Scripture can be found here...
I have been thinking this week of
what makes a place “home.” That persistent longing for the place where we
belong doesn’t always make sense to us when we first become aware of it, when
we first notice that we are actually longing for it.
As a child I never had any doubt
that I was home. As an adoptee secure in a loving family, I was confident of my
place and my welcome. Home was the air I breathed. Then, when I was 14 years
old I went on a retreat with a group of students from my Roman Catholic high
school. I was a religious kid to the point of overt nerdiness… remind me to
tell you the “rosary on my belt” story sometime. Anyway, on this retreat, we stayed
in an old lighthouse keeper’s house on Long Beach Island. About 25 students and
two priests, we spent the weekend doing the following: studying Paul’s letter
to the Ephesians; playing our guitars together (those of us who had them… a
girl named Judy taught me the chords to “Diamonds and Rust”); walking, running
and generally playing on the beach; and (though I doubt any of us could have
articulated it this way), living out a new but really very ancient model for
Christian community. At the end of the retreat, we had what was called a “love
feast,” with bits of bread and juice, in which we took turns going around the
room, each of us saying one thing we cherished in each and every other person.
It took a long time. It was over in an instant.
By the time the van pulled into
the high school parking lot, late Sunday afternoon, I knew I had experienced
something completely new, a way of living in my faith I’d never known before.
It was out there, ahead of me. It was completely unlike anything I’d known, and
yet it felt like home. For years afterward I longed to find it, or to return to
it, or maybe even to create it anew, that powerful sense of being home.
A powerful sense of being “home”
permeates Psalm 84. This psalm is one of the most well-known and beloved in the
entire Book of Psalms. Some of us grew up with this psalm. Some of us know it
from its setting in Brahms’ German Requiem; the setting we sang of it this
morning is inspired by that music. For some of us, it is brand new. It describes
a powerful experience of the temple in Jerusalem as “home.”
How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of
hosts!
My soul longs, indeed it faints for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God. ~Psalm
84:1-2
The psalmist sings, How lovely is
your dwelling place! And by all accounts, the temple, especially the first one built
by Solomon, was truly a beautiful structure. 1 Kings 6 describes a building impressive
for its day, though somewhat modest for ours: at approximately 90 feet long and
30 feet wide, it would have fit comfortably inside, say, St. Patrick’s Cathedral
(which is about 360 feet long and 190 feet wide). It was constructed of stone,
inlaid with cedar wood and pure gold, decorated with intricate olivewood carvings
of cherubim, palm trees, and flowers in bloom. And clearly, the lavishness, the
richness of the temple was meant to convey the absolute power and sovereignty
of the God who dwelled therein (and probably, to be completely honest, the
power of the king who built it). The temple was believed to be the literal home
on earth of the presence of God, symbolized by the Ark of the Covenant, which
it housed. Of course the literal home
of God was lovely!
But it is not only God who is at
home in the temple. For the composer of this psalm, a song meant to be sung in
worship, it is a place of such beauty and power that he feels something akin to
physical pain when separated from it. The psalmist describes himself as
fainting with desire to be within the temple courts, and his entire being—heart
and flesh, in other words, “all of me”—sings for joy to the living God. The temple
is God’s home on earth. And the temple is where the psalmist feels utterly at
home. And he’s not the only one.
Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself,
where she may lay her young,
at your altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my
God. ~Psalm
84:3
This place, built to convey majesty and power, is so welcoming that even certain wildlife can find or create a home there. Tiny, insignificant birds can build their nests, twig by twig, and lay their eggs, and perch and hover until their babies are hatched, and then shelter them there. The temple is home to God. The temple is home to human beings. The temple is home to the birds of the air.
Happy are
those who live in your house, ever singing your praise. Selah
Happy are
those whose strength is in you, in whose heart are the highways to Zion.
As they go
through the valley of Baca they make it a place of springs;
the early
rain also covers it with pools.
They go from
strength to strength; the God of gods will be seen in Zion. ~Psalm 84:4-7
Happiness is living in the
temple. The temple is a source of strength to those who long to be there so
deeply, so earnestly, that the maps there are written on their hearts. In fact,
the longing for the temple makes even the most arduous journey…the journey
through the dry and inhospitable valley… pleasant, easy. They go from strength
to strength, and they find themselves, inevitably, joyfully, ecstatically, at
home. The temple is home.
Funny omission in all this… it
feels like a funny omission to me, anyway. The main activity taking place in
the temple is nowhere described in this psalm, though there is a delicate
allusion to it. The main activity taking place in the temple is something that
is pretty foreign to us, pretty hard to approach in a way that makes sense. I’m
going to let novelist Anne Rice do it for us.
In 2005, following her embrace of
Christianity, this writer famous for her stories about vampires released her
novel, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt.
Her description of the temple, informed by meticulous research, can fill in the
psalm’s glaring omission. In this passage, the narrator is describing his first
glimpse of the temple as an eight year old child, when he traveled with
extended family and friends to celebrate the Passover in Jerusalem:
I could hear the pipes and the cymbals and the deep blended voices of
the singers. Never had I heard such rich music, such full music as that of the
Levites singing. It wasn’t the gay, broken, and high song of the Psalms we sang
on the road, or the happy fast-paced songs of the weddings. It was a dark and
almost sad sound that flowed on and on with great power. The Hebrew words
melted in the chorus. There was no beginning or end to any part of it.
It caught me up so completely that only slowly did I see what was
happening in front of me, in front of the railing.
The priests in their pure white linen with white turbans on their heads
moved back and forth with the animals from the crowd in which we stood to the
great altar. I saw the little lambs and the goats going to the sacrifice. I saw
the birds being carried.
The priests were so thick around the altar I couldn’t see what they
did, but only now and then see the splashes of blood high and low. The hands of
the priests were covered in blood. Their beautiful linen robes were splashed
with blood. A great fire burned on the altar. And the smell of roasting meat
was beyond words. I smelled it with every breath I took.[i]
The main activity taking place in
the temple is the sacrifice of animals upon the altar, animals that will become
burnt offerings to God, most of whose purpose is to atone for sin. The purpose
of the temple is, yes, to provide a home to God’s presence on earth. But it is
also to make right relationship with God possible by the work of the sacrifices.
And so the temple, about which
the psalmist sings with such ineffable beauty, is shown to be home to so much
more than we first imagine. It is God’s home on earth. It is home to the humans
who wander in and out, hoping to set things right with God. It is home to the
flying creatures who nurture their small and growing families. It is home to
the rituals of life and the rituals of death, and as such, it is home to the
deepest human hopes and aspirations as well.
Home. I have been struggling this
week with what makes a place “home.” I think of my 14-year-old self, playing in
the sand and sharing in the love feast, and the genesis that weekend nearly
forty years ago of some half-formed notions of what kind of spiritual home I would
inhabit in the future, meaning, the years after 1975. And I realize that what I
found on my weekend at the beach with 24 other teenagers and a couple of middle
aged priests is both light years apart from what the psalmist finds at the
temple, and strangely similar, too.
My 14-year-old self found a place
and a time where God and people were at home together, and the sense of
all-encompassing welcome was profound.
I found a place and a time in
which I could engage in a ritual of, not simply reconciliation, but
affirmation, in loving words and gestures between myself and God and God’s
other beloveds.
I found a place and a time in
which to focus on the wisdom of the ages in scripture, a spring of living water
in the dry valley that was often life as a teenager.
I found a place and a time where
the music of my heart could find expression, and even grow.
And, more than anything, I found
something I knew was big enough and strong enough and enticing enough to stake a
life on. Anne Rice places a prayer in the mouth of her 8-year-old narrator, his
response to what he has witnessed in the temple. He prays:
Lord, Lord, whoever I am, whatever I am, whatever I am meant to be, I
am part of this, this world that is all of a flowing wonder—like this music.
And you are with us. You are here. You have pitched your tent here, among us.
This music is your song. This is your house.[ii]
This child has found his way home.
And, yes, my heart is longing,
fainting for this, always. Isn’t yours? This sense of welcome, this sense of
complete belonging is at the heart of all our searching, our whole life long,
whether for a life’s partner, or work we love, or a kitchen whose window looks
out on morning glories climbing a trellis. And in all these things, in all
these ways we are tantalized by the idea of “home,” what we are really longing
for is the very Presence so beautifully described by Augustine of Hippo when he
speaks directly to God of his deep and unrestrained longing. He says, “You have
made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in
you.”
This restlessness for the God who
is our home is at the heart of all we do. It is the basis of every program and
plan we have here at Union Presbyterian Church, whether it is our plan for Christian
education or our mission trip to the very same Jersey shore on which I had my
teenaged epiphany. It is the reason we want a good roof over our heads and
beautiful music to inspire us while we worship and praise the God of our
longing. This restlessness for God is what gets us out of bed on a Sunday
morning, and puts in our hearts much the same prayer as that eight-year-old
boy:
Lord, Lord, whoever we are, whatever we are, whatever we are meant to
be, we are part of this, this world that is all of a flowing wonder. And you
are with us. You are here. You have pitched your tent here, among us. Our music
is your song. Our home is your home. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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