When God's People Live in Unity

How good and pleasant it is when God's people live together in unity! It is like precious oil poured on the head, running down on the beard, running down on Aaron's beard, down on the collar of his robe. It is as if the dew of Hermon were falling on Mount Zion. For there the Lord bestows his blessing, even life forevermore. (Psalm 133)   The Israelites didn't have separate denominations.  They certainly had conservative factions and progressive factions within their ranks (think of the disagreements in the Sanhedrin between Pharisees, Sadducees, and others later on from the New Testament!), but given the fact that there was only one city of Jerusalem, they only had one place to go to celebrate a festival.  The journey of ascents to the one, true God and to the one city of Jerusalem necessarily brought them all together as one, big, raucous family again.  Despite their grudges, despite their disagreements, despite their opinions of one another's practice of the faith: there they were—worshiping, eating, and praying together as God's people. Imagine that.  All of God's people living together as sisters and brothers.  The divided kingdoms of Judah and Israel living together as sisters and brothers.  The faithful exiles living together with the Samaritan traitors as sisters and brothers.  The Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, and Zealots living together as sisters and brothers.  In those rare moments when it happens: it is like the ordained, anointed blessing of God running over through the priesthood and down to all the people.  It is as if the plentiful dew of a lushly green-forested mountain fell on the dry rocks of Mount Zion; as if the day of God's gift of abundant life and blessing has arrived at last where all the people will gather in peace and celebration for the feast of the Messiah. Each festival celebration was a foretaste of much better things to come—the vision of what God was up to in calling Israel as his one, singular people.  In Jesus and around the Lord's Supper table, we catch a similar vision of the power of God at work.  We confess and believe in the one Spirit-fired "holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, and the life everlasting."  Which is to say that we believe that Christians from the URC and the CRC, the Canadian Reformed and the Free Reformed, those on all sides of present school and church conflicts—that all of them, in the end, are one.  Not because we have managed to work it out on earth, so much as that it is the reality of God's heaven.  In current conversations on sexuality, much is made of a morality rooted in a Creation-order ethic.  But I do wonder at times if we shouldn't find our starting point in the other end of history: in the New Creation where "they will neither marry nor be given in marriage" and where all God's people are gathered fully and finally together—progressives, conservatives, protestants, Catholics, and every one of the thousand-plus factions of "the Reformed faith"—all at the Wedding Feast of the Lamb.  This place where we will finally and manifestly be what we actually already are in God's reckoning: reconciled together in Christ into one body, through the one Spirit, faith, and baptism through which the one Lord bestows his blessing, even life forevermore. May Psalm 133 inform our praying of the Lord's prayer that God's "will be done on earth as it is in heaven."  And, until that day when our journey of ascents is complete inside the gates of the New Jerusalem, may this psalm inform our living, too.