Holiness in Community: Creating a Culture of Grace and Truth
June 1st, 2006By: Christine D. Pohl
I love the picture of Jesus that John gives us in chapter 1–Jesus the Word who became flesh and lived among us. Jesus is the Holy One who shows us and gives to us the beauty of holiness, the One who helps us to know what holiness looks like in relationships, the One who invites us into a holy community.
One way of getting our heads and hearts around the notion of holiness in community is to ask what it would mean to create a culture of grace and truth? These are concepts deeply connected to pictures in the Old Testament of God’s covenant love and faithfulness—key dimensions of God’s holiness. If we can deepen our understandings of what grace and truth and fidelity look like in relationships, I think we would be moving forward in understanding what it means to be a holy community. We would have a fuller sense of Wesley’s concern about social holiness.
So what are the conditions for holy living in community? What are the practices that make holy living possible? I would say, at least for a start, that in holy communities, people keep their promises, they live truthfully, they live gratefully and hospitably. These four practices—promisekeeping or fidelity, truthtelling or truthfulness, gratitude and hospitality - are central to creating a holy life together.
So what does a grateful community look like? It is one that is deeply responsive to the goodness of God, rich in worship, where a certain level of thankfulness undergirds life together. In a grateful community, there’s lots of testimony to God’s faithfulness through which the community experiences the joys of others; expressions of gratitude make the community alive to the Word and Spirit and to God’s work. What if we intentionally began each day with an expression of gratitude to God and those around us and ended the day by recounting the moments of grace and goodness? How might we and our communities be transformed if we were just more intentional about gratitude?
Certainly, one of the most destructive intrusions into community life is envy—wanting what someone else has, and not wanting them to have it. It often reflects lack of confidence in our own giftedness and ingratitude for what we do have. But other deformations of gratitude also hurt life in community—a sense of entitlement, presumption, perpetual dissatisfaction, grumbling. It is impossible to sustain a community if it is being chipped away by ingratitude and dissatisfaction. But a community that practices gratitude and embodies thankfulness will be a life-giving, life-affirming place.
Turn now to the second practice: promisekeeping or fidelity. Today our culture and we are jaded about promises, partly as a result of the continual hype of advertising that makes promises about products none of us believe. Think what has happened to our moral language when we don’t even notice how odd it is that we use a furniture polish called pledge, margarine called promise, a supplement called ensure and then there are depends. Think of what has happened to key words associated with fidelity and how they have been trivialized.
Lewis Smedes observed, “if you have a ship you will not desert, if you have people you will not forsake, if you have causes you will not abandon, then you are like God.” Promises make an uncertain future more predictable; when kept, they foster trust, give a certain steadiness of purpose. They allow for dependability in relationships, even when we hit trouble spots. They are deeply connected to our ability to sustain hope. Promises safeguard us against our own inconsistencies and fickleness. They stabilize our love.
A community cannot move forward without fidelity, nor can an individual’s or community’s yearning for holiness be disconnected from faithfulness in human relationships.
Let’s turn now to truthfulness, truthtelling as a practice of holy community. What does a community look like that loves the truth, that lives truthfully? It is a community without a lot of posturing, a community that attends to details and does not close its eyes to the difficult stuff, that names deception and dissimulation early. It is a community that has an accurate sense of its own fallenness and of God’s truth and goodness. In such a community people own their responsibility for sin. When there is wrongdoing, people don’t say “it happened” but rather “I did it, or we did it. I take responsibility. I was wrong.”
A truthful community will not necessarily be tidy. There will be some loose threads and rough edges, because such a community is unwilling to cover over wounds lightly, saying peace, peace when there is no peace. A commitment to living truthfully will make safe space for transparency, for the awkwardness of confession and for the long road to forgiveness and healing.
As a holy community responds to the grace and truth it sees in Jesus and receives through Jesus, it turns outward in love and hospitality. A holy community practices hospitality—it makes room for neighbors and strangers. A community that understands itself as invited into God’s purposes, and to God’s table, then in gratitude, turns outward. That grace and gratitude take the form of offering welcome to others.
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