Rev. Nigel A. Everett

Our scripture would be set to music, were it like the movies or TV dramas; in this case, to the somber music of some heavy, even dreadful, theme. And the music would be our clue: this is the crisis. The story could fizzle out from here like a sputtering firecracker spinning crazily in the dust; or this might be the launching pad for a soaring thrust into a new kind of community never before seen under the sun.

The ingredients of the crisis are well known to any reader of the New Testament. In essence, they are these:

1. Jesus had let himself be put to death on a Roman cross;
2. He had left behind the confounding evidence of an open tomb;
3. His followers had witnessed to one another that they had seen him alive;
4. He had appeared to more than 500 of them;
5. And, to a few of them, he had delivered a mandate to be his witnesses over the whole earth, with the caution that they wait in Jerusalem until they had experienced a second baptism—a baptism of fire and the Holy Spirit.

My purpose in tracing this very familiar sotry out again, is that we might capture in our minds a rather clear picture of that time when there was no Church at all, except this small community of believers. When we come upon them, they have no identity, no tradition, no history, no real sense of direction. All they have is this mandate—and a promise. The mandate was that they should be witnesses of the great thing God had done in Christ; the promise was that they would have help from outside themselves in this task.

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