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Let us continue in worship by hearing the reading of the Psalm numbered 133. Behold how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity. It is like the precious oil upon the head running down upon the beard upon the beard of Aaron running down on the collar of his robes. It is like the dew of Hermon which falls

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on the mountains of Zion for there the Lord has commanded the blessing life forevermore. And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

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A few weeks ago I was preaching at the 175th anniversary of one of our sister churches here in Pittsburgh. I've known the minister of the church for many years and I wanted to begin by acknowledging our friendship but I didn't want my acknowledgement to be too maudlin and sentimental. So I pointed

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out Bruce and I have known each other for 30 years. As a matter of fact we both began in the ministry in adjoining pastorates and across the years our paths have crossed many many times. I think I'm safe in saying that there isn't anything that well they're just nothing that Bruce wouldn't do for me

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and I can say in the same way that there's nothing that I wouldn't do for him. And then wanting to inject a touch of humor I said as a matter of fact that typifies our relationship over the last 30 years. We've really done nothing for each other. Well it got the laugh that I desired but on the way home in the car

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thinking about the consequent ethos of the event it dawned on me that there are a lot of people who get nothing from their friends because they have no friends. It's a very sad thing to be without a friend. I am called many times to go to other places to preach and teach. That's one of the responsibilities

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of a church such as this one where you have specialized ministries you must share those ministries with other congregations. So I go and I do this but I really do not enjoy it and the reason I do not enjoy it is because you're not there. You're the ones who bring joy into my

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preaching experience. Your faces, your words, your deeds, they're the things that are most important to me and I find myself when I am in other pulpits thinking well it's nice to be among friends even when they're not yours. I heard a man say at Rotary the other day it doesn't matter how popular you are

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it's the weather which will determine the size of your funeral. Now I put that in the same class as the remark it's nice to be among friends even when they're not yours. There's something cynical about that and there's something very lonely about that. The fact is and I think all of us know this if we think of

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it even for a moment there are a lot of lonely people about. Some perhaps seated very near you at this moment. Some perhaps wearing the very clothes that you are wearing. Oh this loneliness is often concealed but the reality of it cannot be disputed. So the question becomes where does the lonely heart find

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shelter? The biblical answer is friendship. Psalm 133 verse 1, "How good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity." Now that word unity means intimacy and fellowship. Communists call one another comrades but the word means very little. Californians are ready to kiss you at the drop of a suggestion

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just hold up your face and they're there to kiss it and they're ready to call you buddy and darling but there's really not much substance to those words as they're used there. The biblical concept of unity or friendship is much deeper and much richer than that. In order to best understand it we might go back to

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another ancient culture the Egyptian culture. In the court of each of the Pharaohs there was one person who was known as the one friend and the one friend was the one who was closest to and most intimate with the Pharaoh. Now at a place called Abydos in Egypt we came across years ago the tomb of a man

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named Una who was the one friend of Maraira Pepe who was a Pharaoh of the sixth dynasty. Now this is one of the oldest historical writings that we have and in this writing Una talks about how he happened to become Pharaoh's one friend and this is what he said "it happened that my wisdom pleased his

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majesty and that also my zeal pleased his majesty and that also the heart of his majesty was satisfied with me." That's what the Bible means by unity and intimacy and friendship. How good and pleasant a thing it is when folks satisfy one another's hearts. Now I know that as soon as you talk about intimacy

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or friendship you frighten some people. I've heard the comments many times. I'm afraid of intimacy. I'm afraid I'll be hurt. I don't want to get into an intimate friendship. Too often that kind of thing leads to sexual temptation and the like. I don't believe in intimacy. It's hard enough living my life just as

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it is. When I get into intimate relationships I begin to feel insecure. I'd rather keep things on a casual basis. I find that the people I fight with the most are the ones with whom I'm the most intimate. Life is too complicated as it is. Let's not make it more complicated by involving other

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people. All kinds of things are said to justify not being a friend, not being intimate with others and there's much truth in these things. Friendship does involve risk. Friendship can be very scary. Friendship does carry with it a high price. It does involve change but my friends remember this. The alternative to

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friendship and intimacy is loneliness. When you choose not to be a friend, not to have friends, not to satisfy another's heart and to have your heart satisfied, when you choose not to know that, you isolate yourself and that can lead to profound emotional damage. The Bible says it is a good and a pleasant thing when

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folks dwell together in unity and that means it is not so good and it is not so pleasant when folks do not. John Wesley, the great founder of Methodism, when he started out in his Christian life, was very austere, very stern. There was a kind of monkey's chill growing across his discipleship and an older Christian took

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him aside and said, "Mr. Wesley, you wish to serve God and to go to heaven. Well, you cannot serve him alone. You must either find friends or make them for the Bible knows nothing of solitary religion." And Wesley understood the truth of that and he went out and began to build a circle of friends and out of that circle

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of friends came Methodism and Methodism was the greatest social influence in England in the last centuries and has influenced our own society tremendously. Wesley, you see, learned how to make friends and anyone can learn to develop friendships. It's a process of having a healthy self-image, of cleaning up one's

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own life, of being genuinely concerned for others, and of a sacrificial love. All of these things are involved. Now, we don't have the time to go into these things this morning. About eight years ago, I preached a series of four messages in this church on friendship. How to form a friendship, how to nourish a friendship,

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what to do when a friendship gets in trouble, and those sermons are available on tape. You can get them this morning if you wish or at any other time and I would urge you to do so if this matter is a matter of urgency in your own life. But understand, please, that one can learn how to build and develop friendships and in

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this intimacy and unity of satisfying one another's heart, there is shelter for the lonely. I've always liked the story of the midwife who called up a doctor and she reported that she was trying to bring this baby into the world but she was having difficulties and the doctor would have to come. So it was down in the

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mountains of Appalachia and he drove his old car as far as he could and then got out and climbed high up into the hills to a little shack there. There was no electricity and when he went in they just had a lamp so he had the the father come over and hold the lamp up and he turned to seek to help this woman who

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was seeking to give birth to this child and after a few minutes of effort he did bring the child into the world and he turned and he handed it to the midwife and as he looked back a second child had presented itself for birth. Well, he said here's the reason you were having a problem and he birthed the second child

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and turned and handed it off to the midwife and as he looked back a third child had presented itself. And it was at this point that the farmer leaned down and said, "Doc, you don't think it's this light that's attracting them, do you?" Well, what I'm trying to say this morning is that you can put a light into your

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life which attracts them, which attracts friends. You can have a new birth in your own relationships. You can discover the shelter there is in friendship. You can leave loneliness behind. The Bible says how good and pleasant it is when folks satisfy one another's hearts. Believe that and act on it. It's the

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first thing to do in dealing with loneliness. Now this psalm which is before us goes on to make two other comments about friendship and both of them are interesting images. First it says that friendship is very costly. The words are these, "Unity is like the precious oil upon the head running down upon the

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beard, upon the beard of Aaron running down on the collars of his robes." Now Aaron was the first high priest of Israel and when he was anointed for that sacred task he was anointed with oil. It wasn't just sprinkled on him, it was poured on. A rich and costly and aromatic oil was poured on him so that

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it ran down. It symbolized the blessing of God and it also symbolized soothing. We even use oil today. You know when you're out in sunburn you put on oil to ease the sting of the sunburn and you know also that oil can be used for healing. In the 23rd Psalm we read about having the anointing of the head. The

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anointing of the head is to soothe any wounds that have been sustained by the sheep and oils are often used in medicinal preparations to make us more comfortable. So oil you see is a symbol of rich blessing and also of soothing and also of healing. I tried to think of a 20th century equivalent to this

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picture from the Old Testament and the only thing I could think of is those scenes that you see following the Super Bowl or the World Series when the winning team is in their locker room and they're pouring champagne all over each other. Now notice they're pouring champagne not Kool-Aid. It's a rich

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thing they're doing you see and it's refreshing, it's soothing because it's chilled and coming off the hot field of athletic contest it's good to have that coolness. Now I know that champagne is not healing but certainly after the contest of a whole year's effort winning that victory that that cool champagne

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falling down on one must have a very soothing and a kind of healing effect. Well that's what's being talked about here when it talks about the oil being poured onto Aaron and running down his beard and onto his robe. It's a costly symbol that's rich in meaning and friendship is costly. Unity is costly. It

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costs first in self-surrender. When you're a friend of someone you trust them and that's an act of vulnerability. Alexander the Great had a doctor friend named Philip and on one occasion Alexander received a letter from a man named Parmenio warning him that Philip was a traitor and that Philip was going

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to give him a medicine which was in fact poison. Do not take that medicine. Alexander took the note and put it under his pillow. Shortly thereafter his doctor Philip came and gave him a new medication. Alexander thanked him, smiled and swallowed the medication in one gulp and then he reached under his pillow

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pulled out the note and handed it to Philip and said, "Read this and you will know how much I trust you." Well when our friends give us counsel we trust them. We listen to them, we heed them. Now this doesn't mean that we surrender our will to them because love can be wrong. A person can give you the best counsel of

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which they're capable and still be quite wrong. Freedom of decision still belongs to you but at the same time when your friend speaks you know that her words carry with them love and concern. It's the best that she has to offer and you respond to that by giving it the most serious and profound attention and

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there's cost in that kind of self-surrender. And then there's also cost in the suffering which you undertake for the sake of your friend. There was a truck driver moving along a highway in the Midwest six years ago and he got caught in a blizzard so he pulled off to one side of the road waiting for

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the storm to finish and he fell asleep. When he wakened it was dark, he did not know it, but he and his truck were under a 30-foot deep snowdrift. He tried to open the doors to his cab, couldn't of course because of the weight of the snow, tried to use his CB, he could hear other CB messages but he couldn't get anything

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out himself. And so he settled back to wait. He was there in that cab for five days, 120 hours. He drank melted snow, he had nothing whatever to eat. When he was finally rescued he was asked if he was ever afraid and this was his reply, "No, I was not afraid. I knew that my friend knew that I was traveling along

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this length of highway. I knew that he would come looking for me. I could see him in my mind looking for me and I knew he would keep up until he found me. It was not a question of whether he would find me, but when he would find me." Now when you know that your friends are counting on you like that, when you know that they're

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depending upon you like that, when you know that they're looking forward to your coming like that, well that's a costly burden to carry but it's part of friendship. And also in friendship there is the costliness of the wounds that are sometimes inflicted on you by your friend. One man talking to another man, he

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said, "My wife asked me about her cooking the other night and my wife's a terrible cook so I told her so." And the other man said, "Well what happened?" He said, "I didn't see her again for three days." "Oh," he said, "did she go home to her mother?" He said, "No, it took three days for the swelling in my black eyes to go down

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enough for me to see anything." Well sometimes when you tell your friends the truth you get a punch in the eye. People that you're trying to help in loving friendship can sometimes, because of illness or frustration or anger of one kind or another, they can become very vicious, very unkind, very cruelly

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responsive. But if you're a friend you hang in there. It was Mark Twain who said, "A friend is someone who sticks by you when you're in the wrong. Anybody will stick by you when you're in the right." This is all part of the costliness of friendship but it's worth the price. When you are satisfying someone else's

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heart like that, they will satisfy yours and out of that comes the shelter that the lonely heart seeks. And then the psalm uses one other picture in its final verse and as you notice the psalm is only three verses long. It says that friendship is life-giving and it does that by referring to the dew on Mount

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Hermon. It says, "Unity is like the dew of Hermon which falls on the mountains of Zion. For there the Lord has commanded blessing, life forevermore." Now Mount Hermon is a high mountain in the northern part of the Holy Land. It's snow covered. You can see it from all over the northern part of the Holy Land. Now as

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the winds blow across that mountain, they're chilled by the snow. When they meet the hot air coming from the desert, condensation occurs and there is an unusually heavy dew that falls. And if it were not for that dew, no crops would be able to be grown in that area. In other words, the dew is that which makes the

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parching ineffective. The dew is that which brings life. So what the psalmist is saying here is that when you enter into friendships, you encounter that gentle touch of dew which takes away the parch of loneliness. Do you know what the largest organ in your body is? It's not your brain, it's not your heart, it's not

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your stomach, it's your skin. The skin of course is what holds us all together, but it's much more complicated than that. In every 100 square millimeters of your skin, there are 50 tactile receptors and those receptors are receiving data all the time. Some parts of the body have very few receptors, other parts have a

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great number. But those receptors are attached by a half a million filaments to nerves which go to the spinal cord and then to the brain. And that is how we can feel hot or or cold. But more than that, the skin not only transmits to us that kind of physical data, but our studies have shown that it transmits

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emotional data as well. They've only really been studying the skin since the 1940s and they've discovered remarkable things. In the hospital, when people are touched, their blood pressure will go down. Individuals who are very nervous and tense and anxious, when they are touched gently and affectionately, they

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are calmed. One of the things that bereaved people almost always say about the one whom they've loved and lost a while is, "I miss her touch, I miss his touch." A research group in the University of Minnesota came out a few years ago and said that for optimum mental health, every person needs at least 14 hugs

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every day. This last week, Harry Belafonte was in town and he was singing a love song and it was titled "Skin to Skin." There is an emotional content in touching, yet we live in a society where it's quite alright to touch or pat a dog or a baby, but you dare not do it to anybody else. I'll confess that I've been parts

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of some groups where I was inclined to get down on my knees and walk through the crowd wiggling my fanny with the hope that somebody would reach out and pat me. Andy Rooney, that curmudgeonly wit on CBS, has recently done a bit on hugging. He says much hugging in our society is non-hugging. First he

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lampooned what he called the A-frame hug. That's where the two faces touch but nothing else touches. That's an A-frame hug. And then he talks about the burping hug. That's a chest-to-chest hug, but you pat the other person on the back like you're burping an infant. He said it's very degrading. The only hug, he said, which is

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really worthwhile is a full-body press without burping and at the end you honestly look at the person. Well there's a lot to be said for that. It's that kind of touching that falls like a dew on a life and helps to take away its loneliness. I have a theory and that is that much of the awkwardness and the

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pain and the disputation that we get to in life would be omitted if we touched more. Here's an old couple sitting on the porch and he turns to his wife of 50 years and he says, "Sally, I'm really proud of you." What'd you say? I said, "Sally, I'm really proud of you." Can't hear you, speak up. I said, "Sally, I'm really proud of you."

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She said, "I'm tired of you too." Now I think the results of that would have been altogether different if he'd have just gotten up, walked over, and given her a hug. Both the scriptures and the sciences teach us that there is in the unity, the satisfaction of one

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another's hearts, that gentle dew, that touch which makes hope, which shelters the lonely heart. So how are things with your heart? Do you have healthy friendships? Are you ready to go to work building them? One of the members of our church said to me on Thursday of this last week, and this man has had a

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particularly difficult last few years, he said, "What I love about this church is that it preaches and practices hope and love." That's not always true. Sometimes some people here do some rather unloving things. And you know, it seems to me a beautiful thing to say about a church and

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to hope that will be altogether true of a church. That it be a place where unity and intimacy is. I am your pastor and I love you, but my heart is not big enough to be in touch with each and every one of you. No heart is that big except the heart of God. That means that we must love each other, that we must weave a

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filament of fellowship and friendship within our lives as part of this people of God. It would be a beautiful thing to be known here and elsewhere as the church where hope and love are, where the people really work at satisfying one another's hearts. Let us pray.

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Oh God, we thank thee for this heart song from so long ago in which we are reminded of how good it is when thy people dwell together in pleasant unity. Bless all the friendships in this fellowship or outside of it. Bless all those who at this moment think of their friends and who lift their names to thee

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in silent thanksgiving. And bless, we pray, those who know lonely this day because they are without friends. Give to them sufficient faith and courage to launch out into building friendships which will shelter forever their lonely hearts. These are our prayers and we ask them in the name of

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that one who showed the greatest love a friend can show when he laid down his life for us, those he loves. Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]