Psalm 133 – St Luke’s.
If I asked you to pick a bible verse, or a saying or a phrase, that holds a place in your life; one that settles, anchors or guides you – what would it be?
If our roles were reversed today, I might call out: “measure twice, cut once” or “tools and stairs don’t mix”, but I may well have picked Psalm 133 too. And indeed, I have chosen it for our scripture reading today because, as well as it being one of my life-centring verses, it just so happened that it was read out last Sunday during my first service in post, and again at morning prayer in the week.
This gave me a welcome sense of connection.
We all need points of connection to help us feel like we belong or fit in. Especially on our first visit to church. It might be a conversation. It might be the kind of tea, coffee, biscuits or home-made cake that were served. It might be a piece of art or two on the wall or ceiling. It might be the woollen prayers or a pile of ladders by the organ, or the wires that cross the church that carry endless creative possibility. It might be a phrase that people used to welcome you or part of the liturgy, or the music, or the sermon, or the prayers, or the inclusive invite to communion. Or maybe it’s the clothes or the shoes that people arewearing, or their hairstyles, or the gender, colour or age of the service leaders. Maybe it is the anybody-guess-what’s-coming-next-notices? Maybe it is the physical orientation of the service?
Maybe it is ‘all of the above’.
Maybe it’s ‘none of the above’.
Is this your first Sunday? Will it most definitely be your last? Or will you now be here until the day you die? Stranger things have happened!
As I arrive at St Luke’s I see a well-loved church with a strong identity, that is successful and yet fragile in places. Especially after an unsettled season. And I am very aware that you are now being asked to allow an unknown figure, such as myself, to land out-of-nowhere into a key role.
It’d be odd if we weren’t all a bit nervous of each other. New and old! But I hope that we can be hopeful, and excited, as we all reorientate for a new season. As we shift in our seats. And as we breathe today, breathing the words from psalm 133 and RS Thomas’ poem.
Reflecting on Psalm 133, it is, I think, a psalm of reorientation, where the psalmist gently reminds us of what God really wants, and what the all-round benefits of this are.
What does God really want?
God wants us to live together in unity.
When I cast my mind around the bible I see several key times when God commands unity: “A new command I give you (says Jesus) Love one another” (John 13:34); “the law and the prophets” (Matt 22:38) can be summed up by loving God and loving others. And the apostle Paul agrees in Gal 5:14: “The entire law is summed up by keeping this one command – love one another.”
It’s a running theme!
But here, in Psalm 133, it reads as less of a command and more of an invite. Where we are encouraged to live in unity because if we do: 1) – Life will be ‘Good and pleasant’: like beard oil and mountain dew. And 2) - That God will bestow blessing on us, giving life forevermore.
I know that this isn’t exactly profound power language today, but, pushing the boat out, I think it may well have been back then. And I’d like to offer an explanation of why I think this.
The word ‘good’, for example.
My youngest son has just done his GCSE’s, and of course people are asking how well he did.‘Good’ in this instance is likely ‘just above average’, or ‘good, considering what kind of a boy he is’. But it’s certainly not excellent. In Psalm 133 however, the word ‘good’ is the same word that God used when God looked at creation and saw that it was ‘good’. And it is also the same word that God used to describe the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Good in this psalm then is not ‘just-above-average-good’. Unless you think God could have done better with creation. Both physically and morally! But I’m not going there with you. Yes, corruption came in after creation, so you might argue it was not so good. But there’s some philosophy to do here and we can’t get into that now.
Suffice to say, in my mind, the psalmist is convinced that our living together in unity will result in things being as good as it is possible to get. In every sense of the word. I’m not sure what else they could be saying. Or why they would be saying something else.
And then there is pleasant. Our unity is not only ‘good’ but it’s also ‘pleasant’. ‘Pleasant’ raises the bar by adding another dimension. Pleasant is the same word as sweet sounding. Especially in a musical sense. This is where all the notes hit the sweet spot. Where there is no sweeter spot. Of all possible examples I am randomly reminded of a moment during the live west-end musical ‘hairspray’ when one soloist sang. It was ‘good’. And I felt for a moment that I was in heaven. But then there were more voices. Joining in, filling the space that I had thought was already full. I actually experienced a moment of euphoria. How can I find words to express that divine almost out of body experience? How can I put it in Old Testament language? Would ‘absolutely pleasant’ suffice?
How ‘good’ and how ‘pleasant’ it is when God’s people live together in unity?
It doesn’t get better than that!
To hammer the point home the psalmist then uses the two great failsafe examples that are beard oil and mountain dew!
Let me explain:
In Ex 30 God told Moses to make a very special perfumed oil, which included cinnamon, and sprinkle it on things to make them sacred. This included Aaron’s head (and subsequently his son’s heads), but nobody else’s heads.
For the oil to get over Aaron’s head and onto his beard and robes a lot of oil would have been needed. I suspect that it was hard to imagine that much oil, especially not that much special oil. For what was usually used for sprinkling would now be pouring. This image can only mean one thing: there is no place more anointed – no place more sacred - than when the oil runs down onto Aaron’s beard, collar and robe. It would have been the most sacred place, thing or person anywhere – ever!
I don’t know what you imagine when you think of sacred. But whatever, and wherever that is, I think that the psalmist is trying to say that it isn’t more sacred than us dwelling together in unity.
The other failsafe example that the Psalmist uses is the dew of Hermon on mount Zion. Hermon was apparently a very dewy place, and Zion a very fertile one. People would have known that. Maybe land values reflected it. How fruitful, then, would a place with the conditions of both those places be? Would it have been the most fruitful place known to humankind?
So, according to the psalmist: living together in unity is good and pleasant, and sacred and fruitful, to the extreme. To the point even that the psalm ends with the assertion that under these conditions things are so good that there is actually no end at all. For they are the conditions of eternity. They are where God bestows blessing forever. Peak blessing. ‘Good’ blessing.
At this point, if we haven’t already, we should probably acknowledge now that what we are describing here is the very essence of the Holy Trinity. The eternally-voluntarily-united-more-than-one-as-one-God
Who we are invited to join in with.
Which is wonderful! And it would be great to end this sermon there.
But, of course, easy said – not so easily done.
Even Jesus, in his act of trying to bring unity to the cosmos, said: “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me”(Matt 26:39). He was personally deeply troubled by the cost of unity.
The week before last Emily and I celebrated our wedding anniversary by walking up a small mountain in Wales with our dog. It was a joyous celebration of our love and unity. Until we got to the top and our dog decided to stop, lie down and not move. This has never happened before, but she is now 12 and maybe the walk was too much for her. So, faced with the choice of leaving her on the mountain to die or carrying her down I picked her up and began carrying, while Emily kindly decided to lead us by a different, more direct route down.
Soon I was standing on steep unstable rocky ground surrounded by gorse and snakes, with no hands, a distressed dog, a bad back, and nowhere to go.
Do you ever have those moments when you love somebody (in theory) but you really don’t like them?
Unity, by the way, doesn’t always require that you like or agree with people. I wonder if the Holy Trinity are like that sometimes?
After perseverance, prayer, contortion, swearing and no small amount of scratches, we eventually found a stream where I put the dog down for a drink. Here she drank for about 5 minutes and then lay down in the stream, and didn’t move.
Now I was faced with the choice of leaving her to die in the stream or carrying a wet dog!
One of the books that I have been given to read as part of my entry to St Luke’s is ‘Fully Alive’ by Elizabeth Oldfield. And in her chapter entitled “Wrath: from Polarization to Peace-making” she talks about how wrath (which she describes as vengeful or vindictive anger) is a ‘delicious pleasure, akin to a sugar high’. Unity is not only difficult, but it is also not always immediately desirable. Not when the addictive sugar-high-delicious-pleasure of wrath is an option too.
Happy anniversary darling!
And here we are today at church, reading Psalm 133 as though we mean it. As though we believe it. Choosing, I’d like to think, to allow it to become a point of connection for us, and to trust it as a centring psalm of reorientation after our own walk through the landscape of church in West Holloway, however scratchy and uncomfortable it might have been.
I’d like to finish with one more life-centring phrase as a prayer. It is probably what first kickstarted my feeling drawn to St Luke’s, and it’s found at point 28 of 30 things about St Luke’s on the ‘about us’ page of the website.
“At St Luke’s, we always try to be open even when we are closed”
Amen
PS - The dog survived, as has our marriage!
Psalm 133
1 How good and pleasant it is
when God’s people 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 on the collar of his robe.
3 It is as if the dew of Hermon
were falling on Mount Zion.
For there the Lord bestows his blessing,
even life forevermore.
The Bright Field By R S Thomas
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
Pippi (Spotty Stockings)
