Ibrahim was not only my friend but the best footballer I have ever seen. We met while working together digging a field, planting grass clump by clump for what would become a makeshift running track for the football team. After a day’s sweat in the field, we would lace up our boots and play for a couple of hours. And every night he would float around the pitch answering the laws of a different space and time. Always two seconds ahead, two yards too quick.

Ibrahim was a Muslim, albeit a slightly confused one. His father was the local Imam, an important man. Over the course of many months where you could almost literally see the inner conflict, Ibrahim became a Christian. I vividly remember the moment when we prayed together for the first time in the middle of this huge dense scrubland, overlooking the shores of Lake Victoria. We prayed a faltering, formulaic believer's prayer, the kind that would make me cringe nowadays. But somehow something happened and Ibrahim became a strong Christian. He believed and kept believing.

His father chased him away from his own home. When he refused to renounce his new found faith, his father broke into the place he was staying and quietly sprinkled kerosene all around before leaving the house alight. Ibrahim survived, only just.

I think of Ibrahim when reading these first 8 chapters of Acts. These chapters are hugely challenging. They speak of utter all-out commitment, the type of commitment that leads to persecution. The type of commitment that I suspect I don’t have.

We left Luke’s first volume behind by saying that if Jesus dies and rises again, then everything must change. In Acts, Luke continues this theme, constantly posing the question ‘who is your boss?’ Is it the powers of this world; is it Caesar, the religious rulers or is it this resurrected Jesus? As we take in the sweep of Acts, starting off in provincial Jerusalem with her petty religious elites and ending at the very seat of the world superpower in Rome, Luke would ask us the same question again and again - who is your boss?

Perhaps it is because of the insistent discomfort that this question provokes but my personal reaction to Acts 1-7 is mixed. In some ways I think it is too good to be true – surely it would take a little longer for the disciples to truly grasp the magnitude of what has happened? Surely there would be some who fell by the wayside, some who opted out and went home to be fishermen? Surely some would be cowed by persecution?

But Luke gives us none of this. Instead we have signs and wonders, we have thousands of new believers being added daily, we get the disciples and especially Peter, of all people, finally putting all the pieces together and understanding who Jesus claimed to be.

The transformation in the disciples is truly astonishing – from being the dispersed, cowed, and utterly bewildered group to believing, comprehending and united in a few short chapters. We get Peter and the others endlessly quoting Old Testament scripture, creatively re-telling Israel’s long story as expertly as Jesus himself. Some of the most profound and impressive theology is to be found in these chapters. Have a look closely at Peter and Stephen speeches. They are stunning feats of applied theology (which, it is worth noting, continually stress that Jesus is resurrected, something that we tend to downplay in favour of focusing on Jesus’ death). They have taken Jesus’ radical message and understood its full dimensions in terms of Israel’s relationship with her God and have been able to communicate this simply and effectively to their audiences. Paul, with whom Christian history and theology has been pre-occupied for most of the past two millennia, took almost a decade of serious thinking before he was able to start his ministry. Peter and Stephen managed this in a few short months.

One of the most impressive aspects of these chapters is the fact that the new community is a public community. Luke tells us repeatedly that the disciples were in different parts of the temple. The new community did not wallow in private ecstatic spiritual experience but immediately took their message to the street, to the public realm where they could be challenged and attacked. They could easily have followed the example of the Essenes, another reforming Jewish sect of the time, and headed off to the desert to create an esoteric community. But no – they stayed in the city, ready to speak truth to power, repeatedly, even to death.

These chapters are a challenge to my world-weary faith. Most of us will not have experienced people being healed, a community in which all needs were met and everything is held in common, or buildings being shaken. Nor will most of us have been faced government crackdowns. However, this same Spirit that was at work in these early days of the church is also present with us. As Paul, who we meet next week might say, might say, the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead is powerfully at work among us. Instead of looking for ‘gritty reality’, I am challenged to allow myself to get swept up again into the great saving story of this resurrected Jesus who calls us to be witnesses to our local streets, our county councils, our residents’ associations, our government departments, even to the ends of the earth.

Questions for reflection:

1. Are our faith communities ‘public’? Or do we hide away in private truth with private experiences?

2. Who is setting the agenda for our lives? Can we live our lives more intentionally in the footsteps of Christ?

3. What might this look like and what effect would it have on our relationships with our neighbourhoods?