Harmony

This morning, I read the first part of Romans 15 and thought about choir practice. That's a little weird, since this is a passage that has commonly been understood to be about tolerance.

What got me think about singing, though, was verses 5 and 6: "May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ."

I wondered, why would living in harmony with each other require endurance and encouragement? Shouldn't harmony be the easy path of least resistance, just going with the flow? After all, you have to start a fight, which takes a decision and an action. If you don't start any, if you just don't do anything, shouldn't harmony be the result?

But then I thought about choir. And I thought about how we sounded the first time we sang through the music. It was tentative, it was ragged, and there were a lot of sour notes. We were each kind of doing our own thing, which meant we were trampling all over each other musically. It was only through the work of rehearsing that we came to harmonize, and that's when music started to happen.

Haven't you seen the same thing happen in your church, or at work, or at home? When everyone is going their own way, doing their own thing, don't we at some point bump into each other? It may be conflicting calendars, or two people wanting the same TV set, or disagreements over what gets done or doesn't get done during worship, but eventually all of that random activity creates chaos.

So a better answer is to put in the effort needed to get together. That's described earlier in chapter 15 like this: "We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up."

Put it that way, and it's going to take some endurance and encouragement, isn't it. In fact, it's going to be more work than fighting, because it requires us to pay attention to other people, to get to know them well enough to understand their points of view. But look at the outcome: together, with one voice, we will glorify God.

Think how happy that will make Him. That ought to be worth whatever amount of work it takes.