Not Like Paying Taxes

Not Like Paying Taxes

Psalm 133 presents what we are after: “How wonderful, how beautiful, when brothers and sisters get along!” The psalm puts into song what is said and demonstrated throughout Scripture and church: community is essential. Scripture knows nothing of the solitary Christian. People of faith are always members of a community. Creation itself was not complete until there was community, Adam needing Eve before humanity was whole. God never works with individuals in isolation, but always with people in community.

This is the biblical datum, and that with which we must begin. Jesus worked with twelve disciples and lived with them in community. The church was formed when one hundred twenty people were “all together” in one place (Acts 2:1 and again 5:12). When some early Christians were dropping out of the community and pursuing private interests, a pastor wrote to them urging them to nurture their precious gift of community, “not avoiding worshiping together as some do but spurring each other on, especially as we see the big Day approaching” (Heb 10:25). The Bible knows nothing of a religion defined by what a person does inwardly in the privacy of thought or feeling, or apart from others on lonely retreat. When Jesus was asked what the great commandment was, he said, “Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence,” and then immediately, before anyone could go off and make a private religion out of it (“I come to the garden alone”), riveted it to another: “There is a second to set alongside it: ‘Love others as well as you love yourself ’” (Mt 22:34-40).

Christians make this explicit in their act of worship each week by gathering as a community: other people are unavoidably present. As we come to declare our love for God, we must face the unlovely and lovely fellow sinners whom God loves and commands us to love. This must not be treated as something to put up with, one of the inconvenient necessities of faith in the way that paying taxes is an inconvenient consequence of living in a secure and free nation. It is not only necessary; it is desirable that our faith have a social dimension, a human relationship: “How wonderful, how beautiful, when brothers and sisters get along!”

For centuries this psalm was sung on the road as throngs of people made the ascent to Jerusalem for festival worship. Our imaginations readily reconstruct those scenes. How great to have everyone sharing a common purpose, traveling a common path, striving toward a common goal, that path and purpose and goal being God. How much better than making the long trip alone: “How good, how delightful it is for all to live together like brothers” (JB).

Two Ways to Avoid Community

But if living in community is necessary and desirable, it is also enormously difficult.1 There is a clue to the nature of the difficulty in the phrase “when brothers and sisters get along.”

Most Christians have some firsthand experience of what it means to live with brothers and sisters. Brothers fight. And sisters fight. The first story in the Bible about brothers living together is the story of Cain and Abel. And it is a murder story. Significantly, their fight was a religious fight, a quarrel over which of them God loved best. The story of Joseph and his brothers follows a few pages later, in which Joseph, envied by the rest, is sold into Egypt as a slave. Miriam and Aaron quarreled with their brother Moses. David and his brothers fare no better and add to the evidence of discord. Even Jesus and his brothers are evidence of disharmony rather than peace. The one picture we have of them shows the brothers misunderstanding Jesus and trying to drag him away from his messianic work because they are convinced that he is crazy.

Those who have acquired their knowledge of human relationships by reading psychology books instead of the Bible find the case histories on this subject under the chapter entitled “Sibling Rivalry.” But most of what is there is only a footnote to what Scripture says: children fight a lot; each brother is quick to take offense if he doesn’t get his own way; each sister wants a major share of the parents’ attention.

Children are ordinarily so full of their own needs and wants that they look at a brother or sister not as an ally but as a competitor. If there is only one pork chop on the plate and three of us who want it, I will look at my brother and sister not as delightful dinner companions but as difficult rivals. Much of the literature of the world (novels, plays, poetry) documents this: living together like brothers and sisters means, in actual practice, endless squabbles, murderous quarrels and angry arguments. And so if we are going to sing “How wonderful, how beautiful, when brothers and sisters get along,” we will not do it by being left to ourselves, following our natural bent. If we do, we will only get into a big fight, and the only wonderful thing about it will be the pleasure the spectators get in watching us bloody each other’s noses.

Living together in a way that evokes the glad song of Psalm 133 is one of the great and arduous tasks before Christ^’s people. Nothing requires more attention and energy. It is easier to do almost anything else. It is far easier to deal with people as problems to be solved than to have anything to do with them in community. If a person can be isolated from the family (from husband, from wife, from parents, from children, from neighbors) and then be professionally counseled, advised and guided without the complications of all of those relationships, things are very much simpler. But if such practices are engaged in systematically, they become an avoidance of community. Christians are a community of people who are visibly together at worship but who remain in relationship through the week in witness and service. “In the beginning is the relation.”2

Another common way to avoid community is to turn the church into an institution. In this way people are treated not on the basis of personal relationships but in terms of impersonal functions. Goals are set that will catch the imagination of the largest numbers of people; structures are developed that will accomplish the goal through planning and organization. Organizational planning and institutional goals become the criteria by which the community is defined and evaluated. In the process the church becomes less and less a community, that is, people who pay attention to each other, “brothers and sisters,” and more and more a collectivism of “contributing units.”

Every community of Christians is imperiled when either of these routes are pursued: the route of defining others as problems to be solved, the way one might repair an automobile; the route of lumping persons together in terms of economic ability or institutional effectiveness, the way one might run a bank. Somewhere between there is community—a place where each person is taken seriously, learns to trust others, depend on others, be compassionate with others, rejoice with others. “How wonderful, how beautiful, when brothers and sisters get along!”

Each Other’s Priest

There are two poetic images in Psalm 133 that are rich with insights in the work of encouraging and shaping a good and delightful life together in Christ. The first image describes community as “costly anointing oil flowing down head and beard, / Flowing down Aaron’s beard, flowing down the collar of his priestly robes.”

The picture comes from Exodus 29, where instructions are given for the ordination of Aaron and other priests. After sacrifices were prepared, Aaron was to be dressed in the priestly vestments. Then this direction is given: “You shall take the anointing oil, and pour it on his head and anoint him . . . . Thus you shall ordain Aaron and his sons” (Ex 29:7, 9 RSV).

Oil, throughout Scripture, is a sign of God’s presence, a symbol of the Spirit of God. Oil glistens, picks up the warmth of sunlight, softens the skin, perfumes the person. (Gerard Manley Hopkins, extolling God’s grandeur in creation, uses a similar image in his line “It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil crushed.”)3 There is a quality of warmth and ease in God^’s community which contrasts with the icy coldness and hard surfaces of people who jostle each other in mobs and crowds.

But more particularly here the oil is an anointing oil, marking the person as a priest. Living together means seeing the oil flow over the head, down the face, through the beard, onto the shoulders of the other—and when I see that I know that my brother, my sister, is my priest. When we see the other as God^’s anointed, our relationships are profoundly affected.

No one has realized this more perceptively in our time than Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He wrote, “Not what a man is in himself as a Christian, his spirituality and piety, constitutes the basis of our community. What determines our brotherhood is what that man is by reason of Christ. Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us.”4 And what Christ has done is anoint us with his Spirit. We are set apart for service to one another. We mediate to one another the mysteries of God. We represent to one another the address of God. We are priests who speak God’s Word and share Christ’s sacrifice.

In the second image, the community is “like the dew on Mount Hermon flowing down the slopes of Zion.” Hermon, the highest mountain in that part of the world, rises to a height of over nine thousand feet in the Lebanon range, north of Israel. Anyone who has slept overnight in high alpine regions knows how heavy the dew is at such altitudes. When you wake in the morning, you are drenched. This heavy dew, which was characteristic of each new dawn on the high slopes of Hermon, is extended by the imagination to the hills of Zion—a copious dew, fresh and nurturing in the drier, barren Judean country. The alpine dew communicates a sense of morning freshness, a feeling of fertility, a clean anticipation of growth.

Important in any community of faith is an ever-renewed expectation in what God is doing with our brothers and sisters in the faith. We refuse to label the others as one thing or another. We refuse to predict our brother’s behavior, our sister^’s growth. Each person in the community is unique; each is specially loved and particularly led by the Spirit of God. How can I presume to make conclusions about anyone? How can I pretend to know your worth or your place? Margaret Mead, who made learned and passionate protests against the ways modern culture flattens out and demoralizes people, wrote, “No recorded cultural system has ever had enough different expectations to match all the children who were born within it.”6

A community of faith flourishes when we view each other with this expectancy, wondering what God will do today in this one, in that one. When we are in a community with those Christ loves and redeems, we are constantly finding out new things about them. They are new persons each morning, endless in their possibilities. We explore the fascinating depths of their friendship, share the secrets of their quest. It is impossible to be bored in such a community, impossible to feel alienated among such people.

The oil flowing down Aaron’s beard communicates warm, priestly relationship. The dew descending down Hermon’s slopes communicates fresh and expectant newness. Oil and dew. The two things that make life together delightful.

Rousing Good Fellowship

The last line of the psalm concludes that the good and delightful life together is where “GOD commands the blessing, ordains eternal life.”

Christians are always attempting and never quite succeed at getting a picture of the life everlasting. When we try to imagine it, we only banalize it. And then, having scrawled an uninteresting and amateurish sketch using the paint pots of an impoverished faith, we announce that we are not so sure we want to spend eternity in a place like that. Maybe we would prefer the rousing good fellowship of hell. Psalm 133 throws out just a hint of heaven (a hint that is expanded into a grand vision in Revelation 4—5), turning that on its head: the rousing good fellowship is in heaven.

Where relationships are warm and expectancies fresh, we are already beginning to enjoy the life together that will be completed in our life everlasting. Which means that heaven is like nothing quite so much as a good party. Assemble in your imagination all the friends you enjoy being with most, the companions who evoke the deepest joy, your most stimulating relationships, the most delightful of shared experiences, the people with whom you feel completely alive—that is a hint at heaven, “for there GOD commands the blessing, ordains eternal life.”

April 9, 1945

One of the best, maybe the best, book written in the twentieth century on the meaning of living together as a family of faith is Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The book begins with the words of the psalm: “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to live together in unity!” (NKJV). The text was with Bonhoeffer all his life. His first publication, a doctoral dissertation at age twenty-one, was titled “The Communion of the Saints.” His book The Cost of Discipleship has been a handbook to a vast company of Christians on pilgrimage. During the Nazi years he led a fugitive community of seminarians, living with them in a daily quest to discover for themselves the meaning of being a family of faith in Christ and training them in the pastoral ministries that would lead others into that fellowship of a common life. It was during this period that he wrote Life Together.

During the last years of the Third Reich he was imprisoned by Adolf Hitler. But even then prison walls did not separate him from his brothers and sisters in Christ. He prayed for them and wrote letters to them, deepening the experience of community in Christ. And then he was killed. Even as his life had been an exploration of the first line of Psalm 133, his death was an exposition of the last line: “GOD commands the blessing, ordains eternal life.”

In such a way one man showed in his life and death, even as we can in the communities we live in and lead, the rich and continuing truths of Psalm 133: “How wonderful, how beautiful, when brothers and sisters get along . . . . That’s where GOD commands the blessing, ordains eternal life.”