"His service is the golden cord close-binding human-kind."

Rembrandt "Jesus"

(First posted August 8, 2013)

Hymn: “In Christ There Is No East or West” – John Oxenham (1852-1941)
Common Tunes: ST. PETER, McKEE, ST. STEPHEN

Inclusive hymns like this one are a fairly new phenomenon so far as hymns go. William Dunkerly’s pseudonym was John Oxenham, and in 1908 he wrote these words which break down many of the church’s self-imposed barriers, especially those related to race and cultural backgrounds. For me at least, it speaks to the widening of the tent of God’s grace in several directions, and I love singing this hymn.

It is the participation in service to the greater kingdom about which today’s hymn-line speaks. Serving Christ by serving others - nearby or in some distant land – is one of the binders of our faith.

In the world of painting, each medium has a different binder… the substance which holds the pigment together. At its basic explanation, there are flakes of color which will not hold together without a binder; the binder with which we’re most familiar is, of course, linseed oil – or oil painting like Rembrandt used here. Without a binder, those flakes of color are basically worthless; they can’t be attached to a canvas to produce a thing of beauty and/or value. But when mixed in with linseed oil, they are suddenly useful. (That is way too simple an explanation of a more complicated process, but you get the point!)

The Christian body has many binders: love, acceptance, grace/mercy, faith… the list goes on and on, and we sing about most of them: Bind us together with cords that cannot be broken, for instance. And, of course, we evangelicals would say that the blood of Christ is our primary binding element.

One of the strengthening binders for any group is service – or working together for the common good or toward a common goal.

In my full-time ministry, most of the projects I oversaw were musical in nature; but working together toward a musical-production goal is a great ‘picture’ of what we’re talking about here. One year at First Baptist in Waxahachie (where I’m now a choir member), we had over 250 people involved on stage in a Christmas production – in a church that ran about 500 in worship. 250 children through senior adults running around in bathrobes pretending they were Judean! Ah, those were the days! But the point is that those major projects bound those people through music and drama… the binders.

But the real beauty is when God’s people work together with folks from other congregations… other ethnic backgrounds… other countries… other races… to achieve a goal. Mixing together skin pigments, using service for Christ as the binder.

Instrumental