How good and pleasant it is when God's people live together in unity!
Psalm 133:1
Both Pictures Fall
It's a little harder to apply Old Testament scripture to our lives, so it helps to know where this one was sung. Psalm 133 is a song of ascents. Pilgrims sang it walking uphill to Jerusalem for the festivals, and they weren't walking alone. Different tribes, different towns, people who did things differently from each other, all converging on the same road at the same time.
So this isn't a psalm about unity in theory. It was sung by people who were in the middle of having to get along with each other for several days.
David gives two pictures of what that's like. First, "precious oil poured on the head, running down on the beard, running down on Aaron's beard, down on the collar of his robe." That's the oil of priestly consecration, the oil that set a man apart to serve God on behalf of everyone else. And David keeps saying the same word. Down, down, down.
Then the second picture. "It is as if the dew of Hermon were falling on Mount Zion." Hermon is up north, snow-capped, and it gets heavy dew. Zion is south, and dry. The dew doesn't climb from Zion up to Hermon. It comes down.
Both images move the same direction, and then verse 3 says why. "For there the Lord bestows his blessing." Bestows. He gives it.
You Can't Manufacture It
Here's the problem with most of what gets said about church unity. It gets handed to you as a project, something you achieve if you try hard enough and mean it enough. This psalm says the opposite. Unity is a blessing that comes down, the same way the oil ran down Aaron's beard and the dew fell on Zion. It's received, not achieved.
Which does not mean you sit still. It means your job changes. You're not building unity. You're clearing what blocks it.
This looks like going first with an apology when you're only sixty percent of the fault. It looks like refusing to repeat the sentence about somebody that you know will travel. It looks like sitting next to the person at church you find exhausting, and asking them something past how's it going. It looks like assuming the best about a text message that could go either way. It looks like letting a preference die so a relationship doesn't have to.
And notice what David calls it. Good, and pleasant. Not every good thing feels pleasant, and plenty of pleasant things aren't good. He says this one is both. Stay with that, because unity mostly gets sold as a duty. David is describing something you'd actually want.
There's a loneliness a lot of us are carrying that we keep trying to fix privately. We look for one relationship, one change that will finally settle it. God's answer to loneliness in scripture is almost never a single person. It's a people, living close enough together to be a nuisance to each other sometimes.
None of this is finished yet. Any church you've ever loved has also disappointed you, and that will keep being true until Jesus comes back. But the blessing in verse 3 is "life forevermore," and God is handing out pieces of it now. Every time a room full of people who have every reason to split stays together anyway, that's the dew coming down on dry ground.
Prayer
Father, we confess how much of our division we've argued ourselves into thinking is righteous. Show us where we're the obstacle. Give us the humility to go first, and the honesty to admit when we'd rather be right than close.
Thank you that unity is your gift and not our achievement, because we've proven we can't manufacture it. Pour it out on us. Let it run down over our churches, our families, and the people we've been avoiding. Make it good, and make it pleasant, the way you promised. We pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen.