The day is hot already, and we all know
that it will be a scorcher. The sun will
beat down upon us, and the mirage we will see before us will be the heat
shimmering up from the ground itself. We
will feel it even behind our eyelids.
There will be little respite from the sun’s blazing rays – even when we
stop for lunch in an olive grove a few miles down the road.
It
has been a long walk. It will feel good
to sit down and be off our feet for a while.
In the grove, we can take off our sandals and wipe the dust off of
them. We can wiggle our toes in the
stream that long ago cut its way through this valley and now meanders among the
ancient trees.
We are on our way to Zion, of
course. We are on a pilgrimage to the
Holy City itself, to Jerusalem. A sense
of excitement grows inside us with each step we take – a wonderful anticipation
of what we will find in this most sacred of places. It is a marvelous feeling that we have
perhaps never felt before, or certainly not for a long, long time.
We are not traveling alone, of
course. The roads are far too dangerous,
and so we journey in a group - for safety, but also for camaraderie. Some of our fellow travelers we know. They are family and neighbors. Others have merged their group with ours along
the way. All are welcome: Strangers and friends.
Baptist
pastor Randy Hyde imagines our journey this way: “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.”
Your
primary and most climactic end point, of course, the real reason you came all
this way, is the Temple – the wonderful house of God that King Solomon built. It is gargantuan, sacred, and dripping with
gold – a fitting dwelling place for the one true God, the God of Israel.
Your
imagination takes over as you think about what will accost your five senses
when you enter: “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.” (Anne Rice)
Surely Yahweh/God will be
in this place – to receive our offerings and, through them, to forgive our
sins. We will be right with our
God. Our relationship with the Holy One will
be restored - strengthened – and secure.
When we get to Jerusalem, when we enter the Temple, we will be home.
So – really - how can we
keep from singing?
How lovely is your dwelling
place, Lord Almighty!
My soul yearns, even faints, for
the courts of the Lord;
Better is one day in your
courts than a thousand elsewhere;
How can we keep from singing when we are
about to finally come home, home to this place of beauty and power, home to
Zion, to Jerusalem, to the Holy City, home to God? We are so close to fulfilling that powerful
and deeply human urge to simply go home – home where the heart is, home where "when you have to go there, they have to take you in,’ as Robert
Frost once so wisely wrote. Soon we will
reach the Temple. We will finally be home. We will be right with our God. How can we keep from singing?
Fast forward now a couple of
millennia. The day is still hot, but we
are not in the land of olive groves. We
do not travel in groups anymore, and we are not gathered in a gargantuan
structure dripping with gold. And I am
not going to sacrifice a ram or a goat or even a bird.
Yet, if we search our hearts to their
very core, I wonder if we will not discover – most likely very deeply hidden –
a similar sensation when we come here on a Sunday morning. Though we
probably are not rolling down our car windows and singing hymns at the top of
our voices as we drive here, surely, like the ancient Israelites on pilgrimage
to the Temple, we are meant to know the fulfillment of that same deep-seated
human need: When we come to this church,
we have come home.
When you come right down to it, when
all else is stripped away, surely that is what church is meant to be – a coming
home to God. Of course, I do not mean church
as this building, beautiful as it might be.
Rather I mean all of us coming together as worshippers. This gathering we participate in each Sunday,
this gathering is our opportunity to come home to God. And since that is so, then surely, how can we
keep from singing?
What a beautiful home,
God-of-the-Angel-Armies. I’ve always longed to live in a place like
this,
Always dreamed of a room in your house,
where I could sing for joy to
God-alive! One day spent in your house, this beautiful place of worship, beats
thousands spent on Greek island beaches.
I’d rather scrub floors in the house
of my God than be honored as a guest in the palace of sin.
Of course, when I
speak about church, as blogger Jeremy Myers writes, “I am not talking about
simply showing up on Sunday to fake a few smiles, and half-heartedly sing a few
songs, and then suffer through a long-winded sermon. That is not what church
was meant to be. (Just like) that is not what heaven (is meant to be) either.
Almost all
Christians (Myers goes on to say) have some sort of idea that heaven is going
to be one long, unending church service. They have an image of a never-ending
sing-along in the sky, one great hymn after another, forever and ever, amen.
And most people,
when they hear that think, ‘That’s it? That’s heaven? That’s the good news?’ We
know we don’t want to go to hell, but we’re not sure we want to go to heaven
either.” Well, neither heaven (I hope) nor
church (I can assure you) should be like that.
You see, church –
worship – is more than the sermon. It is
more than the prayers. It is more than
the singing – though, when all those elements are combined, the result that
Karen and I hope for far exceeds the sum
of all the parts.
Church is about
dreaming and envisioning the world as it should and could be, rather than
remaining mired in the world as it is. Church
is about creating a backdrop against the world as we know it – seeing the
proliferation of guns in this country and the twisted logic of ISIS and the
racism that has never gone away – seeing those cultural realities not only as
they are but, more importantly, in light of non-violence and reconciliation and
radical inclusion that is the essence of the Gospel message and therefore the
ground of our fondest hope and wildest desire, if we are, in fact, Christians
as we say we are.
Church is about
daring to create an “alternative imagination,” to coin a phrase from Biblical
scholar Walter Brueggemann. Our ancient
ancestors knew that the Temple pointed beyond itself to the central reality of
God/Yahweh. In the end, they did not
journey for the building - gargantuan and dripping with gold as it was – they
journeyed to be home, to be in the presence of God.
Likewise, when we
journey here, we come not for this old structure with the paint peeling on the
outside and the floors in the classrooms needing to be replaced. We come because our worship together reminds us to keep God –
and the Gospel message - at the heart of everything we do. Our presence here
makes this old building sacred because it is our home. It is where our relationship to God is
strengthened and restored and made secure.
This home of ours
– it is a thin place where the veil between the world of what is and the world of
what might be falls away, the mere dream of which arms us with what we need
most: courage and strength and great high hope.
So – really – how
can we keep from singing:
How
lovely is your house, amazing God! I
want nothing more than to live close to you. Just one day knowing you are near
is better than a thousand days without you.
No comments:
Post a Comment