Looking for the Presence of God

I'm going to invite one of our deacons, Kevin Clennan, to come and to read to us our scripture reading this morning.

It's from Psalm 84, Kevin.

Let's read together from Psalm 84.

How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts.

My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord.

My heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.

Even the sparrow finds a home and the swallow a nest for herself, for she may lay her young.

At your altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God.

Blessed are those who dwell in your house, ever singing your praise.

Blessed are those whose strength is in you and whose hearts are the highways to Zion.

As they go through the vale of Baca, they make it a place of springs.

The early rain also covers it with pools.

They go from strength to strength.

Each one appears before God in Zion.

O Lord of hosts, hear my prayer.

Give ear, O God of Jacob.

Behold our shield, O God.

Look in the face of your anointed.

For a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere.

I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness.

For the Lord God is a sun and shield.

The Lord bestows favor and honor.

No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly.

O Lord of hosts, blessed is the one who trusts in you.

Well, it's so nice to see you all here this morning.

When I was reading through Psalm 84 just this week, I kept coming back to this feeling that I've had at certain points in my life.

And I wonder if you've had this feeling too.

This feeling like a homesickness, but it's not homesickness.

It's a longing, but not for home.

It's for a place that you've never been before.

I didn't want you all to think that I was really weird when I said that.

So I googled it to make sure that it was a thing.

And it turns out it is a thing.

And the Germans have a word for it.

They call it Fernweh.

I did French in school, so you have to apologize for my pronunciation.

It's a yearning for a far-off place that you've not yet visited.

It's not Wanderlust.

Wanderlust is fancy for adventure.

That's something different.

It's not an excitement, but an ache.

It's something like far sickness.

A longing for a place that you know deep down inside that's real, but you can't locate it on a map.

And at no point in your life have you ever fully actually arrived at it.

Have you felt that ache?

Maybe the day after everyone goes back home after you've all met up with family for Christmas, you felt that ache.

Or maybe as you turn over the last page, the final page of your favorite book, you get that longing.

Or maybe, like just last week, the musicians who've written the soundtracks to a lot of our lives pass away, they die, and they move on.

And you feel this feeling like there's something beyond.

That thirst, that longing.

That all your life you haven't been able to satisfy.

And maybe you've tried.

Maybe you've tried to satisfy it with the respect and the authority that comes from building a successful career.

Or maybe you've tried to extinguish that longing through deep friendship, where you can be truly open and honest with people.

You can bare your soul and know that you're still safe.

Or maybe you've amends yourself in beauty.

The beauty of nature or of music.

You've sought out emotive experiences.

Or you've sacrificed yourself for your own art.

C.S. Lewis, he wrote the Chronicles of Narnia.

He was a Christian writer too.

And he wrote a book called Mere Christianity.

And in it he wrote this famous line.

If I find myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy,

the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.

Have you felt it?

I think we all have.

And as we read this 3,000 year old song,

it takes this universal human truth.

This place, this thing that the world's never seen.

And it gives it a name.

It gives it a face.

And in Jesus, it gives us an answer.

We're going to look through the psalm together in three movements.

This, longing for God, walking with God, and finally dwelling with God.

So first of all, longing for God.

This song, it doesn't start with theology, but it starts with longing.

How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts.

My soul longs, yes, faints for the courts of the Lord.

My heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.

The psalmist is wrapped up in this all-encompassing ache for God.

Notice he speaks about his soul, the place of his deepest desires,

and his heart, his inner self, and his flesh.

Even his body is aching, longing for God.

And it tells us exactly what he's longing for.

At first, it looks as though he's longing for a place, a building.

God's dwelling place is lovely, he says.

But he doesn't talk about the beauty of the temple.

He doesn't mention the architecture, or the design, or the ornamentation.

He doesn't talk about the beauty of the activities that take place there.

He doesn't say how moving is the liturgy, or how impressive is the choir.

This place is not beautiful.

It's not lovely because of what it is.

It's beautiful because of who is there.

The place where God dwells is lovely, because this is the home of God.

And this is the key to this psalm.

And the entire Bible.

In the entire Bible, we read about what a human being is made for,

what that longing is that exists in all of us.

We're not merely made to admire beautiful buildings,

although we're thankful for them.

We're made to live in the presence of God.

Centuries before Lewis, St. Augustine, he wrote the line,

you've made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.

But in irresolvable longing that you feel for beauty, for belonging, for home,

it's not a design flaw in human beings that we need to medicate away.

It's the hole in every human heart that only God can fill.

And he's singing.

He's singing for joy.

That can be accurately translated in the original as crying out,

crying out to be with God.

And look how he addresses God.

He calls him the Lord of hosts twice in the first four verses.

And that title, Lord of hosts, it's prominent throughout all of the Psalms,

all of the songbook in the Bible.

And it carries this idea that God is at the same time the terror of his enemies

and the foundation, the security, the delight of his people.

And then in verse 2, the Psalmist calls God the living God.

You see, the Psalmist is not longing for a concept,

the idea of what a God might be like

if only somebody was in control of all this chaos in the world.

That's not what he's saying at all.

He's truly aching for the presence of God

who made himself known to his own people.

who made them, who's so far above them, so different from them,

but yet at the same time entered into a binding relationship with his people,

a covenant.

In verse 3, the writer says,

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 God and my King.

The writer's saying even the lowest,

the least powerful creatures in all the world find a home here.

In God's temple.

Probably he's literally seen birds flying around,

making nests in the eaves or on the roof.

But I think it's also like the writer's identifying himself

with the least powerful, the least impressive of all God's creatures.

And he's saying something like,

these tiny little birds have a home here.

Even the least impressive characters like me

can find a home with God too.

Verse 4 says,

blessed are those who dwell in your house,

ever singing your praise.

This word blessed is a happiness,

happiness.

But it's not that fleeting happiness that comes and goes.

It's not waking up to a sunny morning,

if you can imagine what that might be like.

Or an unexpected visit from an old friend.

It's not that kind of happiness he's talking about.

There's elements of those things,

glimpses of this happiness in those things.

But this is a deep joy that lives really low inside of us.

And it outlasts our circumstances.

No matter what we're going through,

we have this happiness, this joy that carries us through.

And we look then at the end of this little section.

No wonder the writer wants to dwell in God's house.

Everyone who does experiences the fullness of God's favor.

So in these first four verses,

the psalmist is unashamedly crying out with joy

because he's enraptured by the loveliness of God

and longs to be where God is.

And that makes us ask ourselves, doesn't it, this morning,

is this us today?

Do we spring out of bed on Sunday morning,

hearts alive at the thrill of getting to come

and worship God with God's people?

Do we really long for the presence of God?

Or do we find ourselves more often than not thinking

about the things that God can get us

rather than God himself?

C.S. Lewis says that the problem is

that it's not that we expect too much from God

or that we ask too much from God.

It's that we're too easily pleased.

We're too easy to settle for less.

We set our desires too low.

C.S. Lewis said,

we want to go on making mud pies in a slum

because we can't imagine what it means,

what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.

God's not merely somebody who brings us good things.

He's the very source of all blessing,

all happiness, all joy.

So Christianity is not fundamentally

about getting things from God.

The greatest gift that God could ever give us

is himself.

So if we're longing for the presence of God,

how do we actually get there?

Well, the psalmist taps into this

in verses five to seven

when he introduces us to the idea of pilgrimage.

So point number two is walking with God.

Verse five says,

blessed are those whose strength is in you,

in whose heart are the highways to Zion.

So suddenly the writers transported us

from this place of longing to enter the temple,

the place where God is,

to the image of pilgrims being on their way

to that place.

Taking the Israelites would have,

in this generation,

they would have walked towards Jerusalem

to keep the annual feasts.

Zion, it says Zion in the passage,

but Zion's another name for Jerusalem

where the temple was,

where God is.

So these people,

they've got their hearts set on God

as they journey through these difficult terrains.

And their strength is in him,

not in themselves.

The psalmist tells us something remarkable

about the route.

It says that as they go through the valley of Baca,

they make it a place of springs.

The early rain also covers it with pools.

So these people are heading for the temple,

but they're passing through the valley of Baca.

This is probably a real valley.

There's a few potential places people,

commentators think it might be.

But Baca, the word Baca,

sounds like the Hebrew word for weeping.

So we could think about this maybe

as the valley of weeping.

It's a dry, thorny,

waterless ravine.

And yet,

it's made into a place of springs.

The autumn rains cover it with pools.

It brings refreshing and life,

despite the arduous journey

and the difficult circumstances.

This word pools that we've got translated in English

as pools could be translated,

it's translated in other places as blessing.

So rain in dry land is a blessing

from God to his people.

And this verse,

this section of the psalm,

it does something really important theologically,

something that we have to grasp.

Because as the people are journeying

to the temple to God's presence,

God doesn't lift them on a detour

around the valley of weeping.

He leads them right through it.

The psalm shows us that God

doesn't promise an easy path

towards the road of the presence of God.

He promises us a road

that goes right through sorrow,

right through pain,

right through disappointments and loss.

And yet here,

in the valley of sorrow,

or pain or disappointment or hurt,

through the driest valleys

and the hardest terrain,

God supplies blessing.

That's vital for us to hear this morning.

Because which one of us, honestly,

we put our hands on our hearts,

can say that we're,

spiritually,

that we're standing in the courts of God

with unbridled joy?

Aren't most of us somewhere along the path

in the valley of Baca?

Aren't most of us journeying somewhere

through bereavement or sickness

or broken relationships

or a difficult diagnosis?

Well, the first thing to know

is that if you're trusting in the Lord,

this is real hardship.

It's not making less of these things.

But it's not because you've taken a wrong turn.

God's not taken his eye off you

and allowed you to wander in the wrong direction.

Psalm 84 doesn't tell us

that the valley's a detour

from the pilgrim's path.

The valley tells us the valley of,

the psalm tells us the valley of weeping

is the pilgrim way.

As we walk through this valley,

we're reminded that we're walking towards the God

who's going to turn every valley,

every difficult challenge,

into a spring,

into a pool,

into a blessing.

King David wrote very famously,

we sang a paraphrase of it,

even though I walk through the valley

of the shadow of death,

I'll fear no evil,

for you're with me.

Your rod and your staff,

they comfort me.

The second thing to know

about this journey

is that this is not our final destination.

I love the singer,

the singer-songwriter Tom Waits,

and he's got a song called

Come On Up to the House.

And in it he says,

this world is not my home,

I'm just a passing through.

He sings,

does life seem nasty,

brutish in short?

The seas are stormy

and you can't find no port.

You've got to come up to the house.

Yes, the world is not my home.

I'm just passing through.

And then in verse 7,

we see this upside-down logic

of pilgrim theology.

Despite walking through

the valley of weeping,

they're going from strength to strength.

Now this is a stunning statement,

because when we think about journeying

through a difficult journey,

we think we start off fresh

and we become gradually weaker

and weaker.

We go from strength

and positivity

to exhaustion

and despondency

as we become tired.

But this is not

about a physical journey,

it's about a spiritual one.

And it defies worldly logic.

When our spiritual walk

is with God,

it doesn't drain us,

it actually fuels us.

This is a joyful paradox

for Christians.

Even while our bodies,

our minds,

all the things around us

that we see and touch

and feel

seem to be falling apart,

becoming weaker and weaker,

our spirit is being renewed.

In the New Testament,

the Apostle Paul writes

to the Corinthians,

the church in Corinth,

and he says,

though the outer self

is wasting away,

our inner self

is being renewed

day by day,

not by our own strength,

but by relying on God's.

And then the second verse,

the second half of verse seven,

it gives us this incredible hope

to grab onto

that no matter

what your circumstances

are right now,

no matter what you're going through,

no matter how hard

your valley of weeping

is today,

this psalm says,

each one appears

before God in Zion.

Every pilgrim

who's on the way

to God's presence

will arrive

in God's presence

fully and completely.

This is a hard course

to walk,

but it's a course

you'll not fail to complete

because that's God's promise

to us in this psalm.

And then as we come

towards the final point

that we have this morning,

we need to look at

verses eight and nine

because these two verses,

they're a prayer

that unlocks so much

about the way

that we understand this psalm.

Verses eight and nine reads,

O Lord God of hosts,

hear my prayer,

give ear,

O God of Jacob,

Selah.

That's a musical note,

it's a note to musicians,

we think.

Behold our shield,

O God,

look on the face

of your anointed.

So he's just described

pilgrims,

those journeying

through this difficult terrain,

this difficult life,

as going from strength

to strength.

And then immediately,

he admits that he can't

carry on the rest of the way

through his own strength.

The walk through the valley

isn't designed

to make you self-sufficient,

self-reliant.

It makes you someone

who prays all the harder

and brings you

all the closer.

Where it says,

look on the face,

look on the face

of your anointed.

That phrase means

to look favorably,

to bless this person.

And look at who he asks God

to look favorably on

because it's not himself.

The writer's not saying

look favorably on me,

but he's saying,

look favorably

on your anointed.

This is the king,

the one who's been appointed,

anointed to lead

and rule over the people.

The logic's something like this.

Look favorably on the king

because the destination,

the destiny of pilgrims

is inextricably tied up

with the destiny

of the king.

The king is like a mediator,

an intermediary,

the one through whom

the people will be blessed.

Look favorably on him

and let us be accepted

for his sake,

is what the psalms saying.

You see,

access to God's presence

was never going to rest

on the pilgrim's own worthiness.

No matter how much

he longed to be in the temple,

no matter how much

he had to endure

as he journeyed towards it,

it had to rest

on somebody else.

And that brings us

to our final point,

dwelling with God.

This is maybe,

we arrive now,

the most quoted line

from this psalm.

If you've been in church

for any length of time,

you'll have heard this before.

It says,

for a day in your courts

is better than a thousand elsewhere.

I'd rather be a doorkeeper

in the house of my God

than dwell in the tents

of wickedness.

So again,

the psalmist is defying

the way that we think.

We calculate value differently.

He teaches us about

quality over quantity.

One day near God

outweighs a thousand

anywhere else,

the psalmist says.

He'd rather hold

the most lowly position

he can think of.

A doorkeeper.

Someone who doesn't even

get to enter into

the heart of the court.

Who merely stands

at the threshold

as others pass by.

He'd rather that

than dwell

in the camp

of the wickedness.

Even if he could go

right to the center,

prized place,

and all the good things,

the perceived goodness

that comes from that.

This is personal

for the person

who's written this psalm.

Because the sons of Korah,

it tells us at the beginning,

they wrote

a bunch of psalms.

They wrote this psalm.

But they are descendants

of a man

who wanted

more for himself

than he had already

been blessed with.

He was chasing more.

and in his sinfulness,

he tried to step over others

in order to get it.

And what that led to,

it led to destruction,

it led to separation

for him from God.

So the psalmist knows

what it's like

to be on the proximity

of God's house.

And he's telling us

it's worth more

than all the comfort,

all the blessing

that we think

we can find

anywhere else.

The psalm closes

with a description

of his God.

And he says,

God is a son

and shield.

He's the giver

of life and light.

He's the one

who guards and protects.

He bestows favor

and honor

and withholds

nothing good

from those

who walk uprightly.

So the psalm began

with longing

and it ends

with blessing

to those

whose faith

leads them

into God's presence.

So for the psalmist

3,000 years ago,

this is all bound up

in a building,

in a place.

His longing,

his pilgrimage,

his doorkeeping,

it's all pointing

towards the physical temple

that existed

that was built

in Jerusalem.

A temple

that was made

of stone

where people

would come to gather

to worship God,

where God's presence was.

See, but here's

the problem for us

if we read this today.

God later

allowed that temple

to be destroyed.

So if Psalm 84

is only about

a material building,

only about stone building,

then the story

of this song

ends in tragedy.

The temple collapses,

the sparrows

and the swallows,

they fly away,

they make their nests

somewhere else.

And our far sickness,

the ache

in our hearts,

that longing

for that place

we've not yet been

remains unfulfilled

forever.

But the whole Bible

tells us,

that the temple

was never the destination.

It was merely

a signpost.

And it wasn't

the only one.

So when God

made Adam and Eve,

he placed them

in a garden.

And the garden

was perfect,

and so God

could be present

with them there.

But because they fell,

they sinned

against God.

They were put

out of the garden.

And there was

separation between

God and mankind.

Then later,

God dwelt

with his people

in the tabernacle,

a tent

that lived

in the midst

of the people

who wandered

aimlessly

in the wilderness.

And then came

the temple

that we're talking

about here

where God dwelt.

But even in the temple,

there was a curtain

put up

that separated

human beings

from the most

holy place

where God was.

and now this psalm

longs

for unbroken

nearness

to the living God,

a place where

God's presence

and human beings

are no longer

separated,

a home so secure

that even the birds

can make their nests

in it,

a valley of weeping

turned into

springs of waters,

a doorway

into the very

presence of God

that doesn't depend

on our own

worthiness.

And every single

one of those

longings

is answered

not in a renewed

temple

but in a person.

A thousand years

ish

after this psalm

was written,

Jesus stood

at the temple

and he said,

destroy this temple

and in three days

I'll raise it up again.

So the people

thought that he was

talking about

the physical temple,

the stone temple

that he was

standing beside.

But John,

one of Jesus'

disciples,

tells us that he

wasn't talking

about that temple

at all.

He was talking

about the temple

of his body.

You see,

Jesus didn't really

come to be a pilgrim

walking the way

to Zion.

He is the way.

He is the destination.

Jesus is the true temple.

And John tells us

that he tabernacles

among us.

He lives

among us.

Jesus walked

through the valley

of weeping

not as one

who needed springs

but as the one

who supplies them.

Jesus turned

humanity's driest,

most thorn-choked sorrow,

death itself,

into a place

where living water rises.

He's the sun.

He's the shield

in a way

that the psalmist

could only hint at

from his vantage point.

He's the light

of the world.

And when he went

to the cross,

his own body

became a shield,

protecting us

from the suffering

that was rightfully ours.

And maybe most

staggering of all,

Jesus doesn't stand

in.

He doesn't let us,

doesn't just let us

stand at the door.

He says to us

this morning,

I am the door.

And having entered once

by his own blood,

once for all,

he tears that temple

curtain apart

from top to bottom

so that you and me

who deserve

to be outside forever

are welcomed

all the way in.

He's the one

through whom

we have the confidence

to enter the most

holy places

and not just

to be doorkeepers

but because

of the anointed one,

the Mashiach

it is in Hebrew,

the Messiah,

the Christ,

we're named sons

and daughters

of the King.

That's why your

Fernway,

that unnamed

longing

for a world

that you've never seen

is not a cruel joke

played by nature

on your human heart.

It's a homing signal.

C.S. Lewis was right.

If you feel

that you don't belong

in this world,

if there's something

that just doesn't feel

like you belong here,

that's because

your true home

is not fully here.

Not yet.

At the end of the Bible,

John sees a vision.

A vision of what's

going to happen

at the end times

and he records it for us

and this is from

that book,

Revelation,

it's called.

He says,

When we read Psalm 84,

this side of the cross,

in the light of Jesus,

it tells us

that our home

is not just

in the future.

The living God,

who once dwelt

behind a veil

in a tent

or in a temple,

is now dwelling

in his people

by his spirit.

And one day,

he'll do that

so completely

that the dwelling place

of God

will be with man.

Because

Jesus Christ,

God himself,

left the loveliness

of heaven

to come to earth.

And at the cross,

the Son

experienced the agony

of the Father

turning his presence

away from him.

Our far sickness

is transformed

into homesickness.

How?

Because he's opened up

the way for us

to enter into God's presence

where we will find

complete fulfillment.

Our longing

for something

we can't name

has become

a longing

for the home

that we can't lose.

Let's pray.

Lord God,

we're so thankful

to you

for your holy word

that teaches us

that

the circumstances

of our lives

are not

an indicator

of our spiritual health.

Rather,

these are the things

that humans endure

as they journey

towards the cross.

We thank you

that Jesus Christ came

and he lived this life

suffering before glory

for us.

And now as we walk

through suffering

in so many different ways,

we look forward

with hope

to when you

will make all things new,

when Lord,

you will dwell

with us

forever,

wiping every tear

from every eye.

Lord,

we ask that you

bless us and keep us.

Forgive our sins

in Jesus' name.

Amen.