signs-listening

The Sign of the Listening Community

Jesus’ call always comes to individuals and places them in

community. We are saved into community. The story of

salvation has been the story of God gathering and preserving

a people: from the time when God promised Abraham

and Sarah that through their descendents “all the families on

earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:3, NRSV); through the

miraculous deliverance of that family from famine; through

Joseph’s captivity and rise to power in Egypt; through the mass

exodus from Egypt and the deliverance of the people from

Pharaoh’s army at the Red Sea; through the deliverances of

the judges from the oppression of the Philistines and other

enemies, and on through the prophets and kings.

For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; the

Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples

on earth to be his people, his treasured possession. It

was not because you were more numerous than any

other people that the Lord set his heart on you and

chose you—for you were the fewest of all peoples. It

was because the Lord loved you. . . . (Deuteronomy

7:6-8a, NRSV)

Here is both the greatness and the weakness of God, that

God has chosen to love. It is greatness because, by making the

choice of love, God has given meaning to the universe and purpose

to life; it is weakness because a lover cannot force responsive

love, but only woo it. Genuine love is the guarantor of

the freedom of the beloved; when God chose love, God chose

to limit his own power. It may be said that human freedom

to rebel against God is the direct measure of God’s love for

humanity.

God is under no compulsion to love humankind, but, despite

heartbreak and disappointment, God returns to the objects

of his first love, and “remembers his covenant.” (Leviticus

26:42ff; Ezekiel 16:60-61; Luke 1:72) God’s greatest desire is

to have fellowship with the people whom he loves:

And I will walk among you, and will be your God,

and you shall be my people. (Leviticus 26:12, NRSV;

cf., Exodus 6:7)

Here, at the climax of the decrees of the law, are echoes of

Eden, where the Lord walked in the garden with Adam and

Eve at the time of the moving of the spirit. Here is yearning

for reciprocated love that reaches back into the mystery of creation

and offers an answer to the ultimate question, “Why?”

God created because God wants to be with us: Immanuel. Yet,

humankind has not reciprocated God’s love.

Humanity continually chooses to reject God, who is the

very basis of its freedom:

But this command I gave them, “Obey my voice/qol,

and I will be your God, and you shall be my people;

and walk only in the way that I command you, so

that it may be well with you.”

Yet they did not obey or incline their ear, but, in the

stubbornness of their evil will, they walked in their

own counsels. . . . ( Jeremiah 7:23-24b, NRSV)

When God says, “Obey,” it is not the edict of a tyrant but the

longing of the One who is love (1 John 4:8, 16) to provide for

the welfare of the people whom he loves. By their stubborn

rejection of the qol Yahweh, the people of God destroy their

unity with God and with one another. Here is the root of all

injustice and hatred: rejection of the love that resides at the

heart of the universe. It is to repair the covenant of love (“a covenant

that they broke, though I was their husband”) ( Jeremiah

31:32, NRSV), and to reinstate humanity in a freedom that is

free from injustice and hatred, that God in Christ inaugurated

the new covenant.

Jesus’ work is to recreate in us, on the basis of a personal

and inward knowledge of God, the outward community of

those called to be the people of God. Jesus speaks of his yearning

to gather people together, ”How often have I desired to

gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under

her wings” (Matthew 23:37, NRSV). When he sent out

his disciples and apostles (Matthew 10; Luke 9:1-5, 10:1-16),

he did not commission them to call for individual professions

of faith, but rather to announce that “the kingdom of God is at

hand.” It is no accident that Jesus used the social term “kingdom.”

Salvation, inevitably, is a communal enterprise.

When Jesus taught us prayer, we did not learn, “My father,”

but, “Our Father. . . . ” When Jesus told of the shepherd who

had a hundred sheep but lost one and left the ninety-nine to

find the one who was lost, the force of the parable concerned

God’s desire to restore the wholeness of the community.1 God,

he is saying, would rather risk the whole enterprise of salvation

than allow the community of the saved to be diminished

by even one. The measure of the strength of community is not

the health of the strongest but of the weakest.

Jesus carried this emphasis on community into his ministry

of healing and restoration. Although healing touches the life

and body of specific individuals, Jesus not only delivers the individual

sufferer but restores the community of God’s people.

Jesus’ ministry to the widow of Nain, whose son he raised from

the dead, offers a good example:

Soon afterwards he went to a town called Nain,

and his disciples and a large crowd went with him.

As he approached the gate of the town, a man who

had died was being carried out. He was his mother’s

only son, and she was a widow; and with her was a

large crowd from the town. When the Lord saw her,

he had compassion for her and said to her, “Do not

weep.” Then he came forward and touched the bier,

and the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man,

I say to you, rise!” The dead man sat up and began to

speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.

Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying,

“A great prophet has risen among us!” and “God

has looked favorably on his people!” (Luke 7:11-16,

NRSV)

When God comforts one, it is a sign of God’s compassion for

the whole community, as the people of Nain themselves testi-

fied.

The emphasis on community is not on Jesus’ lips alone; it

infuses all strands of the New Testament. In the Letter to Hebrews,

after the long discourse on Jesus as the High Priest and

mediator of the new covenant, comes this exhortation:

And let us consider how to provoke one another to

love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together,

as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another,

and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

(Hebrews 10:24-25, NRSV)

If we neglect the assembly, we neglect our salvation, because, as

the author of Hebrews says, we are all in this together:

But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city

of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable

angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly

of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven,

and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the

righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator

of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that

speaks a better word than the blood of Abel. See

that you do not refuse the one who is speaking . . . !

(Hebrews 12:22-25a, NRSV)

The life of the community gathered by the living word of

God—that innumerable assembly of angels and believers that

extends across time as well as space (Hebrews 11)—is the sign

of the kingdom of God.

Not only is it impossible to be saved in isolation because our

salvation is into the community of God’s chosen, it is impossible

to evangelize without the living evidence provided by the

community of faith. Speaking to his disciples, Jesus says, “You

[plural] are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot

be hid” (Matthew 5:14, NRSV). Similarly, Peter writes:

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy

nation, God’s own people, in order that you may proclaim

the mighty acts of him who called you out of

darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were

not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you

had not received mercy, but now you have received

mercy. (1 Peter 2:9-10, NRSV, my emphasis)

Either our lives carry the smell and light of Eden, or they

do not. Either our lives demonstrate that we are saved from

the first “not good” of loneliness into loving fellowship, or not.

Either our lives reflect the peace and abundance of Eden, or

not. None of this can be demonstrated in an isolated life; these

signs can only be lived in community.

Individual lives may be winsome and testify to God’s love,

but they only become truly invitational as part of the life of

a community that demonstrates it has been transformed by

the presence of the voice of God walking in its midst.” We are

saved through community and into community.

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