Chapter 9

Joy in Community

When I think of community, I tend to think of people in floral caftans, long hair, beads and singing “All we need is love”. Perhaps this is because I am a child of the sixties, and the most common expression of community in the sixties and seventies was the hippie communities inspired by free love, dope-smoking and withdrawal from society.

The little rural town of Nimbin in northern New South Wales was one of the centres of this kind of community. This was where the free thinkers of that era went to design a new utopia. They obviously knew (or cared) little about history. This was not the first time that people have tried to create utopia on earth. Some other famous Australians tried the same experiment in the late 1800’s. Among them was the poet, Mary Gilmore, close friend and possibly lover of Henry Lawson.

She travelled in 1896 to Paraguay, to the “New Australia” settlement, which was set up to be a model socialist community, and demonstrate how peace and harmony could be found away from the old imperialist and hierarchical models of society. Here is what she wrote to Henry Lawson: “Communism as we have it is alright, Harry, and we are getting on – slowly, of course, but in a year or two what now is will have gone, drowned by prosperity.”¹ She was right, because sadly, like all social experiments, it ultimately failed, and everyone came home again to the same old structures.

If you go to Nimbin today, you will find it is a sad and lonely little town. The streets are mostly dirty, the shop fronts covered in graffiti or boarded up, and the hippies of the 70’s have become the capitalists of the new century, rejoicing in high priced land and insisting on the privacy of ownership. All of this is a far cry from where they started in the days of John Lennon singing “Imagine”.

In my thinking about community in this chapter I need to acknowledge that much of my thought is derived from the work of Henri Nouwen, in a little book entitled, “Making All Things New” (especially pp. 80 – 90). Because so many of the ideas and even the words are drawn from this section of his book I have not tried to directly source each expression or idea, but Nouwen’s stamp of thinking is heavily in these pages. Of course, I have added my own extensions to his ideas and my own original ideas as well.

Space for God in our Community

Community creates joy because it creates space for God amongst us. This is the centre of our thought here.

It was God himself who intervened in history on many occasions to deliberately create community. Some of the notable ones included:

• The creation of man and woman in the Garden of Eden;
• The calling out of the nation of Israel in the Old Testament;
• The coming of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, and the subsequent outpouring of a community spirit in the new church;

Not in the Bible, but in the history of the church, there have been many occasions when God used people to start a new community of one kind or another. Almost all of them started out with joy and hope, though not all finished up that way!

There are hundreds of such examples, but think perhaps, of the Mayflower community in the New World, the community of Prison Fellowships, the community of the poor in Calcutta with Mother Theresa, and no doubt you could add many others that you are familiar with in your own life and experience.

Space for Us in God’s Community

In the Old Testament, God instituted a series of feasts to call the people together in community. The Feasts of Passover, of Unleavened Bread, of Weeks, of Trumpets, of Tabernacles all were designed to call the people together, and recognise their common heritage.

For these people, too, God designed a system of land ownership that aided a sense of lasting community. Land could not be bought or sold in perpetuity. The land that was given to the original families was theirs permanently. Because many people will not have read about this (not many people read the book of Leviticus in the Old Testament) I've copied a passage for you here:

The Year of Jubilee

⁸ "'Count off seven Sabbaths of years – seven times seven years – so that the seven Sabbaths of years amount to a period of forty-nine years. ⁹ Then have the trumpet sounded everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement sound the trumpet throughout your land. ¹⁰ Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each one of you is to return to his family property and each to his own clan. ¹¹ The fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you; do not sow and do not reap what grows of itself or harvest the untended vines. ¹² For it is a jubilee and is to be holy for you; eat only what is taken directly from the fields.'"

¹³ "'In this Year of Jubilee everyone is to return to his own property.'"

¹⁴ "'If you sell land to one of your countrymen or buy any from him, do not take advantage of each other. ¹⁵ You are to buy from your countryman on the basis of the number of years since the Jubilee. And he is to sell to you on the basis of the number of years left for harvesting crops. ¹⁶ When the years are many, you are to increase the price, and when the years are few, you are to decrease the price, because what he is really selling you is the number of crops. ¹⁷ Do not take advantage of each other, but fear your God. I am the LORD your God.'"

¹⁸ "'Follow my decrees and be careful to obey my laws, and you will live safely in the land. ¹⁹ Then the land will yield its fruit, and you will eat your fill and live there in safety. ²⁰ You may ask, "What will we eat in the seventh year if we do not plant or harvest our crops?" ²¹ I will send you such a blessing in the sixth year that the land will yield enough for three years. ²² While you plant during the eighth year, you will eat from the old crop and will continue to eat from it until the harvest of the ninth year comes in.'"

²³ "'The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants. ²⁴ Throughout the country that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land.'"

²⁵ "'If one of your countrymen becomes poor and sells some of his property, his nearest relative is to come and redeem what his countryman has sold. ²⁶ If, however, a man has no one to redeem it for him but he himself prospers and acquires sufficient means to redeem it, ²⁷ he is to determine the value for the years since he sold it and refund the balance to the man to whom he sold it; he can then go back to his own property. ²⁸ But if he does not acquire the means to repay him, what he sold will remain in the possession of the buyer until the Year of Jubilee. It will be returned in the Jubilee, and he can then go back to his property.'" (Leviticus 25)

How significant is it that God called this fiftieth year, the Year of Jubilee. Jubilee means Joy. We still use the word “jubilation” to mean exuberant rejoicing and celebration. The word actually comes from the ancient Hebrew. The root word is yobel. The original meaning is “ram”, and then by extension a ram’s horn which was used to sound the commencement of the Day of Atonement and the Year of Jubilee. (More on that in a moment.) The word has spread through many languages you will find this word root in old Spanish, French and Greek. Even the Swiss “yodel” probably originates from this root.

Incidentally, on many of the occasions in the Old Testament, where trumpets were to be sounded, the use of silver trumpets was the norm. On these two occasions of the Day of Atonement and the Year of Jubilee, it was always the ram’s horn that was used. This reminded the people of God’s gracious provision of a Redemption sacrifice. Abraham, with his knife raised to strike his only beloved son, Isaac, saw where the ram was caught by its horn in a thicket, and heard the voice of the angel telling him to stay his hand. God had graciously provided the sacrifice for him, as he provided for us in the person of Jesus, on the very same mountain where Abraham was prepared to sacrifice Isaac. (Genesis 22)

Do you now see the reason for joy in this?

God has created a community of people who own their inheritance for ever, who cannot lose the gift which God has given to them.

God has given me a place in the community of believers and a place in his heavenly home with him. He has secured it for me at his own expense and even though I may go through some difficult times on this earth, even though I may appear to lose my way and forfeit my land through doubt or fear or other loss, there is a chance to have it back.

Here is Joy. Here is Jubilation. God has provided for me a place in his community, a place to live, a home in which to live, a “land” in which to be prosperous and have my family. This is the very community of God.

Space for Others in God’s Community

I said at the start of all of this that community creates a space for God to be amongst us, and for us to be at home in God, but now we can see that community also creates space for us to recognise the Spirit of God in each other. The community of God embraces all people.

We find it hard to share easily with outsiders. Even the very word, “outsider” carries with it a message of fear. We are fearful of those who come from the outside. They may carry with them new ideas, new customs. They may want to take from us those things that we have held for a long time. They are suspicious to us because they sound different, dress differently, speak differently. Some of them even worship differently. We are at risk of making our God too small if we think that we have managed to locate the only way in which he may be worshipped and known.

But as we dare to offer what we have to the outsider, we find that in our giving we find ourselves receiving more than we ever gave away.

Australians were slow to accept outsiders, both in our early history and in the more recent history of the post-WWII and Terror War migrations. I well remember as a child of about ten years old, when the first foreign boy came to our school. I grew up in Toowoomba, a rural Queensland town which was generally protected from the immigration waves that others growing up in Melbourne or Sydney might have known.

This young boy came to our school. His name I still remember because he was so strange to us. His name was Adrian Van Schaegen. I am sorry to recall that we did not work hard to make him our friend. He was so different, so utterly foreign. He must have found it very hard to find a space in our community. It was only when he began to show that he could play sport well (though he preferred to play soccer and we knew nothing about soccer), that he became acceptable to us.

But God continually reminded the Israelites to care for the foreigners amongst them:
When an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him. The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.(Leviticus 19: 33 – 34)

He established the principle of providing for the poor by now demanding all of their own rights:
When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the alien. I am the LORD your God.(Leviticus 19: 9 – 10)

In the care for others in our community, we have it open to us both to find and to create Joy. As we share our lives with others in hospitality and openness, we create community. We create Joy for others and in so doing, we create it for ourselves.

Community amidst Difference

Community is not dependent upon mutual compatibility. When we think that we can only find community amongst those with whom we are similar we fail to understand the core of godly community. And thus we will fail to discover much joy that could be ours.

It is not our similarities and likenesses that bind us together in community. Our community is grounded in God who calls us together. My wife and I are not terribly similar in many respects. We love many different things. But we understand that our marriage is based not on our similarities but in our common calling by God to love him, and our commitment to love each other. When our differences cause us problems then we must be mature enough to look beyond the differences and find joy in our marriage community.

Churches are not often good at this. One of the worst effects of the Reformation was that it legitimised the separation into sub-groups of those who disagreed with other groups. I call this the Great Protestant Split. Many, many Protestant Christians have been through some kind of church split, as one group moved away to start their own new church, or join a neighbouring one, because they disagreed with the original group in some way.

Whilst the Reformation was no doubt necessary to restore a large number of truths and practices in the church of the day, it has left a legacy of Protestant Christians who are not prepared to work through issues and find solutions to problems.

In the community of Christ, we must be prepared to accept individual differences and to find ways of meaningful communication with each other.

I am Principal of a multi-denominational school. We delight in working together with Catholic and Protestant, Pentecostal and Anglican, Baptist and Presbyterian, as we seek to build a genuinely Christian community that is faithful to the Scriptures. In the same way, we try hard to engage two groups of people: firstly those who have a commitment to live faithful Christian lives, and secondly those for whom the Christian life is something that they have not yet fully embraced, but who are interested in being near the fringes of it, and having their children immersed in it. This is all part of working together to build the Kingdom of God.

I have found in this community that there is often real Joy to be experienced as we meet each other at our different journeying points. I have learnt much from people whose lives are at different places from mine. I have often looked around a hall filled with over a thousand people all worshipping together, or at least who have come for a worship service. As I gaze over this group, I am often moved to tears, recognising the hand of God in bringing all these people together. I always silently give thanks to God for bringing me to this place where I can see his Kingdom being built.

One of the images that we often use together is the image that Jesus himself gave in talking about the Kingdom. The image is that of the small mustard seed growing to be the large tree, in which birds of the air come and find a place of rest, a place to be at home.

This is my goal, that people of all different backgrounds and at varying stages of their journey towards God, will find in our school community a place to be at home; a place to feel a genuine sense of belonging. As we walk together on our journey, we often find occasion to hold hands, to hug each other, and with tears of joy, to say that we belong.

Community in Words and Silence

Community enables us to listen together. What should we listen for? The answer is surely, “The voice of God”.

Our contemporary world is not good at listening. We have generally filled our world with noise; the noise of recorded music, the noise of traffic and machinery, the noise of television and advertising. It is common to see children travelling in a car with their parents. The parents are listening to the radio in the front seat, while the children have earphones in their ears in the back seat listening to their music.

In community, we ought to listen to one another. Henri Nouwen says that our words are often walls rather than gates. They prevent communication. We use words as weapons, as barricades to prevent someone coming close to us.

When we do speak words in love, often those words are confused by our self-centred desires. “I love you” may mean no more than “I want to go to bed with you”. We speak words of jargon and religion in churches in such ways as to prevent the uninitiated from coming to know the Jesus of whom we speak.

Nouwen says that in community we are free to become persons. “The Latin word personare means ‘sounding through’.” Persons who are genuinely freed to become known by others are opened up to hear each other truthfully. Communication is no longer reduced to words which divide us or hurt us.

Often a husband and wife, or two lovers will sit together in silence. This silence is a companionable silence. It is not a negative thing at all. In the silence there is communication. The communication says that we are at peace with each other and the world. There is no need for words to fill up the space of emptiness around us. our “personare” sounds through to each other in the silence of our being together.

A community ought to be able to be together in prayer and silence, to hear the voice of God. We pray to God from out of the centre of our common life. As we share silence and words, we enable ourselves to be whole in our community. As we become more and more whole, we open up our souls to the deep potential of joy.

Joy is not always bubbling over, exuberant emotion. Often it will be a deep sense of contentment; of being deeply at calm with the world and with each other. When we can do this with our friends, with our work colleagues, with strangers on the train, with other cars on the freeway, then we truly know Joy of community.

Community is not a Place

What should now be clear to us that when we talk about community, we should not place the little words “a” or “the” in front of it. Community is a quality, not an institution. Community is something that we experience, not something we visit.

Community is a quality of the heart and will. It is a condition, not a place.

In fact it transcends both time and place. This is why it is possible to talk about the “community of the saints”. This refers to that large body of people who have known and loved God down through all of the centuries. I am a part of this community, simply because I love and worship God. I know God and I know others in the context of this community. What I know and love about God, I know because of what others have revealed to me in song and writing.

In the former Australian Anglican Prayer Book, there was a lovely passage in the Second Order for the celebration of Communion (note that word!):

For he is your eternal Word,
through whom you have created all things from the beginning
and formed us in your own image.

In your great love you gave him
to be made man and to share our common life.

This phrase “our common life” always gripped me when I heard the priest pronounce these words. When this particular form was chosen for the service I would wait in anticipation to hear just this phrase. I would feel cheated if the priest said it too quickly and without care and thoughtfulness.

I understand it to mean my life as blended with all other men and women across the globe. It spreads even beyond my lifetime to those who came before me. It links my faith with the faith of my children and grand-children and their children. Hearing the phrase always filled me with joy and brought tears to my eyes.

The Great Redeemer has chosen to share his life with me and my forebears and my as-yet-unborn descendants. His joy was theirs in the past, and is mine now, and will be theirs in the future, by his grace. Even as I write, this fills me with joy.

Playing in the background as I write is Bach’s Cantata No. 147, better known as “Jesu, Joy of man’s Desiring”. The desire of mankind from the beginning has been to come back to God who is our home and our heart’s country. Wordsworth reminds us,

Trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home.

Community occurs (I choose this verb carefully) when we recognise and place God at our centre, and when we stand together with the great family of man before him, in humility and pardon and service.

The word “humility” shares the same root as the word “humus”. It speaks of being of the earth. It reminds us of our common origins, as created by God from the dust of the ground. When we are in community, we do not try to stand above our station. Nor do we try to put ourselves down. We recognise who we are in God and stand, not proud, but confident. And so do all of our fellows. And in our standing, we help each other to stand also.

Together, we find Joy as we find our true selves. T. S. Eliot wrote:

What life have you if you have not life together?
There is no life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in praise of God.

(Choruses from The Rock)

Family JoyFinder

Discuss some things you could do together that would express your family community.

Perhaps there is something you could make – some families may be skilful at quilting, or photography or video film – which would be a project you could do together to make a lasting record of your community. Not only would the created thing be a measure of your community; you would develop community in the process.

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1 The Language of Love, ed. P. Allardice, Angus and Robertson, Melbourne, 1991, p.52.