Tuesday, May 17, 2022
How wonderful and pleasant it is when brothers live together in harmony!
A Perfect Moment is,
by definition, only 60 seconds, or shorter, or, at least, not much longer. In many places Scripture is fluid as to time’s
length, a day can
be as a thousand years, or the other way around.
As
much as time may be relative, and seem longer or shorter than you, or others
see it, one consistent fact about a moment is that it has both a beginning and ending. A hug
begins at some point, and is momentary…it ends when the embrace does. The same can be said of human harmony. There are times when all seems right…until it
isn’t. And, when that realization happens,
it may become the twelve-second lead on the nightly news. There is a reason police consider the call to
a domestic dispute as potentially one of the most dangerous events of any
day. When the harmonious hug ends, the belligerent
battle may kick-in.
And
woe to the bystanders! Bystanders in the
wake of disappearing harmony are described in many ways: victim, refugee, casualty, collateral damage,
just to name a few. Everyone knows some
of these; many (maybe you) have been these.
It is a story as old as Genesis, when Adam’s family brotherhood was
broken with Cain’s using a rock on the back of Abel’s head to make his point.
If you
have experienced harmony at some point in life, you’re aware of its
sweetness. But you are also likely to give
testimony of it’s brevity.
Most generations
long for that harmonious culture of everyone getting along. The founders of
the American dream of equality and opportunity wanted a nation to undergird the
rights of all to the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. But, as one critic observed, we’re guaranteed
the right to it, but
pursuing it is up to you. The builder generation (which gave the world my parents) lived through a
depression and two world wars. They
imagined harmony would be achieved with the establishment of the “United
Nations” – an end to future wars, and happiness with peace for all. How’s that working for us? The boomer
generation, offspring of the builders [my hand raised here] chased
harmony via the sexual revolution. It’s
a little naïve to suppose peace and serenity can be achieved in the most intensely-passionate
of human relations. And the current generation is as certain as all their predecessors the key to
harmony will be found in shaming others for their lack of harmony. Or pinning another peace and love slogan on their forearm or neck. At the risk of joining the fun in all that
shaming, that’s as effective as putting a bandaid on cancer.
Harmony
has no easy answers, no GPS to lead you to that perfect moment of brotherhood. And, even in the most picturesque selfie of
the happy hug moment there
is the grotesque reality looming that it will be just that…a moment. The illusion of having arrived at lasting peace is also just that, a vapor, a cloud
that can be blown away by even a gentle breeze, let alone the storms of our
day.
For You Today
There is a way to
harmony. It is to be found in putting
aside all notions that we can achieve such by human effort or ideology alone. That’s disillusioned arrogance at best. Rather, the only hope for lasting harmony
is what Jesus preached to the crowd that day, recorded in Matthew
5-7. This Sermon on the Mount was no
litany of rules and regulations for religious zealots, it was the attitude and actions
that describe Who the Prince of Peace is, and what His followers would look
like, the peacemakers, the ones who hunger and thirst after righteousness with
everything they think, say, and do. And
they start with anyone who crosses their pathway.
[1] Title image: Pixabay.com Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©
