Sermon Psalms 84:1-12 Pilgrim Song
Dr. Randy L. Hyde
More often than not, the imagination works better when we close our eyes. So, if you need to do that this morning, it is fine. Regardless, I would like for you to let your imagination come into play.
You are not sitting in the sanctuary where the Pulaski Heights Baptist Church meets in Little Rock, Arkansas in the year of our Lord 2006. Instead, you are an ancient Jewish pilgrim, on your way to Jerusalem… Zion, the Holy City. Can’t you just feel the sand between your toes? You have never visited this holy place before, and the anticipation of doing so has raised in you an excitement you haven’t felt in a long, long time, if ever.
You are not alone, of course. It is far too dangerous to travel in this part of the world by yourself. You are in an entourage of fellow travelers, which means you are able to share your excitement and anticipation with others. All conversations are about what you will do when you reach Jerusalem, where you will go, why you have decided to come.
Obviously, you have to tend to practical matters. You talk with the others about where you will stay, how much it will cost, whether you will have any funds left over with which to buy souvenirs. But once these kinds of conversations find suitable solutions, or at least possible answers, your thoughts always go back to the reasons why you have come in the first place.
The chances are, your purpose has to do with a religious festival of some kind. Perhaps it is Passover, or it might be the Festival of Lights. The Jewish calendar afforded the faithful numerous opportunities to come to the Holy City and live out the mountaintop experience of praising God with like-minded believers. As you travel, your thoughts are not on the incessant heat, the dust, the varmints, the thirst, the danger… you are thinking of one thing and one thing only: your destination.
All the elements of this stimulating journey give rise to an emotion you have never felt before, and your heart breaks into a spontaneous song…
How lovely is your dwelling place,
O LORD of hosts!
My soul longs, yea it faints for the courts of the LORD;
my heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God.
Soon, your fellow travelers pick up the refrain of your singing, and join in.
How lovely is your dwelling place,
O LORD of hosts!
My soul longs, yea it faints for the courts of the LORD;
my heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God.
It becomes the hymn, the chorus, that signifies for all of you the very reason for your pilgrimage, not just to the Holy City, but to the very heart of God.
How lovely is your dwelling place,
O LORD of hosts!
Now, let’s come back to reality. We are sitting in the relative comfort of the sanctuary where the Pulaski Heights Baptist Church gathers each Sunday, and it is just past mid-summer 2006. Needless to say, we are far removed from the psalmist, not only in terms of time but of experience as well. Our faith journey has taken us beyond where the psalmist was. Yet here we are, thousands of years later, still affirming his words as an important part of our faith perspective. So, our responsibility today is to take these ancient words and find in them meaning for who we are and what we are and where we are right now. In other words, we must see how these words we call Psalm 84 transcend the ages and speak a new and renewing word to us.
In order to do that, we must ask ourselves some questions.
Have you ever been away from home, from family, from the one place dearest to your heart… and your heart literally aches to be there? You may have been a soldier in the trenches, a missionary on your first assignment. Perhaps your vocation required you to live in a place you’d never been before. Or, you might have been a college student your first night on campus.
I’ve never been a soldier or a missionary, at least not in the traditional sense, but I do remember that first night in college. My older brother Steve had already completed two years at Ouachita Baptist University. So, as I anticipated my freshman year, he was a rising junior. He had made an agreement with some of his friends that they would arrive on campus a day early, before most of the other students came into town. Why didn’t I go with him, he suggested. The only problem was, when he connected with his buddies, he took off and left me alone in the dorm. At that point in my eighteen years of life, it was the loneliest I had ever been (I’ve tried in the intervening years to forgive him, but it’s been hard).
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Perhaps the psalmist has been to Jerusalem before, because it is apparent that Zion feels just like home. If you have ever been separated from home and family, and longed yea, ached to be there, then you know how the psalmist feels. The closer and closer he gets to the Holy City, the more joy the psalmist experiences because in going to the temple he is going home.
The poet Robert Frost has said, “Home is where, when you go there, they have to take you in.” Everyone even the sparrow and swallow, says the author of the psalm find a place in God’s house. In fact, the birds lead the singing!
“Happy are those who live in your house,” the psalmist says to God, “ever singing your praise.”
This is a popular psalm both then and now. Why? Because it connects so well with the listener, the reader. This is how they/we want to feel and certainly should feel about coming to the house of the Lord.
During the past 36 years or so of being a pastor, as you might imagine, I’ve been witness to a great deal of tragedy and sorrow. More often than not, it is found in the context of a funeral and a grave. When the dust of grief has settled, and I’ve visited with those in grief, many a time I have been asked, “What do people do who don’t have church?” You know what they’re saying? They’re telling me they couldn’t have done it without their fellow believers, without the support and prayers, the hugs and tears, the thoughts and embraces and let’s not forget the funeral food of those with whom they share a pew.
Happy are those who live in your house,
ever singing your praise.
But that’s not the only time you need church. When something good happens to you, you don’t want to keep it to yourself, do you? The psalmist’s heart has the map to Zion imprinted on it. The temple is his source of happiness, so the very thought of the temple brings that same measure of joy. That is true of anyone whose source, whose strength is from God. He recognizes that he is not by himself in his sentiments, so he is voicing his joy for others as well.
Psalm 84 celebrates the joys afforded by the dwelling of God with his human creation. And while we may be tempted at times to feel God’s distance more than his presence, we want to be able to celebrate God’s nearness. I think there’s just something inherent in the heart that leads ultimately to a desire to be near, and to be loved by, God.
So the psalmist’s interest in the temple is not just aesthetic… i.e. he doesn’t just want to be there because the carpet is pretty and the temple has a great and powerful pipe organ or an imaginative mural behind the baptistry. His interest is in being a part of the faith community.
I’ve told you before that we have our fair share of young ladies who visit us inquiring about the use of our sanctuary for a wedding. Our rule is they must have some connection to our church because, quite frankly, weddings aren’t easy. In fact, they’re hard work and time-consuming. But, if they want to come and look at what we offer, that’s okay by me. Many times, however, they choose to go elsewhere. Would you like to know the number one reason why brides choose not to have their weddings here? We don’t have a center aisle. Sometime, somewhere, young brides have been told they are the center of things on the day they get married, and when they walk down the aisle, they want it to be the center aisle. And if I try to tell them that being at church implies that God is always at the center, some get very unhappy with me.
The psalmist isn’t interested in the temple for its center aisle, or for any other architectural reason. In his mind, the temple is where God dwells. Four times the psalmist refers to God as “LORD of hosts.” It is a title associated with the ark of the covenant, but it has other significance as well. It is a reference to the Lord as “the living God.” There is a bit of nuance, however, in the Hebrew language that doesn’t translate to the English. The psalmist refers to God as the giver, the author,of life, not just that God is alive as opposed to being dead. You and I are alive, but that doesn’t mean we have the power to give life. Understand?
In the mind of the psalmist, this pilgrimage to Zion to God’s place is a profound symbol of the centering and directing call of God to life. Who of us does not desire that life is centered, balanced? How do we find this balance, this happiness?
Jesus followed rabbinic tradition in proclaiming the beatitudes. Yet, as with all things, he reordered them and gave them new definition. The Psalmist offers a beatitude as well…
Happy are those whose strength is in you,
in whose heart are the highways to Zion.
But guess where the highway takes them… straight through the desert.
The Hebrews referred to it as Baca. It takes its name takes from the gum tree found there. And as with all gum trees, it was known as the weeping tree. This land was arid and inhospitable to the traveler. It provided a difficult, toilsome path to Zion. Getting to Zion, and therefore to the presence of God, was not easy.
Here’s the interesting thing: modern archaeologists have not been able to find a valley referred to asBaca. It is possible that the image of Baca is symbolic rather than literal. Nevertheless, the significance of it is unfaded. In the mind of the pilgrim psalmist, traveling through Baca is like our early American pioneers traipsing through Death Valley. However, the anticipation of Zion made Baca, in the pilgrim’s mind, an oasis, a “place of springs” (vs. 6).
You can sense that the psalmist’s anticipation deepens near the end of the psalm.
Was it written as he got closer and closer to Zion? He says to the Lord… “For a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere.”
The joy of being in God’s house is overwhelming, far better than any other place or time.
For the LORD God is a sun and shield;
he bestows favor and honor.
No good thing does the LORD withhold
from those who walk uprightly.
Travelers in that day needed protection from the elements and robbers, which is, of course, why most pilgrims traveled in groups. But the psalmist says that God is his protection.
In a land where churches are so plentiful, it is hard for us to appreciate the awe with which the ancient Israelites viewed their temple sanctuary. In their minds, it was literally built by God, and therefore was God’s dwelling place. The disciples of Jesus were certainly in awe of it, weren’t they? Jesus was not, however. He knew the temple had, over the centuries, replaced God in the devotion of the religious leadership. They had gone too far in their veneration of the temple, substituting their love for a building for their love of God. But centuries before, as the psalmist made his difficult and long journey to worship, the very thought of it filled him with the highest kind of anticipation. To be nearer and nearer to the temple was to be nearer and nearer to God.
I’ll let you in on a secret, and hope that you can understand and appreciate it. This just may be a place where the Old and New Testaments collide. The Christian affirmation is that God moves toward us. We do not go to church to find God. God goes to church with us. Yet…
We are spoiled by the easy availability of churches. People shop churches the way they select their favorite supermarket. The day of the neighborhood church is long over. We complain when worship takes more than an hour of our time. We find things, people, issues to take exception to. We cannot, for that reason, appreciate fully the psalmist’s deep, deep longing to be in the house of God.
But ask our homebound folk, who cannot come to church anymore. Ask people of faith with extended illnesses. Assess life from the spiritual, not just the material, perspective. It is there, like the pilgrim psalmist, that you will find strength and purpose, joy and happiness. It is there, in the words of Isaac Watts, the hymn writer, that we will find “the abode to which our hearts aspire with warm desire to see our God.”
May God always lead us to his dwelling place, whether it’s this place or not.
Lord, we love this place, not for its beauty but because it represents and embodies your presence with us. May we cherish what it means to live with you and receive our life from you. Through Christ our Lord we pray. Amen.
Sources for this sermon include Mary Frances Owens, Salt from the Psalter (Nashville: Tennessee, 1980) and James Luther Mays, Interpretation: Psalms (Louisville, Kentucky: John Knox Press, 1994).
Copyright 2006, Randy L. Hyde. Used by permission.