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Psalm 133 1 Oh, how good and pleasant it is, 2 It is like fine oil upon the head 3 Upon the beard of Aaron, 4 It is like the dew of Hermon 5 For there the Lord has ordained the blessing:
This year, Monday Matters will focus on wisdom conveyed in the treasures of the book of Psalms. We’ll look at the psalms read in church before Monday Matters comes to your screen. |
How Pleasant…
The psalm says: O how good and pleasant it is when kindred live in unity (Psalm 133:1, NRSV). Please note that the psalm speaks about unity. Not uniformity. Not unanimity. Not even agreement. Which is one of the things I love about church (on a good day).
It’s one of the things I love about a community that tries to keep worship at the center. Churches that aim in that direction allow space for all God’s people to come together. Churches that aim in that direction mean that we can sit in a pew or come to the altar rail with people who differ from us. We can all be fed and even united in worship. It happens when we keep God as the center, when we point beyond ourselves and each other to Jesus.
On June 9, David French, conservative Christian, wrote an op-ed in the N.Y. Times about how he had been canceled by his church because of his own challenge to the political agenda of that particular church. He said that race and politics trumped truth and grace. Not very pleasant. Tom Alberti has written an important book called The Kingdom, The Power and the Glory. The book details the ways that the evangelical movement has become intertwined with one political (and divisive) brand, and how pastors who questioned that development have been ostracized. Not very pleasant. Social media provides daily evidence of thuggish behavior of Christians on the left and right, behavior that insists on uniformity at the expense of unity. Not very pleasant.
This insistence on agreement is nothing new in the church. A mentor told me early on that the Bible is really just a story of sibling rivalry, kindred having a hard time getting along. It starts in the first chapters of Genesis as Cain and Abel disagree, a conflict which ended in murder because Cain was upset about the way Abel worshipped. In other words, it was a church fight, a deadly fight over liturgy.
Earliest documents in the New Testament, written or attributed to St. Paul, speak of challenges that came to congregations when people insisted on agreement on all kinds of issues. Paul gets a bad rap when people think of him as rule-based or intransigent. Maybe he had those moments, but in finer moments, he said that he would be all things to all people. Not that he stood for nothing, but that he recognized that the unity of the community was the best reflection of God’s love, the best reflection of God’s activity in the world. So when people were making all kinds of rules about who could be part of the community, who needed to follow rules or else, Paul said that neither circumcision nor uncircumcision mattered. What mattered was a new creation, a community in which there was neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female. (If he were writing today, what might he add to that list? Neither Republican nor Democrat? Neither High Church nor Low Church? Neither Fox nor MSNBC? Neither Tarheel nor Blue Devil?) Paul describes a radical vision of community that the church has never been fully able to realize.
The Episcopal Church meets this week in General Convention. Every three years, it’s a big old family reunion. Keep that gathering of kindred in your prayers. There’s plenty of opportunity for sibling rivalry. It’s a diverse group. A variety of opinions on all kinds of matters will be floating around. It’s doubtful there will be complete agreement, unanimity, uniformity. But the convention can be a witness to the possibility of unity. That possibility has been enhanced by the graceful leadership of Michael Curry who winds up 9 years of service this week. He has brought us together by insisting on keeping love at the center, echoing the refrain that if it’s not about love it’s not about God.
Coincidentally, today (June 24) is the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist. It’s no accident that his birth comes near the summer solstice, when days begin to shorten. (Have you noticed that happening already?) Compare and contrast to the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord (a.k.a., Christmas), at which point days begin to lengthen. It’s the church calendar at work, illustrating the words of John the Baptist who said of Jesus: He must increase and I must decrease. John the Baptist, shown often in Christian art pointing to Jesus, teaches us about Christian unity by modeling a spirit of humility, a focus on worship, pointing beyond himself.
In partisan times, the church has opportunity to model unity, a rare commodity in our culture. In what ways can you participate in that witness this week, in your family, in your church, in your workplace, in your neighborhood, in the wider community?
-Jay Sidebotham
