Blessed be the tie that binds...
It was usually a closing song and usually, in my experience, was sung during an evening service or as part of the Wednesday night class devotional.
It's still a good song and I have fond memories of it. Haven't sung it in years and can't remember the last time I was in a church gathering where it was sung.
It really does say what a lot of people feel and think about "church" - that it is (or can be) a very tight collection of people who are deeply bonded together over shared beliefs, feelings, and actions.
You really cannot understate the bond that exists in some church groups. There's an emotional attachment that comes with helping each other through life - the good and the bad - over a long period of time.
Family is the word some people use to refer to a church group they're part of. They're the people you were raised with and maybe that you raised your kids with. Marriages, births, deaths, etc - the whole of life.
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A lot of people in the world are looking for that kind of "place" - that kind of community or a network of people they can trust, relax inside of, and know they will have someone who has their back.
Many people do not have that. They might have some kind of group, but not everyone has a collection of people they've done life with for a long time.
That kind of group usually takes a long time or at least intense, long stretches where you are not apart and perhaps experience a lot of physical, emotional, and cognitively challenging things together.
People who have gone through basic military training and battle together can form that kind of bond. People who live together through school can as well. Recovery groups often develop deep bonds like that.
There are other kinds of groups or networks out there that develop, rise and fall, and change over time. If you're lucky, you can keep the same group for a long time or a lifetime.
Because of changes in culture, mobility, the economy, and other big things, a lot of people move around and have pockets of people here and there they get to know over time and occasionally reconnect with.
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The beautiful thing I see in scripture that God was and is doing through Jesus is creating a new humanity out of old divisions. For a long time it was Jewish people vs. all the other nations.
Paul, the apostle, talks about how God is doing a new thing and, through Jesus, reconciling everyone and everything to God. You can read up on it in Ephesians 2 and 3 and Colossians 1, among other places.
We tend to think "church" or "go to church" and other familiar language that reminds us of the religious groups we grew up around when we think about what God was and is doing through Jesus.
It's fair to think that, since it's the culture many of us grew up in. It was axiomatic or ubiquitous - everyone "got" that God, church, Jesus, and religion were all tied together. Yada, yada, yada.
What often gets lost in that mix is the message of the good news of what God is doing through Jesus - the whole making a new humanity and reconciling everything to himself in Jesus.
Because we mix all that up with "church" as we grew up with, we often don't see the larger thing God is doing and, instead, only view it through our own lens of our comfortable, deeply connected groups.
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God is the open door and he calls everyone to come! All of them. And often time, we who are "church-grown", stand at the door to frisk people and make sure they're not bringing in things we don't want inside.
God is the open door and we can sometimes be or function as the screen door; serving as God's bouncers to keep out the riff-raff.
And "riff-raff" is usually just the people who sin differently than us or who are culturally or economically just far enough away from us that we are just not interested in putting out the effort to reach them.
God loves all of them. Paul reminded Timothy to pray for all people, high and low, that everyone might come to know what God thinks about them and know him personally.
A really neat thing about this message is that the "inside" that God calls everyone to isn't necessarily in a building we call a "church". It might include that in some instances, but that's not the point of the call.
It makes me appreciate that old song even more these days knowing that the ties that bind are far more reaching and welcoming than I first imagined growing up and that this kind of "inside" is for everyone.
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Peace and goodwill to all.
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Blest be the tie that binds
Our hearts in Christian love;
The fellowship our spirit finds
Is like to that above.
Before our Father’s throne,
We pour our ardent prayers;
Our fears, our hopes, our aims are one—
Our comforts and our cares.
We share our mutual woes;
Our mutual burdens bear;
And often for each other flows
The sympathizing tear.
When we asunder part,
It gives us inward pain;
But we shall still be joined in heart,
And hope to meet again.
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