This morning I’ve been invited to speak at my local church as part of a month-long series on the psalms. I’m planning to say something like what follows.
One of my favorite digital history projects is called America’s Public Bible. Developed by Lincoln Mullen at George Mason University, it used a machine-learning model to identify 1.8 million Bible quotations from nearly 14 million pages worth of digitized newspapers from 19th and early 20th century America.1
Among other uses, APB lets us see which scriptures were most popular in that period, a time of significant growth, change, and conflict in U.S. history. The top two — both from the Gospel of Luke — may be surprising. Luke 2:14 “was used in far more contexts than just Christmas,” while Luke 18:16 (and related verses in Matthew and Mark) spoke to the growth of the Sunday School movement. John 3:16 wasn’t all that popular at first, but ended up #6. Others are more predictable: selections from the Ten Commandments and Lord’s Prayer; Matthew 25:40; and Psalm 23:1.
But can you guess the second most popular verse from the psalms? It came from one of the shortest of those poems: “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!” (Ps 133:1, KJV)
As is true of most all popular verses, there are many reasons American newspapers quoted that verse. Many were reporting on religious revivals that brought together members of different churches, or the transdenominational temperance movement. But it’s telling that Ps 133:1 was most popular in the two-decade period before, during, and after the American Civil War.
After Abraham Lincoln’s election in November 1860, a Nebraska paper quoted those words after urging “no hasty steps on the part of general government calculated to produce conflict or clash of arms.” As the war raged four years later, the Daily National Republican visited the “unfinished pile of stone” that still made up the Washington Monument and found memorial items donated from around the fractured Union, including one tablet inscribed “PSALM CXXXIII.”
All of which may sound a bit too familiar for comfort. We’re meeting, after all, in highly polarized election year that has already debuted one movie imagining a new civil war. Just this past week, the pastor of the Disciples of Christ congregation that meets in our old sanctuary wrote on Substack about the challenges of coexistence in the contemporary church: “In our conformist age, there is no live and let live. From MAGA to ‘woke’ from social justice to being ‘biblical’ the message is not to accommodate, but to fall in line or leave.”
So 2024 seems like a good moment to rediscover Psalm 133, to remember how good it is to experience unity.
Our confirmands got to contemplate it two months ago. This same room happened to host one of the “prayer stations” we visited one night. We sat around these tables, read Psalm 133:1, then started to draw what unity looked like in our lives, what it meant that “When we follow Jesus, we’re never alone. We are always surrounded by a big community that loves us. We are all connected!”
So before I wrap up my brief remarks, I thought I’d invite you all to do something similar. Try to visualize people living together in unity. What image comes to mind? Maybe think of a specific moment when you’ve seen or experienced Christian unity in some profound way. Either draw the image, or hold it in your mind as you pray Psalm 133 to yourself.
The psalm itself gives you two examples of visualizing unity, though they probably seem obscure.
It is like the precious oil on the head,
running down upon the beard,
on the beard of Aaron,
running down over the collar of his robes.
It is like the dew of Hermon,
which falls on the mountains of Zion.
For there the Lord ordained his blessing,
life forevermore. (vv 2-3)
If the ancient ritual of a priestly consecration or the relationship between topography and precipitation in the Middle East doesn’t help you see unity, or its benefits (“life forevermore”), let me suggest two other images of unity.
Tomorrow night I’ll be flying to Europe to lead a tour of Scandinavia. A week from today, we’ll be in Stockholm, where I plan to worship at Immanuelskyrkan, a church in the Mission Covenant tradition that is a trans-Atlantic cousin to my home denomination. I’ll attend one of two services. I can go to the beautiful sanctuary and worship in Swedish, a language that (for all my recent Duolingo efforts) I don’t really understand, or I can opt for an English-language service led by a British pastor and musicians/singers of primarily African and Caribbean origins. Either way, I’ll set aside the sameness and familiarity of my usual worship in suburban American to join other followers of Immanuel in both celebrating and transcending our differences in language, nationality, and theology.
But the most powerful image of Christian unity that I’ve seen can be found in another part of Europe, at the Greek Orthodox monastery of St. John the Theologian on the island of Patmos. The evangelical writer Andy Crouch explains it in his 2013 book, Playing God.
The unusual icon depicts Peter and Paul “nearly kissing; their faces… pressed up against one another in an intimate greeting, presumably something like the ‘holy kiss’ that Paul refers to in his letters.” But Crouch learned that he wasn’t wrong to read wariness into this embrace: “These are not old friends reunited after a long journey. They are, in fact, very recent enemies meeting shortly after Paul’s conversion from persecutor of the church to energetic defender of the Way of Jesus.”
The icon, a Greek scholar explains to him, represents synaspismos, a word for unity that stems from ancient soldiers locking shields together in battle. It’s become for me what it became for Crouch:
a picture of fellowship, partnership and community, and also of difference, distance and difficulty. Ultimately they are all part of the same thing. It is perhaps the best portrayal I have seen of the reality that love is as much an act of the will as an impulse of the heart. In the Synaspismos we witness two strong leaders willing to submit to one another—to embrace the gifts the other brings and to join together, shields overlapping, in a shared mission.2
So yes, it is truly “good and pleasant… when kindred live together in unity.” But it’s also a lot of work, requiring humility, self-sacrifice, mutuality, and shared commitment to a common mission.
I’ll be taking next Sunday off while I travel in Europe, but if you want to return to the lectionary yourself… Next week’s readings: 1 Samuel 15:34-16:13; Psalm 20; Mark 4:26-34; 2 Corinthians 5:6-17.
Most of them from the amazing Chronicling America project at the Library of Congress.
I previously wrote about this same icon in the chapter on Christian unity in my book with Mark Pattie, The Pietist Option.