Our readings this week are Acts 2.42–47 and John 10.1–10.

The gospel reading ends with Jesus' claim that he came that we 'may have life, and have it abundantly.'  In the reading from Acts we perhaps get a glimpse of what that might look like.

It's an idyllic description of the life of the early church - living together with all things in common, worshipping in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house.  They were full of gladness and generosity, and praise, and prayer.  It's no wonder that the community grew daily!

It's very tempting to assume this to be a slightly rose-tinted picture.  A remembrance, perhaps, of 'the good old days'.  It does certainly seem as though this paragraph offers us just the highlights - the rest of the New Testament letters give us clear indications that this group of believers was no more impervious to bickerings, squabbles, and disagreements than we are today... but...  nonetheless, I believe this is, if only for a short while, how it was.

This is the most brilliant centre-point, the ground zero, of the explosion of the idea that became the church.  It is the core essence of what it means to be a Christian community, before it has been inevitably chipped, ground down, and bruised by growing within a world of very different ideals and values.  So why shouldn't we imagine it to be the brightest and best it could have been?

The risk of writing it off too quickly as wistful nostalgia, or cosmetically altered history, is that we reduce it from being an inspiration, even an aspiration, to being yet another impossible ideal.  And those are really dangerous things.  Climate change is too big - there's nothing I can do.  War and international injustice are matters for governments - there's nothing I can do.  Glass ceilings and salary caps for women, that's just the way things are - there's nothing I can do... how long we could make this list.

But if this were real - and, as I said, I believe it was - then it shows us that another way of being is possible.  Perhaps that's another reason we don't want to believe it.  Because if it is possible, and we're not living up to it, then it could be that we have something to answer for... and we'd rather just get rid of anything quite that uncomfortable.  Living a life that confronted the powers of his time with a different way of being, and showing what was possible if you started from a place of love, grace, generosity, and inclusion instead of power and control is what got Jesus killed, after all.

And that's the risk, isn't it? That accepting that a different way is possible, and committing to walking it isn't going to be comfortable, or easy.  It means standing up, and standing out.  It means sacrifice, and giving what otherwise we might have kept.  It means being willing to share in suffering, rather than benefiting from it.

To acknowledge that risk, and do it anyway is going to take grit, and determination, and lots of hard work.  And guess what, it took that back in the day too.  That word 'devoted' in verse 42 - 'They devoted themselves to the apostle's teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers' - is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It's a word used outside of the gospels to refer to a soldier's duty, or a servant's work.  It's a word that is less about infatuation and more about incessancy.  It means to continue to do something with intense effort, to bring to bear unfailing strength, to persist despite difficulty. 

Imagine a world infused with a church that followed Christ like that.  If we can imagine it, maybe we can become it. Perhaps Acts chapter 2 is not as far beyond us as we might think.