God with Us

How lovely is your dwelling place, Lord of heavenly forces!

My very being longs, even yearns,

    for the Lord’s courtyards.

My heart and my body

    will rejoice out loud to the living God!

Yes, the sparrow too has found a home there;

    the swallow has found herself a nest

    where she can lay her young beside your altars,

    Lord of heavenly forces, my king, my God!

Those who live in your house are truly happy;

    they praise you constantly. Selah

Those who put their strength in you are truly happy;

    pilgrimage is in their hearts.

As they pass through the Baca Valley,

    they make it a spring of water.

    Yes, the early rain covers it with blessings.

They go from strength to strength,

    until they see the supreme God in Zion.

Lord God of heavenly forces,

    hear my prayer;

    listen closely, Jacob’s God! Selah

Look at our shield, God;

    pay close attention to the face of your anointed one!

Better is a single day in your courtyards

    than a thousand days anywhere else!

I would prefer to stand outside the entrance of my God’s house

    than live comfortably in the tents of the wicked!

The Lord is a sun and shield;

    God is favor and glory.

The Lord gives—doesn’t withhold!—good things

    to those who walk with integrity.

Lord of heavenly forces,

    those who trust in you are truly happy!    (Psalm 84)      

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When my father died, we were fortunate enough to know that his wish was to have his body cremated.  I say fortunate because when you have to make decisions for someone, it is a blessing to know what they wanted.  My mother had also been very clear about her wishes, so there was no question that her remains would be cremated and then spread under a weeping willow tree, beside a lake, with a hot fudge sundae and a good book. 

My father wasn’t quite as explicit – beyond the fact that he was to be cremated he gave no other direction.  But we knew that one of the places he had loved in his life was Portland, Oregon and the surrounding area – the cascade mountain range, and particularly Mt Hood, a majestic volcanic mountain, the highest mountain in Oregon.  When he was young he liked to ski in those mountains.  He talked about it often – often, for my dad anyway, which means he mentioned it a few times. 

Portland was his birthplace, but he left there as a young man.  He moved to California for college and started his career there.  Eventually he made his way to the Midwest, where he lived for the rest of his life.  There was little reason to go back west for a visit, because all his family there was gone.  But I think Oregon was always home for him.

So two of my sisters decided that the best thing to do would be to take his ashes to Oregon, carry them up to Mt Hood, and leave them there.  This was a kind of pilgrimage for them.  None of us had ever been to Oregon, but it was legendary in our minds.  We had always heard about it; we were descended from pioneers who crossed the western United States in covered wagons on the Oregon Trail.  All our lives we had said we wanted to go to Portland some day and see it for ourselves.  So now my sisters made the decision – this was the time to do it.  Both the journey and the destination were important.

That is often true, and yet so easy to forget in our purposeful drive to get somewhere.  Today most of our journeys are very fast, thanks to interstate highways we can travel with nothing to slow us down – and nothing much to look at, either.  Thanks to airplanes, which get us there even faster, with even less to look at.  The faster the better; if we could only teleport!  Much of the time, it is not about the journey – it’s about the destination. 

But there are still times we take the slow way, and when we do we experience a different kind of journey. 

When my son, Henry, began his bike journey this summer, we knew it would be interesting, and challenging, and exciting, and maybe scary.  You see the land much differently from a bike than from a car.  You see little critters moving through the grass.  You see every bug crawling and flying in your vicinity.  You feel the cold in your bones in the early mornings in Maine and then again in New Mexico.  And you feel the unbearably humid heat in Missouri, and the dry-as-an-oven heat in Arizona. 

And the community of bikers experienced all this together, along with the collective aches and pains, the flu they passed around, and the grief of losing one of their own in a tragic accident – Patrick, who was killed by a car in Oklahoma.  They have cried and laughed and held one another all summer.  We can be sure that the experiences of this journey have changed them, shaping them into the men and women they will become.  This journey has been a kind of pilgrimage for them.

We talked about the idea of pilgrimage at the roundtable this week.  We like the idea of the journey as a process.  We wondered a bit about whether the destination even matters in a pilgrimage, because the journey, itself, is so important.  Yes, in fact, the destination does, matter in a pilgrimage.  It’s what makes it a pilgrimage instead of just a wander.  A pilgrimage has a goal, an end point, which the process is building toward.  The pilgrims who walk the Camino de Santiago have a destination; the Muslims who do the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, have a destination; the people of Israel who made pilgrimage to the temple in Jerusalem had a destination.  There is always a destination, but in a pilgrimage the journey is as important as the destination.

We like the idea of pilgrimage – but I fear that few of us will ever embark on one.  Pilgrimage is a demanding thing.  It asks us to put the rest of our life on hold and devote ourselves completely to the journey.  It takes time and devotion, because on the journey of pilgrimage we make ourselves available to encounter God.  That is the not-so-secret secret of pilgrimage.

In the traditional pilgrimages, the destination is always a holy place. Psalm 84 is a love song about the pilgrimage to the holy temple in Jerusalem.  “How lovely is your dwelling place, O God!”  But listen, also, to the way the psalm describes the journey itself: “as they pass through the Baca Valley, they make it a spring of water,” and “they go from strength to strength.”  This is a journey of blessing because God is with them all along the way.

By the time Solomon and all the workers he conscripted finally built the temple in Jerusalem, Israel had been long accustomed to worshiping a sort of portable God.  In their wilderness exile, God traveled with them in the tabernacle.  The Ark of the Covenant was carried from place to place, their visible assurance that God was with them, wherever they were.  So at this time and place it was a big deal to give God a permanent home.  From now on, people would make special journeys – pilgrimages – to be with God in this place.

And yet, even as they were doing this, they were wondering:  is it possible to contain God in a place on earth?  God is so great – if heaven can’t contain God, how could this temple contain God?  Surely, God is too great to be confined. Surely, God is anywhere and everywhere.

The people of Israel were realizing that the God who promised to be with them was able to meet that promise, no mater what trials or hardships they faced.  They came to understand that this God, who had promised Abraham would be a father to many nations with more descendants than there are stars in the sky, who had foretold that he would ultimately be a blessing to all the world – this God would not be contained or limited by anything we humans can do.  The promise, Israel realized, is that God’s name will be in God’s temple, and when we invoke the name of God – particularly in this place, God’s dwelling place – God will be there.  What’s more, Israel knew, the name of God, wherever it is invoked, whomever it is invoked by, holds power.

But for us, even more precious is to know this God came to be with us in flesh and blood, through Jesus the Christ – Immanuel, God with us.  By his sojourn on this earth, his atoning work for us, we claim the blessing of Abraham, to be called children of the living God.

The temple Solomon built is long gone.  But the name of God lives on.  The temple is gone.  But through Christ, and the Holy Spirit, we are made living temples of the Lord.  We have God with us – within us, around us, under and over us, behind and before us.  Immanuel … God with us.  Isn’t that amazing? 

The temple is gone, but pilgrimage is still possible for us.  Listen, and we may hear God calling us to embark on a journey – a journey where the destination may be the same as our starting point, but leave us different than we were when we began.  Listen – God is calling us on a journey that has the power to transform us into the people God intends for us to be.  Let us begin.