Hostile housemates?

It’s really hard living with other people.

When you live with others you start to notice the differences in your habits and routines. Do they wash dirty dishes straight away or leave them in a pile by the sink for later? Are they a night owl while you're an early riser? It doesn’t take long before you can write a long list of things they do that irritate you. Sometimes the tiny daily annoyances can build up into resentment, bickering, division and even, hatred.

Martin Luther King Jr said: “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”

An anonymous person said: “The key to getting along with people is to either lower your expectations or learn to drink more wine.”

I'll let you decide which one you agree with most. But I think both of them share the view that we need to learn the key to living in unity, rather than tension, with the people we live with. But how do we do that?

Our readings today reveal something about the nature of God and how He wants us to live with each other.

In our Gospel passage, we see the disciples encounter Jesus after his resurrection. Thomas and his fellow disciples had spent years with Jesus, who they believed to be a wise teacher. They’d heard his parables, seen his miracles and watched him die on a cross. And, here, we see them touch his hands and sides and become fully convinced that He is the Messiah, God in human form.

This realisation that they have been in fellowship with God all this time, and not just a wise human teacher, changes everything for these new believers. It not only changes the way they see Jesus, it also changes the way they see each other.

We see these early believers later in the book of Acts, living together in unity, sharing everything in common, serving each other and meeting each other’s needs. They are not in competition, not bickering or divided, not focusing on what makes them different from each other. They are living in unity because their hearts and minds share the same knowledge that they now live in fellowship with God and they want to live their lives in His light.

They were able to walk in His light in the way they lived their lives with other people. Our reading from 1 John tells us that “if we walk in the light as he himself is light, we have fellowship with one another.”

That suggests that the key to living in unity with people is walking with God.

Unity is important to God. We see in today's Psalm that God blesses and approves when people are living together in unity.

God approves and blesses unity because unity is the nature of the Holy Trinity. The Godhead is the perfect example of unity. God the Father, Son & Holy Spirit, as one being, three persons, eternally in fellowship, eternally in unity.

The three persons of the Trinity speak as one, they are in agreement. The Father glorifies the Son, the Son reveals and glorifies the Father, the Holy Spirit reveals and glorifies the Son.

There is no competition but instead a valuing and celebrating of each unique and distinct role in the trinity.

God is united. He is One. And he invites all believers into his unity, into the peace that comes from living in His light.

When you think of the perfect unity of God, how does it compare to the dynamics in your own family? How does it compare to the dynamics in our church family?

For those of us who are not perfect and who do not live in perfect homes with perfect families, this vision of unity might seem an impossibility. Or for us in the church, trying to agree with each other when we all might have our own ideas about the best way of doing things, may seem a constant challenge.

But is there something we can do to get to that state described by the Psalmist, where the environment and the people we live and worship with can feel good, pleasant and united instead of divided and hostile?

Well, maybe we can learn from John’s letter to the early church. He says: This is the message…..God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin."

Walking in fellowship with God is walking in the Light of His Word. It means speaking to Him in prayer, reading His Words in the Bible, and allowing His truth to shine into us and show us the things we try to sweep under the carpet.

Today’s Collect prays that God will help us to put away the leaven of malice. Leaven, or yeast, is a tiny substance that you add to dough to make it rise. And just a tiny bit of malice towards someone, that we allow to grow bigger and bigger inside us, can have a bad affect on us and the people we live or worship with.

God calls us to walk in his light, to deal with malice quickly so that it doesn't have the chance to grow. He doesn't want us to deceive ourselves and pretend that there's nothing that we need to address in our lives and our behaviour towards others. He wants us to tear up the record of wrongs we have compiled against someone who has annoyed or done wrong to us.

God wants us to confess our unforgiveness to him; to bring our hurts, grudges and resentments directly to Him. And He promises that, when we do this, He will forgive us and cleanse us. As we spend time with God being honest about our feelings we are walking in His light, He will help us to forgive and change our attitude towards the people we live with just as spending time in fellowship with the resurrected Christ transformed the early believers and the way they treated each other.

God promises that if we are honest in our confession to Him, we have an advocate, someone on our side. Jesus, who died for not only our sins but also for the sins of those who have hurt us and those who will hurt us in the future.

God wants His family on earth, his church, and our individual family relationships, to resemble Him. He wants us to live in unity, just as the Trinity lives in unity. He wants us to have one shared message and to be in loving and patient fellowship with our church family members as well as the people we share a home with.

In a nation and a world that is growing increasingly divided. With war in the Middle East, and in Russia. With the threat of another World War hovering over us. With culture wars and division rising in the UK and the USA as elections are around the corner...

This is a time when God wants us, his church, members of His body, to be cities on the hill. He wants us to be the light of the world. To share and show his love, his light and unity, with a society that desperately needs to see it.

Jesus said to Thomas, after Thomas had put his finger in the wounds on his hands and in his side: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

The world needs to look at us, members of the body of Christ, and see the light of God when they see us living and serving as a church community in unity. Yes, maybe we are members of Christ’s body who bear wounds, scars and hurts; Yes, maybe we are in daily need of confession, cleansing and removing the dark shadows that we can so easily let creep into our hearts and minds. But, if we walk in God’s light, if we can show the divided world around us a true picture of how good and pleasant it is to live together in unity, then we will glorify God and reveal the salvation that Jesus offers to those who have not yet seen Him.

Let us keep walking in the light and make a habit of daily confessing those things that God’s light reveals to us, so that we can have true fellowship and unity with God and with each other.