The community of faith is a place of worship. In worship, unity and healing recur as the church remembers that the community was born of a divine act of deliverance. As the church experiences community, it is renewed by that same gracious act.

For ancient Israel, remembrance of divine grace was preserved by means of a sacred calendar that placed memory of the prevenient, gracious acts of God at the very heart of life. Once a year Israel recalled its deliverance from slavery at Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread; once a year thanks was given for the land and its harvest at the Feast of Weeks; once a year God’s protection in the wilderness was commemorated in the Feast of Booths; and once a year the solemn fast of the Day of Atonement was observed.

The rhythm of the order God had established for the people of the covenant was also celebrated weekly, commemorating God’s creation of the world and Israel’s release from bondage in Egypt, and reminding the people that they were a holy possession of their God. This rhythm in turn radiated outward in time to be marked by the observance in the seventh year of God’s gift of the land, and in the fiftieth year of God’s gift of freedom. This calendar lent a harmony to life, both by reminding Israel of the history of God’s covenant relationship and by placing the community within the broader context of God’s care for the entire created order.

Although the sacral calendar has fallen into neglect in many religious communities today, there is no question that much is lost when a people no longer symbolizes its communal life and the holy events of its past as parts of the much more encompassing order over which God reigns.

Only when its unity is rooted in its sense of devotion to the one true Sovereign can a community of faith transcend the webs of pettiness, parochialism, and self-interest that so rapidly belittle and destroy human fellowship. For only when a person’s primary relationship, in the ultimate sense of the term, is to God, can the inordinate and unhealthy neediness and insecurity that blights our relationships with others be replaced by a genuine sharing predicated on a sense of wholeness dependent on no human, be it self or another, but on God’s grace.

A community of faith that takes seriously the central theme of its heritage will therefore hold up before the world, by means of paradigms and symbols both old and new, the sole sovereignty of God as the only proven safeguard against the myriad penultimate loyalties that promise abundance but deliver death. To choose life is thus to submit to the only one who, as Creator of all life, is graciously willing and able to sustain the life and freedom of all. To choose life is to let go of all that holds the heart back from embracing that which alone possesses intrinsic worth, to relinquish all forms of bondage, and to find fulfillment in belonging to the order of life over which God reigns.

United in worship and reconciled with its God, the community of faith is restored to the health and wholeness that enables it to be a nucleus of health for the broader human community around it. Its own blessing and health are not gifts intended for it alone, but willed by God for all. And it is indeed in worship that the truth of God’s absolute sovereignty brings into focus a vision of God’s reign of peace and justice over all creation. This vision is the faith community’s invitation to give expression to its devotion through a life of service in the world. And its experience of having its needs fulfilled by God in worship empowers it to speak out courageously against all that tears the fabric of the human family, and to ally itself with all peacemakers and agents of caring in the world.

Paul D. Hanson, The People Called: The Growth of Community in the Bible (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 505–507. Used by permission.