Ecclesiastes 4.7-12 (CEB):

Next, I saw under the sun something else that was pointless: There are people who are utterly alone, with no companions, not even a child or a sibling. Yet they work hard without end, never satisfied with their wealth. So for whom am I working so hard and depriving myself of enjoyment? This too is pointless and a terrible obsession.

Two are better than one because they have a good return for their hard work. If either should fall, one can pick up the other. But how miserable are those who fall and don’t have a companion to help them up! Also, if two lie down together, they can stay warm. But how can anyone stay warm alone? Also, one can be overpowered, but two together can put up resistance. A three-ply cord doesn’t easily snap.

Ecclesiastes is a phenomenal plea to live a happy life in a world that is too often unfriendly to happiness. More importantly, throughout the text, the author indicates that living together in partnership (two together) and community (a three-ply cord) are the keys to maintaining happiness, both individual and communal.

I like the simile of the three-ply cord because I often speak of God as an invisible thread that weaves us into the colorful, richly diverse tapestry of human beings we are. Like the fibers on a weaver’s loom, we are each beautiful strands of individual physicality that together form the fabric of God’s reality.

We are all aspects of God, quintessentially equal and necessary parts of the whole of God’s creation. This understanding should lead us to work together as a single global community. I think it’s biblical to want all the tribes of the planet to live together as one, as described in the First Testament—especially if we believe in a God of reconciliation, as described in the Second. In both books of the Bible, isolationism—retreating into our own little corners of the world and then fighting like hell to keep them—is the opposite of what Jesus wanted to accomplish.

Long before him, though, over five-thousand years ago, our Jewish forbears knew it was nothing for a mighty empire to eradicate an isolated tribe from the face of the Earth (not much has changed). Over hundreds of years, the original 12 tribes of Jacob’s sons became surrounded by empires ravenous for territory and labor. Individually, the tribes would have been picked off until Judaism was lost to the desert sands. Thankfully, guided by an unwavering faith in their covenantal relationship with God, the tribes banded together and did their best to fend off invaders.

Humans—all humans—are stronger together. That we fail to understand the power of cooperation and continue to fall prey to leaders who keep us from achieving the power of global human unity—is heartbreaking.

The challenge Ecclesiastes presents is how to commune as human beings in a world that continually describes our differences negatively. How do we exalt our unique contributions to the overall beauty of a living God and not condemn someone else for thinking or believing or exalting differently? When will we finally believe in a God of all people instead of merely a God of my people?

It’s unfortunate spiritual evolution doesn’t seem to be as natural a process as physical evolution because, while we’ve physically evolved to the point of sentience, we’re spiritually stuck in the Middle Ages, with minds just as closed and ignorance just as rampant.

It is well beyond time for humans (Christians, especially) to shed the mythological trappings of our superstitious predecessors. Now is the time to do the excruciatingly difficult work of being the arms, hands, feet, eyes, ears, and conscious conscience of Jesus in the world. Now—not tomorrow—is the time to work together with people who believe differently and co-create a more loving, equitable society where we respect and embrace each other’s religious, political, social, psychological, historical, and ethnic differences. It is time to spiritually evolve into the 21st Century, even while so many of the world’s religions are firmly mired in the 12th. For many of us, it means it is time to leave religion behind, and focus on spirituality.

Which is what Jesus suggests, too, by the way.

Jesus teaches us that we should consider our existence more deeply. Rather than thinking about our lives as merely here and now in this fleeting physical moment, consider that we are all eternal spiritual beings in God. We are more than what we seem or think, all of us, no exceptions. If we can learn to see the Divine Eternal in one another, well, I think that’s paradigm-changing.

Paul understood our inability to see clearly and developed an innovative solution to the problem. Paul was aware of the unifying importance of a community centered on God, or in this case, the God represented by Jesus. Paul creates new communities where Gentiles and Jews alike mingle based, possibly for the first time in history, not on common tribes or hereditary social status, but on a shared belief in Jesus as the harbinger of a new world.

All of Paul’s new churches were diverse communities focused on sharing love. People from vastly different backgrounds—rich, poor, educated and not, slaves, merchants, tax collectors, and fishermen, all formed new, culturally mixed communities who found commonality in their faith that Jesus, as Paul taught them, sacrificed his life for them, so they could be free.  It’s a freakin’ unbelievably powerful message in the 1st Century CE when virtually the entire world is enslaved to the power of Rome.

Paul realizes these new communities have the power to overturn the way the world operates, just as Jesus intended. He writes letter after letter to his churches to help nurture them in their new faith in something greater than, yet intimately part of, themselves.

Paul thought that by concentrating on spiritual unity, which is universal and touches all people no matter what we call ourselves, he could create the kin-dom of God Jesus envisioned. Paul encourages those first communities to share their resources and gifts, whether money, food, time, or talent. In promoting social welfare, Paul mimicked the way the earliest disciples acted, half a century before his ministry began. Of course, those early Jewish-Christians were themselves recreating what the original 12 tribes practiced 5000 years before that.

We’ve had the answer to world peace for tens of thousands of years, we just keep letting it get away from us. Inherently, I think most people understand that living together as citizens of Earth is much more advantageous than living separately as citizens of Country X, Y, or Z. Our ancestors understood they would perish without cooperation. That’s an important message to remember in these days of climate change, world wars, and border walls.

I am frustrated with the world and the people in it. Never in history have I witnessed a more selfish, willfully ignorant, racist, misogynistic, xenophobic state of affairs on such a global level. I am realizing that the only way anything changes is by remembering we are spiritual beings having a physical moment. God is with us. Invasively, pervasively. Our physical experiences are necessarily unique, but Christ calls us to embrace that uniqueness and recognize it as a thread of God’s being. Jesus urges us to create new communities where we encourage every member of society as they walk with God in their own unique way. Because when we walk with each other, we’re walking with God, co-creating God’s kindom of unconditional love and cooperation in our world, right now,

That’s the thread of humanity I want us all to continue sowing, too.

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