January 29thPsalm 133
No Christian is an only child
‘All actual life is encounter.’ [M. Buber]
Melissa Florer-Bixler is the pastor of Raleigh Mennonite Church in North Carolina. In a recent column in the Christian Century she wrote the following:
We are a tenant church. Renting a space for worship is a way of life deep in our bones. Cleaning up is written into our contract, one of the tasks that comes with low rent for a few hours each Sunday in an Episcopal church’s fellowship hall. It is a small job, too minute, I’ve concluded, to trouble a volunteer.
Instead, running a towel across the blinds and checking the bathrooms for paper towels is humbling. Whatever hearty proclamation I make from the pulpit, however our hearts are rent by soaring hymns, our skin turns to dust that accumulates in cracks and corners. We create waste. Someone must clean it up.
Much of this life is cleaning up after one another, figuring out what to do with the mess. Someone will come along to sweep up after us, to take away the cast-off parts. Church is the place where people have chosen one another’s mess. People are complicated and lovely. They disappoint us, then exceed our expectations. We long for one another, and we come up empty. It is messy, this dusty life.
Today I climb the stairs to the third floor and gather the relics of our body. An inch of blue yarn, a safety pin, a green marker, a small plastic bag holding pedicels of grapes. Emma has been drawing her cartoon snakes again—here’s a boa constrictor wearing a top hat. The crumbs of our people’s lives remain, hanging in the air, gathered together in clumps on the ground. I sweep away the traces in order to make room for more of us.
I clean up the church week after week, and I’ve come to accept that we can’t get away from the shedding of our skin. We can’t leave behind the mortifications of the flesh that are acne and aging, losing our abilities one by one. We are fragile dust creatures. What is this place that we are meeting? It is the place where we learn to love the dust of one another’s bodies.
In this psalmist’s beautiful meditation on unity, we are given two images: oil and the dew of Mt. Hermon. Both are pictures of abundance and life. God’s generosity calls people to worship. And in worshiping this God of abundant life and love, we become one family.
Of course, like a family we sometimes forget that we are dust: frail, fragile, easily distracted, quick to criticize, slow to forgive or listen. One barrier to unity is our dream of the ‘perfect church,’ but according to Dietrich Bonhoeffer this is a dangerous dream.
In his book, Life Together, one of the best ever written on the life of the church, Bonhoeffer writes:
Not what a person is in themselves as a Christian, our spirituality, our piety, constitutes the basis of our community. What determines our [unity] is what we are by reason of Christ. Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us.
We represent to one another the gifts and blessing of God. We are set apart for service to each other. All of us as Christians need other Christians to speak and share the life of Christ so that we may become better, more faithful disciples.
The church must always remember the prayer of Jesus intimating that the world will only believe his message if we the church live together in love even as he and the Father love.
20 ‘I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, 21that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, 23I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me (John 17.20-23).
‘Behold how good and pleasant it is when sisters and brothers live together in unity!’