldn’t keep to themselves. Literally, they couldn’t keep quiet about it. Peter, called before the Sanhedrin to give account for the miracle he’d performed in making a lame man walk, was “filled with the Holy Spirit” and preached to them about the Resurrection (Acts 4:8). Philip was minding his own business in his house when “an angel of the Lord” called him out to the south road to speak of Jesus with an Ethiopian official he didn’t even know (Acts 8:26). Time and again, the Apostles were sent out to meet new people in unexpected places and introduce them to the joy of their Lord. That was how they built up the Church.

And we are the inheritors of the Apostles’ mission today. Like them, we have received something wonderful from Jesus—the gift of new lives of love and hope and joy—and, like them, we can’t keep quiet about it, we can’t keep it to ourselves, but impelled and empowered to share it with others.

Our world is quite different from the Apostles’ world, of course. Testifying before courts or running up to the chariots of government officials worked for Peter and Philip; we may need to try other methods. Today we have communications channels and publication tools and marketing opportunities the Apostles never dreamed of. What we have in common with the Apostles, though, is the call to use whatever means we have at hand to share Good News in whatever ways our neighbors need to hear. And that is how we build up the Church.

Last summer we engaged in an ambitious Parish Connections process, and we learned a great deal about who the St. George’s community is and how we feel God is with us now. This spring and summer, it is time to complement those learnings by finding out more about who the St.Louis Park community is, and how God might be calling us to outreach and ministry and evangelism in our neighborhood. We have many resources for this. In April, members of the parish attended a workshop on Evangelism and Marketing sponsored by the diocese, and are working with the Evangelism Team of the Vestry on a plan for becoming more visible to our local community. Also through the diocese, we have internet access to a great deal of demographic information about our neighborhood, and can learn more about the real needs and real opportunities for service with those among whom God has put us. We have rejoiced at being a welcoming congregation, greeting warmly anyone who comes in our doors; but we can go out beyond our doors, too, and be a sign of New Life to those who don’t yet know us.

In the months to come, you will hear more about plans for discovering what gifts we have to share with our community, and figuring out how to let the community know we have those gifts to share. In doing this, we’ll be acting like apostles, like Peter and Philip and all the rest, because we have a gift that’s too good to keep to ourselves, because Christ has given us a Life that grows the more we share it.