Our Sermons

Bible Passage: Psalm 133
Pastor: Pastor Schlicht
Sermon Date:  May 29, 2022

The most-read online article of the year 2016 was written by a man named Alain de Botton called, “Why you will marry the wrong person.” It’s a great piece that blows up a lot of common expectations about love and relationships. Most people go into love thinking it’s going to be easy. It’s just going to be natural and intuitive. Even the way we talk about love makes it sound like it just happens to you, “You fall in love.” It’s as easy as falling into a ditch. Alain argues, and I think he has biblical grounds to do so, that this is an unhelpful way to look at love in any relationship. Rather, he says, love is a skill. It’s a skill that is learned through difficulty.  Just like many places in the Bible, he talks about love as an action that takes effort to do well. How do we relate to people with compassion, with patience, and with kindness? It takes trial and error, hurt feelings, missed expectations, and a bunch of forgiveness along the way. My favorite sentence from the article is this: “Compatibility is the achievement of love, it cannot be its precondition.” Most people think, “Let’s see if we’re compatible because this needs to be the precondition, the basis, of our love.” But really, if you’ve spent any time in a long-term relationship, you know that compatibility as a precondition doesn’t help 5 years in with serious issues. Having ‘so much in common’ doesn’t save a marriage. Rather, compatibility is the result, the achievement of laboring toward each other. This is not only good advice in marriage, but it relates directly to a Christian community.

In the same sort of way, we assume that Christian community should be easy. That I can just walk into a church and fall into strong and meaningful relationships. I enter into this group of Christian people and I assume they are mature and kind, that they all remember my name. I assume that they will pursue me as a friend, that they care for me selflessly and understand me. But if they don’t, if there’s tension and awkwardness, if there’s something that happens that I disagree with, then “I’m out!” What we need to do is detangle our ideal of a Christian community with the real Christian community God has placed us in. We need to understand that Christian unity is neither easy nor natural. That’s what we see in Psalm 133 today. Just three verses disclose a world of meaning, all focused on the rare and beautiful blessing of Christian unity—a message dearly needed today.

Verse 1: Look, how good and how pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity! A sense of quiet rapture is conveyed at the outset through three words of emphasis—”look” (hineh), and the twice “how” (mah). Don’t run past this sentence, it is trying to pull you over, slow you down, and get you to gawk at what’s happening. Recently, I was driving with my daughter and she cried out, “Look, Daddy, Look!” We were driving near the water tower. I pulled over because we had a good view and we just stopped and looked at it for a bit. In a more profound way, this is what the Psalmist is doing. He says, “Woah, look! There is something worth stopping to see. here! There is something uncommon, something rare! And what is it? Brothers living together in unity! How good it is, how God-pleasing, and how pleasant it is, how beautiful and precious this is when Christians dwell together in unity.

King David, the man who wrote this inspired Psalm, knew the long-standing strife between the tribes of Israel that existed before him. Unity among the twelve tribes of Israel was by no means normal. After becoming a nation under Moses, they enjoyed a tentative, fraying unity until the death of Joshua, and then waged war against one another for centuries during the period of the Judges. Under King David, they were finally united for about a century until King Solomon’s death. Thankfully, David didn’t live to see it, but the rival kingdoms of Judah and Ephraim split, never to be reunited again. The animosity was so strong between these brothers that the Judahites killed 500,000 of the men of Ephraim in the late 10th century BC. All of this to show that unity is rare to establish, and rare to keep.

I think familiarity breeds contempt in the hearts of many Christians when it comes to Christian unity. It is easy for people who have a Christian spouse to disregard the unity they enjoy in Christ. It is so tempting for a member of a church like Eastside to see everything lacking in our brothers and sisters, rather than giving thanks for the unity of Christ which triumphs over our differences. It’s so easy for a student who goes to a Christian school to disregard the blessing they have with their classmates in Chrsitian unity. This incredible gift of God for the lonely Christian is trodden underfoot by those who have this blessing every day. It is easy to forget that brothers and sisters living in unity is a gift of grace, one that any day may be tak­en from us—that there may come a day when we wish we could meet as we do now. Let us, who have the priv­i­lege of liv­ing and worshiping with oth­er Chris­tians, praise God’s grace from the bot­tom of our hearts because this unity we have is a rare blessing. Look, how rare it is for Christians to live together in unity, despite how much seeks to divide us. You see the real beauty of this uncommon unity is revealed in its difficulty.

That’s what we see in verse 2: It is like the precious oil poured on the head, running down on the beard, the beard of Aaron, running down on the collar of his robes. David says that unity is like the oil which ran down Aaron’s beard. How does this portray a hard-won unity between brothers? Well, oil running down Aaron’s beard alludes to when Moses, the brother of Aaron, anointed him as the first high priest over the nation of Israel (Ex. 40:13) which happened in the context of much heartache, anger, and betrayal right after the sin of the Gold Calf. 

Do you remember what Moses does when he comes down from Mount Sinai with the 10 commandments and sees the idol of the Golden Calf that his own brother made? Think about it, the tension between these two brothers is extreme. Everything that Moses has been working for has been shattered. And it was undone by his very own brother—the one who has worked most closely beside him, the one with whom he has shared intimate times with God, the one who understands better than anyone else who Moses really is and what is most important to him. In righteous anger, Moses smashes the precious stone tablets on the ground and turns to Aaron for an answer. And Aaron has the gall to lie to him! He says that the golden calf just walked out of the fire! Ridiculous! He doesn’t deserve forgiveness! There, crushed between loyalty to God and his people (including his brother), Moses is not allowed the luxury of maintaining some sentimentalized view of brotherly unity. God’s threat is complete destruction of the people, including Aaron. But in the middle of this turmoil, Moses urgently prays to God and intercedes specifically for Aaron (Deut 9:20). So what does our God of grace do? He renews his commitment to the people and forgives them. Now, and only now, after this intercession and forgiveness does Moses announce to the people God’s plans for the tabernacle and priesthood which Aaron would lead. This is when Moses gives the command for the holy garments to be placed on his brother, and he takes precious oil and pours it over Aaron’s head, anointing him as the High Priest of Israel. You see, the picture of unity in Psalm 133 of oil running down the head of Aaron does not occur in an idyllic setting. No, it comes after a relationship has been severely tested. It comes at a time when trust is broken, when the memory of hurt is still fresh. It comes when sin is ugly and a grudge is reasonable. And yet despite all that has taken place, we look through the eyes of Moses in this sacred moment, watching the precious oil running down over Aaron’s head, down his beard, and onto his priestly robes. In other words, the beauty of Christian unity is revealed by its difficulty.

There was a member at a previous congregation who had run into their first difficulty with someone at a church and they told me they were going to leave. And I said, “This is your first chance to prove the beauty of Christian unity and you’re going to back down? You’re finally at the plate and you get to swing the bat! Are you just going to walk away?” I mean this is what it means to be a Christian family. It’s about sin and forgiveness; it’s about praying for each other; it’s about the beauty of a unity revealed precisely in its difficulty. I feel like if you haven’t had issues with at least a few people here at Eastside, then you haven’t really experienced deep unity with this community yet. Do you know what I mean? (Not that you need to go picking fights! Please don’t!) But if you are part of a family, you know that siblings quarrel! This is the beauty of Christian unity, not that our church is perfect, but that we forgive each other repeatedly. This is why real Christian unity is so rare and beautiful! Because it is hard! Because it’s a real, not ideal, unity. 

I try not to roll my eyes when I hear someone talk about something that happens at Lakeside or Luther Prep and then they lean in to say something like, “And that’s supposed to be a Christian school!” Yes, it is a Christian school…with a bunch of sinful teenagers running around! Why are we surprised that there are problems in Christian communities?! Because we have this false ideal, this dream of what a Christian unity should be, but it’s not real. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his book Life Together, writes this: “Every human wish or dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves his dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest.” Do we sometimes love the dream of Eastside more than the church and school which actually exists? Do you love what you wish your spouse would be rather than the real person God has given to you? Do we love ideal children or our actual kids? Do we love our idea of what a friend should be, or the sinful person that we have, by God’s grace, made a connection with? 

My friends, I pray that God in his grace shatters such dreams. Just as we see Aaron through Moses’ eyes, so also we should be prepared to be disappointed with others, with Christians in general, and if we are honest, with ourselves. Because the sooner that disillusionment takes place, the sooner the fog of an ideal community clears out, and we can begin loving and uniting with the real Christian brothers and sisters God has placed around us. And when that very real Christian sins against you, that is an opportunity for you to practice what we preach! That very moment of disappointment with a fellow Christian becomes beneficial, because it gives you a chance to teach others that none of us can achieve unity by our own words and deeds, but only by that one Word and Deed which really binds us together: the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ. 

That ties into Verse 3 which shows us that this rare and beautiful unity is a blessing that can only come from God. David writes: It is like the dew from Hermon running down on the mountains of Zion. For there the Lord commands this blessing: life to eternity. To us, living in a climate with plenty of rain, dew can be more of a nuisance than a blessing. All it does is get your shoes wet during a morning outing. But in Israel, where there is no rain for months at a time, dew is a refreshing and even life-giving blessing. But here there is a crazy amount of dew. Mount Hermon was the highest mountain in ancient Israel, boasting majestic, snow-capped peaks rising 10,000 feet above sea level. In comparison, Mount Zion was dry and much smaller. However, the dew of Hermon could never flow down to Mount Zion because it was by Jerusalem, separated by a hundred miles and the deep Jordan rift. So if the dew from Hermon is running down all the way to Zion, then this is a poetic picture of supernatural abundance, of unnatural blessing so great it has to be from God! You can also see that in the fact that the pictures of unity in the Psalm are repeatedly described as “running down.” (“running down the on the beard, running down on the collar of his robes, the dew from Hermon running down  on the mountains of Zion.”)

Like anointing oil that runs down off the head, unity in faith flows down from Christ the head of the church. Like all good gifts, unity among believers is a blessing from God. This gift of unity is not based on mere common interest, or political compromise, or willingness to paper-over differences. The real unity which God gives is based on him and his Word which ultimately brings us “life to eternity”. Look around the room, God commands this blessing, that we will live together with each other for eternity! Think about that during communion today. Think about that with your family. Think about that in any Christain relationship. May the Lord bless us as we pursue and preserve the rare and beautiful blessing of Christian unity! Amen.