• Seven things, and not one is an opinion
• What the bond of peace is made of
• One another is reciprocal or it is nothing
• Made easy to be around
• A laundry room on a Tuesday

Seven things, and not one is an opinion

Start at the end of the Lesson, because the end is a list and the list is doing the arguing.

One body and one Spirit; as you are called in one hope of your calling. One Lord, one faith, one baptism. One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in us all.

Count them. One body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God. Seven items, and Paul offers them as the reason the bond of peace is worth keeping.

Now look at what kind of things they are. A body you were put into. A Spirit given. A hope you were called into. A Lord, a faith, a baptism, a God.

Every single one of the seven is something received. Not one of them is a view anybody arrived at by thinking hard, and not one of them is improved by being held with more conviction than the person beside you holds it. That matters for what the bond of peace can be built on.

There is no item on that list that reads one opinion. There is no one reading of the text, no one position on the question, no one way of seeing it. Paul is telling a congregation what it holds in common, and what it holds in common turns out to contain nothing that anybody had to agree to.

That is the first thing the bond of peace is not. It is not consensus. Paul had every chance to make it consensus, and he listed seven gifts instead.

It is worth pausing on how easily he could have gone the other way. He is writing to a mixed congregation with a live and painful question running through it about who belongs on what terms, and a shared position would have settled a great deal. He does not offer one. He offers a body, a Spirit and a baptism, and tells them the bond of peace is kept out of those.

And the grammar of the last line closes the door on ranking. One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in us all. Three times all, with no interior divisions marked, and the last of the three is in us. Whatever the bond of peace is holding together, it is not a room with a head table.

What the bond of peace is made of

Now go back four verses, because Paul has already said what the work is.

With all humility and mildness, with patience, supporting one another in charity. Careful to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

Sit on the Douay’s verb. Supporting here does not mean encouraging, funding or approving of. It is the older English for bearing with, putting up with, carrying the weight of somebody, and the Latin behind it is supportantes, from the verb for carrying a load.

So the means of the bond of peace are humility, mildness, patience and bearing with. Not enthusiasm. Not shared conviction. Not liking each other, which is the thing a great many congregations treat as the real test and which Paul does not mention at all.

And see the direction those four words travel. Humility, mildness and patience are all things required of the person doing the bearing, not of the person being borne. The bond of peace is kept by whoever is finding it hard, and the effort is theirs.

That is a very unromantic account of the bond of peace. Paul’s congregation is not being told to feel more. It is being told to put up with each other for longer, and to do it without the compensation of thinking well of yourself for it, which is what the word humility is doing in that clause.

Last Sunday this space read charity as the thing put underneath a person, rooted and founded rather than displayed. Here is the same word doing a plainer job. Charity, in verse two, is the medium in which you bear with somebody you find difficult, and the bond of peace is the result.

There is a second thing hiding in careful to keep. Paul does not ask anybody to make the unity. He asks them to keep it, which is a word for looking after something that is already there, and you cannot be careful to keep a thing you were supposed to manufacture.

So the bond of peace is not a project either. It is not an outcome the congregation is working towards, to be reached once enough people have come round. The bond of peace is described as existing already, made of seven given things, and the instruction is simply not to let it come apart in your hands.

That changes what failure looks like. If the bond of peace were a project, the people holding it up would be the ones with the strongest convictions. Since it is a thing to be kept, the people holding it up are whoever is being patient this week, which on any given week is a different set of people.

One another is reciprocal or it is nothing

Read the clause once more and put the weight on two words.

Supporting one another in charity.

One another is a reciprocal construction, and the bond of peace inherits its grammar. The Latin is invicem, which is the word for by turns, mutually, each to the other. It does not mean some of you bearing with some others of you. It means each bearing with each, in both directions, and the bond of peace described in the next verse is what that mutual bearing produces.

Which is the part that goes missing. In a great many rooms the instruction is read as though it had a subject and an object fixed in advance: a settled majority who do the supporting, and a small number of designated difficult people who are supported.

Once that happens, the bond of peace stops being a thing everyone keeps and becomes a thing some people keep on behalf of others. And the people on the receiving end know. No one has to be told they are the object of a sentence; you can feel it in how carefully a room handles you.

The Gospel puts a limit on the other side of that. Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself sets the measure, and the measure is reciprocal too. A congregation that teaches some of its members to expect nothing has quietly capped how much the commandment can ask on their behalf.

Hear how strange that is as an instrument. The second commandment does not name a quantity. It names a comparison, and the thing compared against is whatever regard you already have for yourself, which means the commandment yields a different amount in every person who obeys it.

Set that beside the bond of peace and the two lock together. A room where some members are the standing objects of everybody’s patience is also a room teaching those members to set their own measure low. The commandment then delivers exactly as little as it has been given to work with.

None of which makes the bearing itself a bad thing. Somebody is always going to be the difficult one on a given morning, and a congregation that never has to put up with anybody is not peaceful, it is empty. The bond of peace is kept by real patience with real people, and the objection is not to the patience.

The objection is to the casting. Paul wrote a reciprocal verb, and a church that assigns the roles in advance has changed the verb while keeping the vocabulary, which is how the bond of peace comes to mean something close to its opposite.

Paul’s other famous list was in view on Friday, when this space saw him cancel every item on it. The list in today’s Lesson is not that kind of list. It is not gifts being ranked and then set aside. It is seven things no one can be ranked by, which is why the bond of peace can be built on them.

Made easy to be around

Here is where the day’s own text calls for a naming, so I will make it.

The harmful teaching is the one that makes being easy to be around a condition of full membership: that a good member is a warm, fluent, socially unremarkable one, and that anybody who is effortful to be near is a strain on the bond of peace rather than a party to it. Autistic people meet that teaching in a particular form.

It is almost never said as a rule. It lives in who gets asked to help on the door and who does not, in how long a person is allowed to talk about the thing they know most about before somebody changes the subject, in the fact that the same directness is called refreshing in one member and difficult in another. The bond of peace, in a room like that, has come to mean the comfort of the people who find company easy.

Put the fruit test to it, the way this ministry tests everything: by their fruits you shall know them. Ask what the teaching grows, since our own record is the one we answer for.

It grows churches where the coffee afterwards is the real membership test and the liturgy is the easy part. It grows a welcome that lasts exactly as long as somebody is entertaining. It grows people who script themselves before arriving and go home exhausted by the performance rather than the worship. It grows the phrase he’s lovely once you get used to him, which is a sentence that puts one person permanently in the accusative. And it grows a bond of peace that one half of the room is quietly paying for.

Set the Lesson against that. Paul does not ask anybody to be easy. He asks for humility, mildness, patience and mutual bearing, and he grounds the whole request in seven things that no amount of social fluency improves your share of. One baptism does not come in a warmer edition for people who are good at small talk.

And look again at which of Paul’s four words would do the work here. Two of them would. Patience is about time, which is what an effortful conversation costs, and humility is about not keeping a private score of how much of the bearing you did. The bond of peace asks the fluent members for those two in particular, and it asks them quietly.

A church can get this right without a policy and without a single conversation about it. It gets it right when the effortful member is asked to do something rather than merely included in something, when a long answer is heard out to the end, and when no one afterwards tells the story of having been patient. Those are the fruits on the other side of the test.

This space named the same group in November, and the claim then was a different one. That morning was about repetition, and whether saying the same words in the same order is a lesser kind of prayer. This one is about company, and whether being straightforward to sit beside is a condition of holding the bond of peace with everybody else.

Two things this is not saying. Nothing here makes anybody’s warmth or sociability a fault, and an easy manner is a real gift that does real good in a room. And nothing here is a claim about anyone’s inner life, or a suggestion that anybody needs adjusting to fit better. The teaching under examination is about what a congregation requires, not about what anybody is.

It is also a different question from yesterday’s. That was about whether a church will let itself be seen standing next to somebody. Today is about who a congregation quietly assigns the work of bearing to, and the Lesson’s answer is that it is assigned to everybody or the bond of peace is a fiction.

A laundry room on a Tuesday

Let me bring it down to the size it lives at.

There is a story sometimes told of a woman who spent two years doing Tuesday mornings in the laundry room of a day centre for people sleeping rough. Three machines, a folding table, a plastic chair, and a cycle that took forty minutes with nothing to do in the middle of it.

She was told, more than once, that she was patient. People said it the way people do say it, meaning it kindly, and she took the compliment for most of those two years without examining it.

There was a man who was there almost every Tuesday. He did not make conversation and he did not fill the forty minutes, and she had privately filed the silence as something she was being good about.

She says what changed was a remark he made in her last month, which was not about her at all. He mentioned, in passing and without complaint, that she always fussed at the machines for the first ten minutes and that he had learned to wait until she had finished and sat down.

She had not known. Two years of thinking of herself as the one doing the bearing, and the arrangement had been running in both directions the whole time, and only one of them had been keeping count.

That is the whole of the story and she does not make more of it. She will tell you it did not make her a better person and that she was embarrassed for a while and then mostly just got on with it. She would say the mistake was not unkindness, because she was not unkind; the mistake was assuming she knew which end of the sentence she was standing at.

Set that beside the Lesson. Nothing in that laundry room was heroic and nothing in it was arranged. Two people turned up on the same morning for two years, and each of them, in a small and unremarkable way, waited for the other, which is the whole of what supporting one another asks and the whole of how the bond of peace gets kept.

What she had wrong was not the patience. It was the sentence. She had assumed a subject and an object, the way rooms do, and the assumption had held for two years without once being tested against anything he said.

If none of the theology here is yours, the point survives without it. Anybody who believes they are the patient one in a relationship should consider the possibility that they are also, at the same time, somebody else’s forty minutes. That is what the bond of peace looks like from inside, and it looks like almost nothing.

So carry that out with you. The bond of peace is not agreement, it is not warmth, and it is not the comfort of the people who find rooms easy. It is seven things no one earned, and four words of work, and the work has no fixed subject.

And if you have been the difficult one in some room this week, hear the Lesson’s arithmetic. You are not a strain on the bond of peace. You are one of the parties to it, with the same seven things in hand as everybody else, and the bearing was always meant to run in your direction too.

↑ The order resumes below.