Abraham Part 3 - Separation

I’m too young to remember the days when children headed off to the cinema in their thousands on Saturday mornings to watch the latest instalment of Flash Gordon or whatever was showing.

But I’m old enough to remember those same serials when they were on television on a Saturday morning, in the days when we had just three channels to choose from. So I was raised on a diet of Flash Gordon, Champion the Wonder Horse, Casey Jones and Robinson Crusoe and if that rings bells with you, I think we can safely say that you’re at least middle aged.

 
And part of the routine was that they’d always begin this week’s episode by reminding you how last week’s ended. And as we progress through the story of Abram, that’s going to be a necessary feature of our Sunday mornings.

So let me remind you that so far, in Genesis chapter 12, Abram’s been called away from his kin and homeland by God on the basis of two promises – he’s been promised descendants – which he thought he’d never have - and he’s been promised a land in which to raise them.

And he’s travelled to that land – the land of Canaan – but when things get difficult he bails out and heads for Egypt and finds himself in a whole load of trouble.

Pharaoh takes Abram’s wife Sarai to be his latest conquest, not knowing she’s already married, and for that indiscretion he and his household suffer the consequences of divine judgment. And in a rage Pharaoh turfs them out of Egypt with a four word rebuke: “Here, wife, take, go”.

And so they do.

And that’s where we find them as this morning’s reel begins (MAP). And we’re already learning that, unlike those Saturday morning TV shows, the world isn’t divided into baddies who wear black cowboy hats and goodies who wear white ones. Even a character as venerated as Father Abram has his complexites. We’re dealing with real people here, not caricatures.

Abram went north out of Egypt to the southern part of Canaan with his wife and everything he owned, and Lot went with him.

Up until this point, we haven’t heard a lot about Lot, who was Abram’s nephew. The last time he was mentioned was in Chapter 12 verse 4, and he’s spoken of in the very same terms:

“When Abram was 75 years old he started out from Haran, as the Lord had told him to do; and Lot went with him.”

 Now we don’t know much about Lot other than he was the son of Abram’s brother, Haran, and that his father died while he was still young. In effect, Abram became a surrogate father figure for him.

Don’t know how old Lot was when Abram set out on his journey, whether he was of an age where he could look after himself, but it’s interesting to ask whether it was ever God’s intention that Lot should go with Abram on his travels.

“Leave your country, your relatives and your father’s house” God had said. I wonder if that was meant to include Lot. I wonder whether Lot pleaded to go along, or whether Abram couldn’t bear to part from him.

You see Lot was the next best thing to a son. If things stayed the same, he would end up as Abram’s heir. So how would he feel about this promise of descendants for Abram and Sarai? Would he be jealous? Would that create trouble further down the line?

Does the author of Genesis mean us to understand that the words “and Lot went with him” are pregnant with meaning? Could be. Especially given what transpires later on.

But for now they’re travelling together, and as we know from verse 2 –

Abram was a very rich man, with sheep, goats, and cattle, as well as silver and gold.
 
And let’s just pause there long enough to remember that sheep, goats, cattle, silver and gold aren’t enough to satisfy the longings of the human heart. They weren’t enough for Abram and they aren’t enough for us.

We long for place, for purpose, for belonging, for significance. For love. Wealth, without those things, is comfortable misery. Poverty, with them, is far more bearable.

Abram had wealth, but if we could listen in, I think we’d hear him humming that U2 song – “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”.

Now look where he goes looking (3):

Then he left there and moved from place to place, going toward Bethel. He reached the place between Bethel and Ai where he had camped before 4 and had built an altar. There he worshiped the Lord.

 Now isn’t that interesting. In this strange journey he’s on, where the parameters seem so undefined and the destination so unclear, where do his feet take him? They take him back to a place that had significance for him. A place where he felt he belonged, in some way. A place where he’d left his mark on the landscape in the form of an altar. A place he could worship.

We’re creatures of sense; and for creatures like us, places have great significance. Especially places we’ve invested in and where we feel we belong.

Walk into this church some evening when you’re alone and the sunlight’s bathing it in golden light, and it’s almost tangible – the significance of this place.

But it needn’t just be here. All of us, I think, have what the Celts called ‘thin places’. Places where God feels especially close.

Years ago, when I first became a Christian, and I had something I needed to ponder, or to sort out between God and myself, I would head out to Slemish mountain.

Antrim’s a hilly county and Slemish presides over the farmland around Ballymena and if the stories are true, St Patrick used to tend sheep on it’s slopes as a slave boy.

It’s not really much of a hill – a little brother even to Bennachie, but the views you get even from the car park are wonderful.

Many’s the time I’d take myself out there to that place, not just because it was a lovely spot to think and pray, but because in the going, I was saying to God that I meant business. That I was really looking for him.

And today, I do the same thing most mornings, when the kids have left for school and Rhona’s off to her work. Slemish is a bit far away now, so what I do is move a chair in front of the window in the lounge that overlooks the church, and it’s there that I keep my morning appointment with God.

That little corner of the room has become my sacred place. The study’s too busy with books and papers; I needed somewhere that was more about soul than mind. And that’s where I’ve chosen to make it.

Place matters. Abram’s feet led him back to Bethel – somewhere he felt at home and also close to God. Do you have that kind of a place in your life somewhere? If not, could you find one? Somewhere you can be with God intentionally, little and often?

For folk like us, constantly at the mercy of the clock, and our emotions and our digestion, having a place we can go to where we know we’re there to do business with God can be a real help.

Abram reached the place between Bethel and Ai where he had camped before 4 and had built an altar. There he worshiped the Lord.

But what about Lot (5)?

 Lot also had sheep, goats, and cattle, as well as his own family and servants. 6 And so there was not enough pasture land for the two of them to stay together, because they had too many animals. 7 So quarrels broke out between the men who took care of Abram's animals and those who took care of Lot's animals. (At that time the Canaanites and the Perizzites were still living in the land.)

Isn’t it interesting how riches, which we think will solve all our problems, can actually create more of them. How many families get on fine ‘til it comes to the matter of inheritances or land?

Now the problem they had was a genuine one – the land they were living in was already occupied by the Canaanites and their little-known cousins the Perizzites. And with the grass being scrubland, and both Abram and Lot’s herds doing well, there just wasn’t enough pasture to go round. And that’s when the arguments began.

And at this point, I think the Good News Bible lets us down a wee bit.

Verse 8 in the GNB reads:

 Then Abram said to Lot, “We are relatives, and your men and my men shouldn't be quarreling.
 
But that misses something important out. This is how the same verse reads in the NIV:

⁸So Abram said to Lot, “Let’s not have any quarreling between you and me, or between your herdsmen and mine, for we are brothers.

The quarrelling, or potential quarrelling, isn’t just between the herdsmen, it’s between Abram and Lot themselves. And how Abram deals with it is very instructive.

“It’s wrong for us to be quarrelling over this stuff” – he says. “We’re kin and we shouldn’t be fighting. Let’s find a way to sort this out.”

And that way of dealing with the fallouts that inevitably arise between people is totally in keeping with the flow of Scripture, from Old Testament to New.

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says:

“if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.”

That’s a hard teaching, but we get it from the lips of Christ himself and we daren’t miss what he’s saying. If we choose to live in enmity towards a brother or sister in Christ, we cannot expect to live in fellowship with God.

The Apostle Paul says the same to his churches in the letter to the Ephesians:  Each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to his neighbour, for we are all members of one body. ²⁶“In your anger do not sin”^£: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry, ²⁷and do not give the devil a foothold.”

Put positively, he says in Romans: “Honour one another above yourselves. Live in harmony with one another. Do not repay anyone evil for evil. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone”

The Biblical reponse to disputes between believers is both realistic and pragmatic. What makes us different is not that these things never happen; it’s that when they happen, we take a different approach. We have to learn to bring them into the light, deal with them and sort them out quickly rather than letting them fester.

That’s how things have to be done in the family of God.

So what does Abram suggest by way of a solution? (9)

 

So let's separate. Choose any part of the land you want. You go one way, and I'll go the other.”

Abram chooses the way of grace. In settling this dispute, not only does he agree to let go of the young man who’s the closest thing he has to a son, he’s giving Lot first choice of the land, when as the senior man it would have been his prerogative to dictate terms.

So how does Lot honour that?

Lot looked around and saw that the whole Jordan Valley, all the way to Zoar, had plenty of water, like the Garden of the Lord or like the land of Egypt. (This was before the Lord had destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.) 11 So Lot chose the whole Jordan Valley for himself and moved away toward the east. That is how the two men parted.

What do you make of that, I wonder?

You’ll maybe know the story about the two wee brothers whose mum offers them a piece of cake, but one of the slices is much bigger than the other.

She offers the plate to the younger boy first and he helps himself to the big slice, much to the older boy’s annoyance. “Whoa! Hang on a minute. What are you doing taking the big slice?!  If mum had offered me the plate first, I’d have taken the smaller one out of good manners.”

“Aye, I know.” said the younger lad. “And if you’d taken the wee bit, I’d end up with the big bit. So what’s the problem?!”

Lot, in some senses, does the logical thing here. He takes the best land.  But as we remembered last week, the logical thing to do isn’t necessarily the right thing to do.

After all those years living off his Uncles’ good will, it seems selfish at best to deliberately choose all the best, most fertile land for yourself. But that’s what he does – though if you know the story, things don’t go entirely as planned once he starts living within easy reach of the cities of the pain.

So Abram, having done what’s right and gracious, seems to have been dealt a double blow. He’s lost the nearest thing he has to a son, and he’s just given away the best of the land.

But things don’t end there (14)

After Lot had left, the Lord said to Abram, “From where you are, look carefully in all directions.

I am going to give you and your descendants all the land that you see, and it will be yours forever. 16 I am going to give you so many descendants that no one will be able to count them all; it would be as easy to count all the specks of dust on earth! 17 Now, go and look over the whole land, because I am going to give it all to you.”

At a moment when Abram could have despaired that God’s promises were slipping away from him, they were re-iterated with more precision and more force than ever before.

God had promised Abram land. Now he was actually looking at that land, and being promised everything that he could see. And note that – everything- even the land to the east that Lot had just helped himself to.

Abram, in grace, had given it away without rancour for the sake of peace. Now, almost in the same breath, God was promising it would still be his.

And as he stood there, on the dusty hillside, watching  the nearest thing he had to a descendant making his way down towards the fertile plain, the dust swirling around his feet took on a whole new meaning for him as God spoke to his heart.

Abram, no one will be able to count your descendants; it would be as easy to count all the specks of dust on earth!

Abram has learned from his time in Egypt. He’s got himself back on track with God again - he’s in a better place. He’s acted out of faith and generosity in the middle of a tough situation. And the promises God’s made to him are more real than ever.

Amen, and thanks be to God for his word.

 

God's Not Fair - And That's A Good Thing

Towards the middle of last century, experts from around the world gathered in Britain for a conference on comparative religion.

And one of the questions they’d met to discuss was “what, if anything, is unique about the Christian faith”.

Pretty soon they started discarding possibilities.

The Incarnation? Well, although that’s a major strand of Christian belief, other religions have stories of gods appearing in human form too.

Resurrection? Well again, other religions have accounts of people returning from death.

The debate went on for hours until CS Lewis wandered into the room and asked what all the fuss was about. When they told him the question under discussion, he said “Oh that’s easy. The answer’s “grace”.

And after some more discussion, the delegates had to agree. The idea of God’s love coming to us free of charge, no strings attached, seems to go against every instinct of our humanity.

The Buddhist 8-fold path, the Hindu doctrine of karma, and the legal codes of Judaism and Islam all offer ways to God which depend upon our earning approval. Only Christianity dares to believe that God’s love is already ours.

The author Philip Yancey puts it this way: Grace means that there’s nothing we can do to make God love us more. And there’s nothing we can do to make God love us less. He just chooses to love us.

And although the idea of grace is central to the Christian faith, it seems to be one of the hardest things for us to grasp.

And there’s no story in the gospel that demonstrates that better than the one we have before us today – the parable of the workers in the vineyard.

There’s our landowner – representing God, of course. He gets up early in the morning while it’s still dark, checks the grapes for ripeness and decides that this is the day. They’re just perfect.

So he heads down to the square to pick up some workers. “A day’s work for a day’s pay, boys”, he says. And that’s fine with them, so off they go. It’s six o’clock in the morning, so we’ll call them the Early Birds.

Three hours later, he reckons they could use a few more hands. So it’s back to the village square to rustle up some more helpers. This time he doesn’t promise a day’s pay – he just promises to pay them fairly. And that’s ok with them, so off they go too.

By late morning, he’s starting to get a little worried. He’s been getting weather updates on his iPhone; Either that or he’s noticed some rainclouds gathering over the hills.

So he goes out twice more and hires some more workers to get the crop in before the good weather breaks.

And with just an hour remaining, he reckons they could clear the whole vineyard with a few more men, so its’ down to the square one last time to pick up the handful of souls who’ve been sitting there all day with no work to do. Needless to say, these are the guys with least to offer when it comes to manual labour – the elderly, the infirm and those with a bad track record. But he takes them too.

And at six o’clock, with the harvest all in, it’s paytime; and the Johnny Come Lately’s are asked to step up first.

And I imagine those guys must have wondered what to do when they were reached a whole days wages for an hours work.

Should they slip away into the shadows quickly before anyone noticed, or should they do the honest thing and tell the foreman he must have made a mistake?

Well, as they’re wrestling with their moral dilemma, the Early Bird Gang are doing their mental arithmetic. “Right – we must have misheard him this morning. They’re getting a days wage for an hour, and we’ve worked for twelve hours. So that’s twelve days wages we should be getting. Not bad at all! Might work for this guy again”.

But of course, it wasn’t to be. They got a days wage like everyone else. And with righteous indignation they turn on the landowner:

“Hey – that’s not fair. We’ve worked all day in this heat. And you give us the same as you give them? You’ll be hearing from our union representative! Well – at least, you would be if unions had been invented”.

And the landowner replies, quite pointedly, “Look, friends. I haven’t cheated you. A day’s work for a day’s pay - that’s what you were promised. And that’s what you’ve got. So stop your moaning and get away home. Who are you to tell me how to spend my money, if I want to be generous with it?”

And off they go, still muttering under their breath.

It’s no way to run a business, is it? I’m pretty sure the Early Bird Gang wouldn’t be back in that particular vineyard. Though there’s a good chance the Johnny Come Lately’s might be.


But isn’t it interesting to note where our sympathies lie when we hear that story. If I were a betting man, which I’m not, I’d bet good money that all of us here would be on the side of the Early Birds.

It’s just not fair. They’ve worked hard all day and they’re getting treated the same as those guys who’ve just sauntered in for the last hour. Surely that can’t be right?

I’d guess that’s how most of us feel about this story. And that shows how much we still have to learn about grace.

Now in the context of the day, Jesus tells this story anticipating the resistance his followers would find when the Gentiles started responding to the Gospel.

Remember that the Jews were the chosen people. They’d been serving God in the heat of the day for generations. But now, because of what Jesus was doing, the door was being thrown open wide to bring in the Gentiles too. God was treating Jews who trusted Christ and Gentiles who trusted Christ just the same. And most of the debates and arguments in the early church were around that very issue. Just the other week we were thinking about the dilemma that Peter had when God gave him a vision telling him to accept Gentile converts into the family of the church.

So that’s the historical context of the parable.

But for us, this story functions in a different way. What it does for us is highlight two ways of approaching life: the way of grace and the way of bookkeeping.

Christians say that they believe in the way of grace, but in reality most of us are closet bookkeepers.

We think that God’s keeping a ledger somewhere and entering everything we do under one of two headings, debit and credit.

And if, when we reach the end of our days, the credit list is longer than the debits, then we reckon he’s duty bound to let us into heaven.

And that’s wrong! It doesn’t work that way and you need to get rid of that notion if that’s what you believe.

Listen to what the Apostle Paul says in Ephesians 2:8 “It is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no-one can boast”

Nobody is made right with God by works – by doing good things. We’re made right with God solely because of what Jesus has done. He has gifted forgiveness to us. That’s grace.

Our job isn’t to cram the credit side of the ledger with good deeds so that God will then love us. It’s to believe the amazing truth that God already loves us, just as we are with all our faults and failings. And once we’ve grasped that, our task is to live the rest of our lives in gratitude and service, in response to that love.

God’s love always comes first; unearned, and undeserved.

Our response – of faith and good works – always comes second. They flow from our being accepted by God. They don’t lead to that acceptance. God loves first, without cause, in the same way a good parent loves a child – simply because it is his or her child.

That’s the very essence of grace. And boy do we find that hard to accept.

We know there’s no such thing as a free lunch. We live in a world of bookkeeping where nothing’s given unless it’s earned. And nothing’s really ours until it’s paid in full.

And some of us, in our temerity, stubbornly hold on to our belief that in the end, the ledger will be enough to get us through.

When God sees the measure of our life, he’ll surely let us into heaven.

After all, we haven’t been bad people. We’ve loved our kids, we’ve worked hard, we’ve been responsible citizens and good neighbours. Surely that’s enough?

Once again – the Apostle Paul has words for us: “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”

All of us fall short. The very word ‘sin’ in Greek – hamartia - means to fall short in the way an arrow might fail to hit the target.

If hitting the bullseye’s all that matters, missing by an inch is the same as missing by a mile. You’ve missed!

If the examination passmark’s 100%, and you score 95%, you’ve failed, just like the person who’s scored 5%.

So all have sinned, and all of us have blotted our copybooks. None of us can say we’ve lived faultless lives.

But thank God the story doesn’t end there:

“All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God – says Paul - and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”

There’s that word ‘grace’ again.

Could it be any clearer? God’s not a bookkeeper. And it’s a good thing for us that he’s not! If he were, none of us could stand in his presence.

Instead, He’s chosen the way of grace and generosity. But that goes down very badly with those who want to keep score.

The Early Birds despise the landowner for showing grace to the latecomers, because they think it’s unfair to them.

But they’re so busy thinking of themselves that they don’t see what he sees, In a world with no benefits to fall back on, if these latecomers don’t get paid, their families don’t eat.

But the Early Birds don’t see that. They resent his generosity and they feel hard-done by.

But let’s imagine an alternative scenario for a moment. Let’s imagine one of the Early Birds falls on hard times. Nobody wants to hire him because he’s had a drink problem, say. Let’s imagine that he’s one of the ones who gets chosen very late at next year’s harvestime and gets a days wages for an hours work.

How does he feel about the landowner’s grace now?

Isn’t it funny how grace only seems unfair when it’s someone else who’s benefiting? When we’re on the receiving end, it feels great.

And what we so often forget is what I’ve been trying to spell out this morning – that all of us, no matter who we are – are indebted to God’s grace.

And if we’ve received it, it behoves us to pass it on to others.

If CS Lewis is right – if grace is the Christian distinctive, then what will count most in the world’s eyes is whether or not we show ourselves to be gracious people.

Grace isn’t the norm. And that’s why, when people see grace in action, it makes a genuine impact.

I want to leave you with a couple of stories about grace from preacher Rob Bell, that I think will do just that.

(excerpt from “The Gods Aren’t Angry” with two stories of Christians putting grace into practice)

Are you beginning to get a feel for why grace really is amazing?

God’s trademark isn’t fairness. If we got what was fair, we’d all be sunk. God’s trademark is grace.

May we, who claim to have received his amazing grace it, be just as ready to pass it on.  Amen

Psalm 133. Oil, Water and Unity

"How good and pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity".

I think we can all agree that unity is good and pleasant.

I think we can also agree that it is rare!

If you come from a big family, you may well think that the words 'brothers' and 'unity' don’t belong in the same sentence. Brothers fight. Sisters fight. Sibling rivalry is alive and well in most families. Take a look at the first Biblical account of two brothers living together – Cain and Abel - and you soon discover that it ends in murder.

And much of world history shows that we keep repeating the same mistakes we made in Eden. We struggle with our brothers, we make war on our brothers, we exploit our brothers. Again and again and again.

But fortunately, there is one bastion of hope in all of this. The Church. You never get any disputes or fall outs in the church! In the church, the peace of Christ reigns and people live in perpetual harmony.

Aye right.

There’s a story about a woman who went to visit an institution for the criminally insane and she was shocked to see that there were only 3 guards supervising 100 dangerous inmates.

“Don’t you worry that these guys will band together and overpower you?” she asked one of the guards.

“Don’t worry about that,” the guard smiled. “Lunatics never unite.”

If you know much about Church History, you might conclude that the Church is full of Lunatics. You don’t need to be an Historian to see that the church also has a hard time with unity. The sheer range of denominations and schismatic groups in our part of the world is a vivid testimony to that.

And even within our own little sub-groups, many Christians still fail to get along. In congregations all across the World, people are quarrelling and quibbling. It seems almost impossible for Church folk to learn to live together in unity.

And our only saving grace is that it has ever been thus. We tend to look at the early church through rose coloured lenses and imagine it to have been some kind of utopian community.

But when you actually read the New Testament letters, you discover that nearly every one of them was written in response to difficulties and disputes within the church. There were factions, there were scandals, there were power-struggles. Read the book of Acts and you discover that even the luminaries of the early church, St Paul and St Peter, fell out at times.

Whether inside the church or outside the church, it’s a given that people will often struggle to get on with one another. Charles Schultz put it brilliantly in the words of his Peanuts character Linus:

“I Love Mankind. It’s People I Can’t Stand”.

And the problem with churches is that they’re full of people! People who think differently, want to worship differently, are socially or culturally different. It’s easy to say we love mankind in general. It’s very hard to love people in particular, especially when we differ with them.

But that’s what we’re called to. For the sake of the world, and the Kingdom of God, the church is called to pursue unity.

The difference between the world and the church isn’t that the world has fights and struggles and the church doesn’t, The difference is in how we deal with the fights and struggles when they come along. In the midst of our disputes, we in the church are called to pursue unity. It’s difficult! But how good and pleasant it is, the Psalmist says, when we achieve some measure of it.

Today’s Psalm gives us two word-pictures to show what Unity is like. Verse 2 says

"It is like precious oil poured on the head, running down on the beard, running down on Aaron’s beard, down upon the collar of his robes".

That image is a snapshot of the day when Aaron – Moses brother - was first anointed as High Priest over the new nation of Israel. The oil that was poured over his head would have contained several strong spices: myrrh, cinnamon, calamus, and cassia, all blended together in a base of Olive Oil.

Now I don’t know when you last had your head doused in oil, but put yourself in Aaron’s shoes for a moment. How would he have felt, apart from wet and sticky?

He’s being blessed, isn’t he? Treated with dignity and respect. Something precious and expensive is being poured out on him, not just for his sake, but so the whole community can be ministered to through him. He’s never known anything like this – it’s profoundly moving. His body will carry the aroma from this experience for days if not weeks; his clothes will carry it for longer.

And there’s something delightfully wrong about what’s happening to him! You don’t pour a pint of aromatic oil over someone’s head, and you certainly don’t do it while they’re fully clothed. Think of the dry cleaning issues!

Performing the ceremony in that way says something. It says that grace is profligate; it’s unmerited; it’s determined to bless, and won’t be deterred by convention.

That, says the Psalmist, is a picture of the unity that should mark out the people of God.

How would it be, if in the middle of our disputes, we resolved not to go the way of the world, and instead decided to treat one another with dignity and respect? To pour out the precious, expensive commodities of our time, our listening and our patience on the other, even if we feel them to be undeserving of them.

How would it feel to bless someone in that way? Or to receive that blessing, when all you were expecting was more confrontation or criticism? It would surprise you. It might even change you.

“Aye, but they’re not living that way, God!"

“So what?” says God. "That’s their story, not yours. I’m talking to you right now. Maybe you’re the one I want to lead the way, and take the first step. Maybe it’s your example that will make all the difference."

Paul Negrut, the President of the Romanian Evangelical Alliance tells of a man who spent 17 years in prison under the Communist Regime for being a Christian.

Paul went to visit him one evening and arrived just as the secret police were leaving, and the man’s face was bloody and bruised from the beating they’d just dished out. Paul was furious, but his friend said “We’re not here to complain, Paul. We’re here to praise God. Let’s pray together.” So they knelt and prayed, and though Paul was so angry he was tongue-tied, his friend made up for it.

He prayed for the secret police, for the Communist Party, for those who had beaten him up. He asked God’s forgiveness for them, God’s blessing on them and God’s love to be poured out on their families.” Paul said he had never heard anyone pray for his enemies with such love.

After they’d prayed, his friend told him that the secret police came twice a week to torture him, and every time they came he looked into the eyes of the man who was beating him up and said “Sir, if we see each other before the throne of judgment, and if you are eternally lost, I want you to know that it is not because I hate you. It will be because you have rejected Jesus’ love and my love”.

Some time later, that policeman came back to the house on his own, but this time it wasn’t to dish out a beating. It was to say that he had become a Christian. He’d been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and after reflecting long and hard on his life he knew he had to make good the wrongs he’d done and seek forgiveness from those whom he’d hurt. He’d come to pray with the man he’d tortured.

A story where costly grace, poured out at great expense, brought unity.

But what of this second image of Unity the Psalmist offers us in verse 3?

"It is as if the dew of Hermon were falling on Mount Zion".

Mt. Hermon is an impressive landmark that stands out against the dry plains north of Galilee. It’s the tallest mountain in Palestine at about 9000 feet, and its summit is usually covered in snow all year round. The moisture in the air around Mount Hermon makes it a fertile place and the snow melt feeds the Jordan river which waters the central valley that runs through the heart of the country.

The clergyman and explorer Henry Baker Tristram travelled widely in Palestine and wrote this of his visit to Mt Hermon in 1867:

"The vapour, coming in contact with the snowy sides of the mountain, is precipitated in the evening in the form of a dew, the most copious we ever experienced. It penetrated everywhere, and saturated everything. The floor of our tent was soaked, our bed was covered with it, our guns were dripping, and dewdrops hung about everywhere. No wonder that the foot of Hermon is clad with orchards and gardens of such marvellous fertility in this land of droughts."

Now in some of the commentaries I’ve read, they try to make out that the conditions around Mount Hermon sometimes prevail upon Mount Zion in Jerusalem. But having got out a map and ruler, I’m not inclined to buy that story because they’re 125 miles apart!

But wouldn’t it be great if it could! If some of that moist goodness of Northerly Hermon could come to bless the dry slopes of Mount Zion?

The point the Psalmist is making is that when brothers manage to live together in unity, it’s as wonderful and unexpected as snow or heavy rainfall on Mount Zion. With that precious outpouring, new things grow; and arid places become green with life.

It’s the same idea that God expresses through the prophet Isaiah when he says

“The desert and the parched land will be glad;
the wilderness will rejoice and blossom
Like the crocus, it will burst into bloom.”

Can God really make the desert places between us bloom?

Can he turn our instinct to blame into a resolve to bless?

This Pslam promises that He can, if we are willing to let him.


Just hours before he would be arrested, Jesus made this request of all those who would believe in Him. He prayed, "Father, may they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” John 17:23

If the world looks at us and sees nothing but dischord – it will not see Christ. We may as well go home.

But if it looks at us, and sees folk whose love for God makes them resolve to love people, in all their particularity and difference, then maybe we're starting to get somewhere. Because that's the ideal this Psalm, this church, and this table point to: unity in the family of God.

(Some excerpts drawn from a sermon by K Edward Skidmore)