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Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
How great to have everyone sharing a common purpose, traveling a common path, striving toward a common goal, that path and purpose and goal being God.
Living together in a way that evokes the glad song of Psalm 133 is one of the great and arduous tasks before Christ’s people. Nothing requires more attention and energy.
Christians are a community of people who are visibly together at worship but who remain in relationship through the week in witness and service.
The first image describes community as “costly anointing oil flowing down head and beard, / Flowing down Aaron’s beard, flowing down the collar of his priestly robes.”
Oil, throughout Scripture, is a sign of God’s presence, a symbol of the Spirit of God. Oil glistens, picks up the warmth of sunlight, softens the skin, perfumes the person. (Gerard Manley Hopkins, extolling God’s grandeur in creation, uses a similar image in his line “It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil crushed.”)3 There is a quality of warmth and ease in God’s community which contrasts with the icy coldness and hard surfaces of people who jostle each other in mobs and crowds.
“Not what a man is in himself as a Christian, his spirituality and piety, constitutes the basis of our community. What determines our brotherhood is what that man is by reason of Christ. Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us.”
We are priests who speak God’s Word
The Christian needs another Christian who speaks God’s Word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself without belying the truth. He needs his brother man as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation. He needs his brother solely because of Jesus Christ. The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother’s is sure.
In the second image, the community is “like the dew on Mount Hermon flowing down the slopes of Zion.”
Important in any community of faith is an ever-renewed expectation in what God is doing with our brothers and sisters in the faith.
When we are in a community with those Christ loves and redeems, we are constantly finding out new things about them.
The oil flowing down Aaron’s beard communicates warm, priestly relationship. The dew descending down Hermon’s slopes communicates fresh and expectant newness. Oil and dew. The two things that make life together delightful.
The other word is bĕrakah. It describes what God does to us and among us: he enters into covenant with us, he pours out his own life for us, he shares the goodness of his Spirit, the vitality of his creation, the joys of his redemption.
Delight in what God is doing is essential in our work.”
Grace evokes gratitude like the voice an echo. Gratitude follows grace as thunder follows lightning.”
All the movements of discipleship arrive at a place where joy is experienced.
It is this fusion of God speaking to us (Scripture) and our speaking to him (prayer) that the Holy Spirit uses to form the life of Christ in us.
