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.