Today is a good day to talk about my family-it relates to today’s psalm. There are 6 of us; mom, dad then me, my sister Andrea, my brother Edward and my sister Beth. Us kids grew up in a city about an hour north of LA called Thousand Oaks. We are all very different. We each have talents that the others don’t really have. You’d think that would be a recipe for harmony and unity in our family and you’d be dead wrong. First off, my brother and I shared the same room, which was probably more traumatic for my brother then me, but it wasn’t easy for me either. My sisters each had their own room, so that reduced the fighting between them a little. We’d allfight over just about everything. Whose turn it was to do certain chores, who wasn’t leaving who alone, you remember the fights of youth.

I think the most traumatic thing of all was that we all had to share one bathroom; 2 sinks. The guys had their sink, the girls had theirs. One shower, one dirty clothes hamper, one bathroom. What a mess living in a family was for everyone. We frequently hurt one another’s feelings; we said things that at least I know I’d love to be able to take back. We learned in our family, we grew in our family. We had great Christmases, and we had hard ones. Money was always tight when I was younger, but money got better through the years, so I got a different upbringing than did my siblings. But in the end, we all love each other, we all support one another, our infrequent get togethers are nice now. Boy, families bring out the best and the worst in us all don’t they? The church is also a family of sorts-it is those committed to Christ wherever we be; you have family all over the globe. With that image of my family in mind, or better perhaps, thinking of your family and this one, let’s take a look at Psalm 133.

How good and pleasant it is
when brothers live together in unity!
2 It is like precious oil poured on the head,
running down on the beard,
running down on Aaron’s beard,
down upon the collar of his robes.
3 It is as if the dew of Hermon
were falling on Mount Zion.
For there the LORD bestows his blessing,
even life forevermore.

Let’s pray.

We’re almost done taking a look at a very special series of Psalms called the Psalms of the Ascent. They are numbers 120-135 and the were sung for centuries by the Jewish people as they would travel, pilgrimage really, to the Temple in Jerusalem. Jerusalem sits on top of Mt Zion, so anyone traveling to Jerusalem, then and now, has to go up. The people had to ascend, to go up to the Temple, which was at the top of Jerusalem. We noted over the past few months that Jesus and His disciples were headed to Jerusalem for Passover and other important activities, so it was very likely, although not recorded anywhere, that these same psalms were sung by Jesus and the disciples as they headed up to Jerusalem, up to the Temple. So we’ve been looking at these psalms carefully to see what lessons they might contain for us as well, and I’m grateful for Mike preaching last week and continuing the series. I think he got one of the hardest psalms, but I’ll have you know I didn’t plan it that way; it just happened like that. In any case, we come on our travels through the psalms of the Ascent to psalm 133.

Christians are never pictured in Scripture alone or solo; there is never any command of Jesus or St. Paul or anyone else to sequester ourselves alone away from the rest of the Christians in a particular area-in fact just the opposite. The letters of Paul and Jesus’ teachings assume there is body of believers. Even the letters of Paul to individuals talk about the community of believers. Our relationship to God is personal, but it is never private in the sense that we are somehow “secret Christians”. Being a stealth Christian, one without a family, is rarely a good idea; in fact I can think of few exceptions-maybe being a missionary to an area that is completely unchurched, but even then the missionary is an extension of the church. The missionaries are in contact with the sending church or churches; the missionaries are prayed for by the part of the church that remained behind. And they are building community with the people they are sent to. So even then, in the most extreme example, that person is still a part of the family, still a part of the family of God. We all belong, once we have committed our lives to God, to the family of God, the body of Christ. We can’t be a Christian and not be a part of a church anymore than we can be a person and have no family.

Now certainly there are parts of the body that only appear occasionally, they are a part of the family only on special occasions. Some have been wounded by the family, but they are still a part. Some move out and back, but they are still family. Some even run away from their family and pretend that the family never existed. But that doesn’t make them less a part of the family.

At the same time, I think there will always be a tension within the Christian communities because they are made up of people. Families quarrel. I know, I was in one. And you, I suspect, know this to be true as well. You know people don’t stop being sinners when they join the family of Christ because you didn’t. When sinners sin, we hurt each other. Christians, upon joining the family of God, don’t become perfect, they don’t become witty conversationalists. Some are cranky, some a bit depressed, some very wounded, some take their feet out of their mouths only long enough to put their other foot in. But that doesn’t mean they are out of the family; it doesn’t mean any of us are. In fact, some of us are determined to see how God can and will use this family to glorify Himself, build us up and joyously reach out to the world with our message of hope in Christ alone.

So the psalm starts… Behold, How good and pleasant it is
when brothers live together in unity!

Community is important. The Christian community is even more important; and it is essential that all Christians have a community where they can belong. We are not designed to be solitary creatures. Adam wasn’t whole until God created Eve. Think about this; when the police catch some sort of a killer, what do the neighbors all say about that person? Usually they say, he was the quiet type, kept to himself, nobody really knew him and so forth. Haven’t you heard that? The Unabomber- that’s what they said about him. Sad solitary figure- the exact kind of person we are not to be. Jesus Himself had a community of at least 12 around Him, the disciples. We’ve talked in the past about all the “one another’s” in God’s word; encourage one another, pray for one another, bear each other’s burden’s and so forth. There are many of those admonitions in the NT. The NT does not support the idea of a solitary Christian. You can’t find it. Instead, we find over and over how to live together as a community; how to love, how to support, how to live as a community of believers before God and to His glory.

We see this each Sunday in our lives. We come together to worship and that’s good. Together we worship better; more purely, less selfishly, more accountably, than those people who sit at home watching a tv show of a worship service, trying to believe that they are connected to that church they see. (Isn’t it amazing that we are becoming, through tv, more and more spectators of life, and that that’s okay with us, even in the context of worship…) Think about the band of disciples traveling with Jesus, up to Jerusalem, singing this psalm. How pleasant it is for brothers to dwell in unity! Worship is a communal experience; there can be no secret Christians, no stealth or undercover Christians. We are Christians together.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that Christians together are perfect. Far from it. We all have our pressure points and buttons to push. We all have sore spots and different things that are important to us. Just like my siblings and I fought; we in the church can occasionally fight. We see this in the forms of worship sometimes; some people want nothing but hymns, other want nothing but praise songs. Some want the sermon shorter, some want it longer. Some want communion to be served exactly like this; others could care less. Some like the same prayers every week; some like it changed up and different every so often. Because we are fallen people, struggling with sin, we bring that sinful nature into church with us. Look at some of the first people recorded in history; chapter 4 of Genesis contains the story of Cain and Abel, two brothers. Jealousy erupts, and Cain killed Abel. First family in the Bible. Their father Adam walked with God in the garden of Eden; Cain kills Abel the next generation. Now don’t anybody get any ideas. This example is just to say that families fight; and that’s okay from time to time. As long as we fight with ideas about how to best glorify God, how to best proclaim Him in our world. Other fighting is less helpful. But I know it has happened, and I know it will happen. You see, aren’t perfected as soon as we walk into the sanctuary. We are so empty and aware of our needs that sometimes we don’t care who we step on in order to get our needs taken care of. We are still fallen and broken people, the people Christ died for, the people Christ died to redeem. We aren’t perfect, none of us, just forgiven, like the bumper sticker says.

2 It is like precious oil poured on the head,
running down on the beard,
running down on Aaron’s beard,
down upon the collar of his robes.

This image of Aaron comes from Exodus 29, where Aaron is consecrated to the Lord, when His life is dedicated to the service of God. Aaron dressed in the tunic, and then the oil is poured on his head, over flowing onto the holy ground. Oil was one of those items that God used to symbolize His blessing; it softens the skins, makes people smell better, it is a sign of acceptance. Remember when someone visited another person’s house, one of the steps of hospitality was to offer the visitor oil for the head. But when the psalmist uses this image, it is not the everyday oil that this image brought to mind, but the priestly image. Aaron was the high priest, as you might remember, the one who worked with Moses. When we are together, in unity, before God, there is something priestly that happens to us. We become priests for one another; we are able to bear with one another, we are able to exhort each other to more holy living, we are able to pronounce the forgiveness of sins for one another. Brothers and sisters in Christ have special bond; we are family, but we are also priests to one another. We encourage each other when there is discouragement; we serve one another when service is needed or appropriate. We need to remind each other that we are deeply and completely loved by God and we need to live in that each day.

This is one other aspects that sets the Reformed church apart from other streams of Christian thought and beliefs. We believe strongly in the priesthood of all believers. What that means is that though I play a special role in the life of our church community; we are all priests for one another. No one is so high that they cannot be corrected or questioned by other members. There is not a special “super holy” class of people in our church. We are all in this together; we are all able to serve one another, mediate the grace and truth of Christ to one another, we can all proclaim the truths of Scripture. In some churches, only special people can do that. Not in ours. Everyone is special, everyone belongs as a priest. And while that may be intimidating to some, it is true nonetheless that on occasion even the most reluctant person in our midst will be a priest to others in our church family.

3 It is as if the dew of Hermon
were falling on Mount Zion.
For there the LORD bestows his blessing,
even life forevermore.

This image is a little more obscure, and I’m really going to pass along to you the insights of others into what this means. Mt Hebron is the highest mountain in that part of the world at around 9000 ft. It is north of Israel a little, probably would have been seen by Jewish pilgrims heading toward Jerusalem who came from the lands north of Israel. I can tell you from experience that at higher elevations the dew can come on quite heavily during the night. When I’ve camped that high our tents would be covered in dew, and often we’d have to put the tents away wet in the morning to get going on the trail. But in that dew falling there is a freshness, a life giving water that comes in the morning. It’s like having a basin full of water that we splash onto our faces. I suspect that is the image, that is the feeling the psalmist is trying to express.
What I think this is about is that we have to approach our community, each person afresh. We cannot pigeon hole people as being one particular way or another. I think we can actively refuse to think badly about one another in light of the past, we can refuse to think that people cannot grow, be transformed, be changed. I think we grow as persons and as a community when we celebrate how God moves afresh in each other’s lives, sometimes God even uses members of the community to make that happen. It is joyous to look at different people in the church and think, I wonder what God has in store for them today, I wonder how God is going to move in their lives, I wonder what good God is going to do through them…that sort of attitude breaks the sameness we can slip into when we examine our lives and the lives of those around us. God is moving in this place, in your life, in the lives of those around us in the church. That’s not old hat, it isn’t boring, it is new every morning like the dew on Mt Hebron.

How good and pleasant it is when the people of God dwell in unity. And how miserable it can be when we don’t. I’ve heard people tell me that if heaven is like the church, then they are looking to go to hell and have a good time in the afterlife. We get the palest shadow of life in heaven when we look at the life of the church; but it is a glimpse. Where the fellowship is real and genuine, where each person is fresh and new every morning, where we celebrate, where we party with God forevermore. For there the Lord bestows His blessing, when we see the church moving together, growing together in love and faith, blessing each other, serving one another out of joy rather than reluctance, that is life together, it is the good life we are preparing for in this life.

This family of Christ is wonderful. I don’t say that to have swelled heads, but I say it simply because it is true. It doesn’t mean we are without family squabbles, or other sorts of problems, but God is moving in this place, blessing us with each other, transforming us into the people we were created to be. And that is wonderful, it is a blessing, and we need to live into that blessing. We need to grow in unity, we need to grow into our church family. Some of us are reluctant family members who need to come into the house more often, some of us are overbearing siblings who need to back off a little, some of us don’t know where we belong yet in the family, what role we should play. But I tell you, it is wonderful to be a part of a fully functioning church. The church is not full of fuddy duddies, it is full of people with whom we will sit at the great feast in Heaven forever. The people I see are wonderful, God is growing us all and using us to His glory in this place and to the ends of the earth. Live into that; be a part of the family of God.

Let’s pray.