During his 1860 run for the White House, then-candidate Abraham Lincoln received a letter from an 11-year-old girl that some believe helped get him elected president.
As the tale is told, the girl urged Mr. Lincoln to grow a beard because she surmised that whiskers would hide the drab homeliness of his face and improve his chances of winning the election. In no way offended, Mr. Lincoln took her words to heart and personally responded with a letter of thanks, adding that he’d enjoy meeting her when his campaign entourage passed through town.
And Mr. Lincoln began to grow a beard.
Sometime later, the day when Mr. Lincoln’s campaign train was scheduled to roll through the girl’s community, practically the whole town squeezed onto the red-brick-paved platform of the small, white depot: Leading Republican leaders and party operatives wearing their tall, black top hats; a flashy, rousing, star-spangled marching band; townsfolk dressed in their Sunday best – as if anticipating the biblical arrival of something divine.
Everyone who was anyone was there. Well, almost everyone. The letter-writing little girl who captured Mr. Lincoln’s grooming fancy got left behind at home. By her father’s reasoning, Mr. Lincoln only would be interested in the politicians and their support – only attentive to voters and their votes – and not the least bit enamored by the rapt attention of an 11-year-old girl – 60 years before women even had the right to vote!
Back at the depot, as the campaign train clickety-clacked toward the town, its mighty steam locomotive sputtered to a stop well short of the station with the dull thumping sound of a serious mechanical problem. Dead in its tracks, the engine needed emergency mending right then and there. And Mr. Lincoln’s much-anticipated speech from the rear vestibule of his private coach to the eager G.O.P. faithful girdling the depot would have to wait.
Not wanting to bide his time aboard his train while the enginemen affected repairs, Mr. Lincoln climbed down the steps and set off across a field in search of the little girl’s home.
When Mr. Lincoln introduced himself at the door, the housekeeper was speechless. But the little girl and her playmate, the housekeeper’s daughter, welcomed him in as if they were expecting him. The girls had been having a party of sorts, drinking pretend hot chocolate out of small teacups, and they invited Mr. Lincoln to join them.
After a while, Mr. Lincoln said he needed to be going, thanked them for the party, and asked them how they liked his new beard. It earned their toothy smiles and sweet giggles of approval. Then Mr. Lincoln walked back to his waiting train and its now-repaired engine, and was met by impatient campaign aides anxious to make up for lost time. So, with two long blasts of the engine’s full-throated whistle, the iron horse galloped out of town.
That’s right! Now running late, delayed by a wonky locomotive and a sincere desire to thank a little girl, the train highballed right through the town without making its schedule campaign stop: Right past all the dignitaries and politicians, and the marching band; right past the all the well-heeled ladies and gentlemen dressed to the nines. Sorry, folks. See ya’ next time!
A beard made the difference. A beard exalted the lowly and laid-low the exalted. A beard re-ordered priorities and relationships among pawns and power-brokers, in stewardship of creating more-just and -verdant community. And thus you and I join the poetic voice of the psalmist:
“Behold, how good and pleasant it is when all God’s people dwell in unity! It is like the precious oil on the head, running down on the beard, on the beard of Aaron, running down on the collar of his robes!” (Psalm 133:1-2)
It is good – wonderfully pleasant, delightfully lovely – when brothers and sisters are united; when friend, neighbor, and stranger are united in community with all those siblings who share a heavenly parent. And it is more than objectively good; so also is it pleasing to the hearts of both God and humanity. It is endlessly good in absolutely every way possible when God’s people experience and embody unity – as with an oily beard.
The psalm draws on the Old Testament temple ritual of anointing the high priest with oil. Both fragrant and sweet, oil flowed from the top of the head, down to the beard, onto the collar, and trickled on below. In the same way that someone poured oil onto Aaron, so also does the Lord pour the oil of unity onto his people. In the same way that oil spread from Aaron’s head to his beard to his clothing, unity was to flow from God to the priest to the people. Unity was an objective reality that the faithful needed to experience and enable, letting grace and peace flow where they will flow, the Three in One uniting a people as one.
God’s gift of unity now flows by the Holy Spirit, poured out in baptism upon the great and final High Priest, Jesus Christ, who is the head of the Church. Like oil flows from hair to beard to collar, the Spirit flows from Head to body, from Christ to Church. And oh, how good it is when that unity, through Jesus, flows down upon us. Oh how good it is when we practice unity, when we foster it, when we treasure it.
I probably should end it there, but before I close, I’m want to give voice to something that I’m sure many of you are thinking. Maybe we ought to insert one more adverb into the opening verse of Psalm 133: “How good and pleasant and rare it is when God’s people live together in unity.”
Lurking among the goodness of God’s Creation is a power of evil that has a vested interest in shattering the unity of God’s people in the church.
The author C.S. Lewis wrote about it in his classic fictional work The Screwtape Letters. In it a senior demon, Screwtape, writes letters of advice to the junior demon, Wormwood. The letters are primer in the art of temptation, and Screwtape coaches ways of creating disunity.
Regarding the Christian whom Wormwood is assigned to tempt – the Christian referenced as the “patient,” Screwtape advises, “Make his mind flit between things like ‘the Body of Christ’ and the actual person sitting next to him in the pew. Provided any of his neighbors sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or have double chins or odd clothes, the patient will easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous. [Keep him from thinking] ‘Well, if I can be a Christian with all my foibles, why not these others?’”
Pushing back against the evil that sows the seeds of disunity, the apostle Paul thus writes to the Ephesians:
So then, remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth, called “the uncircumcision” by those who are called “the circumcision” – a physical circumcision made in the flesh by human hands.
Remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.
But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it.
So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God. (Ephesians 2:11-22)
As we engage in political discourse, or continue waging the culture wars, or simply tread lightly through our divisive days, we must remember – in the words of another – that those worldly distinctions, even distinctions created by the Lord himself (like circumcision, for example) are not as important as unity in Christ. The grace of God in Christ destroys and abolishes the divisions and hostilities of humanity in order to build a new humanity that becomes God’s house in the world.
God calls you and me to a kind of unity that show a broken, fearful, and warring world that Christ himself and Christ alone is the only hope for peace with each other and with God.
An oily beard. It makes a difference.
The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Pastor Grant M. VanderVelden shared this message during worship on Sunday, October 13, 2024, at First Presbyterian Church in Waukon, Iowa, USA. Scholarship, commentary, and reflection by Tim Challies, Scott Hoezee, C.S. Lewis, Stan Mast, and Jeff Strite inform the message.