As a kid, going to church meant getting dressed up in uncomfortable clothing. Wool pants. Shirts buttoned up to the collar. Clip on ties. Dress shoes. My Sunday best was my Sunday torture.
I didn’t dislike church (other than the clothing). There were stories, games, toys, books, and snacks. The snacks were the best. We sang songs and talked about God and I was fine with all that. Unlike movies and books, I never had an unkind Sunday school teacher. To a person, they were all nice and friendly to me.
Although there was something routine about going to church which took away from its specialness, there was always a sense of expectation when we got in the car and drove to the church building.
We were going to meet God.
Our Sunday mornings at church had three phases. Before the main worship service was Sunday school. And before that, there was a half-hour service just for communion. Later on, that communion service got folded into the main service. But for years, it was its own thing. And it was during that time that I learned how to pray. There would be wide open silences during communion, and I filled those silences with bits of conversation with God. People often talked about a relationship with God and it was in those gaps that this relationship had its start.
But it all happened because we went to church. Without that regular practice of intentionally seeking God, even in uncomfortable clothing, I wouldn’t have filled those silences with prayer.
Love for Yahweh extends to love for the place he’s worshiped.
I experienced this in my own fashion as a kid, for I always knew that there was something bigger going on than punch and cookies and toys and stories in Sunday school. There was God. There was the Mysterious One who caused my parents to stop and be silent and pray. Nothing else did that to them.
And the building is key.
For my whole life, I’ve heard people say, “The church isn’t a building, it’s a people.” And that’s true to a degree. But it’s not completely true. For the people in the building are constantly changing, while the building remains pretty much the same. Returning to an old church you worshiped at decades before is a reminder of that truth.
Architecture is theology. Church buildings gather us and focus our worship. They facilitate and participate in our worship.
This is why the Sons of Korah psalmists long for the courts of God. Simply showing up in the temple put them in a place (both physically and spiritually) of worship. It’s not just my heart that cries out for God. It’s my flesh, my body, too.
How lovely is your dwelling place,
LORD Almighty!
My soul yearns, even faints,
for the courts of the LORD;
my heart and my flesh cry out
for the living God (Ps. 84:1-2).
The temple in Jerusalem was nice and all, but it becomes the focal point of this psalm of the Sons of Korah because it’s where God is encountered. There’s a deep yearning for the courts of Yahweh, because there is a deep yearning to be close to Yahweh himself. Without him as the real goal, the temple is just a nice building to visit, not a source of great happiness.
When I was in junior high, I had a huge crush on a girl named Carrie. A friend told me where she lived, so I would ride my bike to her neighborhood every now and then, hoping she’d see me through the window and come out and talk with me. The only problem was my friend had given me the wrong address. I was on the wrong street. So, my one and only attempt at stalking was a complete failure. But it expressed my deep desire to simply be near her, to be where she was, where she lived.
Psalm 84 continues in this vein, with the writers envying the birds nesting in the high corners of the temple.
Even the sparrow has found a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself,
where she may have her young —
a place near your altar,
LORD Almighty, my King and my God (Ps. 84:3).
It’s a funny picture in a way.
The Korahites arrive in Jerusalem and head to the temple to worship Yahweh. And while they’re at it, they notice sparrows and swallows darting to and fro. And it occurs to them that these birds are actually at home in the temple. And their babies have grown up in the place of the Presence.
They have the same address as Yahweh.
But then it occurs to them that it’s not only the birds who live there. Priests and others who serve the needs of the temple do too. “How cool would that be?” they think.
Blessed are those who dwell in your house;
they are ever praising you (Ps. 84:4).
The imagination is a little off, but it’s understandable. The Sons of Korah, who are there to worship Yahweh and spend their entire time in the temple doing so, imagine that those who live at the temple would be praising Yahweh all the time. It’d be a non-stop praise party.
Before I became a pastor, I wished that this would be the case, that proximity to the things of God would translate to intimacy with God.
Dealing the the mundane details of church life and worship prep quickly emptied those details of a feeling of closeness to God while doing them. And yet the psalm isn’t entirely incorrect. There always is a potential for a sense of the Presence of God in the place of worship if we’ve trained ourselves to be prepared to meet God every time we’re in that place.
And so the psalm transitions to the creation of a pilgrim heart, a heart that is oriented toward God and is always seeking to move toward God.
Blessed are those whose strength is in you,
whose hearts are set on pilgrimage (Ps. 84:5).
This is the core of biblical faith.
Neither heart not strength is set on self. Both are set on God. As long as we are focused on ourselves, we will continue to live small lives, sin lives, loveless lives. It’s the outward-focused life that is the life God wants for us, the kind of life he showed us in Jesus, the kind of life that created us in the first place.
Pilgrimage moves me away from myself. My eyes are on somewhere else, a destination beyond myself. And in this case, my eyes are on Someone else, the God I long to meet at my destination. The place serves the Person.
There is motion to pilgrimage. We don’t stay in the same place. We don’t continue to live in the same ways. The Destination compels us. And so we take step after step after step till we arrive.
Years ago, before my third child was born, I had lunch with a fascinating business owner. He ran one of Seattle’s highest profiled branding and design firms which created promo material for dozens of movies and companies. And as we were talking, he was telling me about his sabbatical in Mexico. It’s theme was wandering. He had numerous paintings of himself as The Wanderer.
I told him, my life also looks like wandering a lot of the time. But I wander with a destination. Instead of being a wanderer, I’m a pilgrim.
The conversation was one of those clarifying moments for me. It gave me freedom to live a life that often looks like wandering but truly isn’t because it’s certain of its destination. And my destination is firmly in the biblical God who is most fully know in Jesus. He is my beginning and he is my end.
To keep this in front of me, I gave my third child the middle name Pilgrim. (At 18, he’s still not sure about that name. But I’m more and more convinced.)
We are pilgrims. We live in a God-ward direction. We move. Our eyes scan the horizon. We journey with other pilgrims. We grow weary and yet press on.
The most-translated book in history (aside from the Bible) is Pilgrim’s Progress. There are parts in the original I’m not keen on, especially its anti-Catholic parts, but it captures this pilgrim imagination so well.
Before we move on to the next verse in Psalm 84, just a few thoughts on strength.
Pilgrimage is an exercise in weakness. I haven’t walked the Camino de Santiago yet (it’s on my bucket list), but I have friends who have walked it. They say one aspect of the pilgrimage is that it breaks you down. It exposes your weaknesses in body and soul.
Psalm 84 will have more to say about strength, but here it asserts that those who have set their hearts on pilgrimage have made Yahweh their strength. It’s not found inside of them. It’s found outside of them in God.
So, it’s no surprise that our pilgrimage toward God leads us through the Valley of Weeping.
As they pass through the Valley of Baka,
they make it a place of springs;
the autumn rains also cover it with pools (Ps. 84:6).
The Valley of Baka is an actual place. And although the word Baka is of uncertain origin, it is enough the same in spelling and in pronunciation to the Hebrew word for weeping (bakah) that there is no question why the valley is mentioned in the psalm.
While not every pilgrim on the road to Zion would pass through the literal Valley of Baka, every one of them would pass through a metaphorical Valley of Weeping.
Everyone who seeks God cries. Going the way of Jesus doesn’t walk around pain, it walks through pain. Tears are an unavoidable part of the journey.
But something happens. The tears are transformed. They become springs and rains, bringing the water necessary for life to the land.
They go from strength to strength,
till each appears before God in Zion (Ps. 84:7).
The transformed tears of our lives somehow make us stronger. And the closer we get to our destination, the stronger we get. The destination itself draws us and strengthens us as each step erases the distance between us and the God we strain toward.
Hear my prayer, LORD God Almighty;
listen to me, God of Jacob.
Look on our shield, O God;
look with favor on your anointed one (Ps. 84:8-9).
Having arrived at the destination of pilgrimage, prayers begin. But the prayers aren’t just for self. They are for the anointed one, the king. In Hebrew poetic parallelism, “our shield” is parallel to “your anointed one,” offering two perspectives on the same person. Where God looks on the king (who ultimately is Jesus) as his anointed, we look on the same king (the same Jesus) as our shield. And he becomes the center of our praying, for everything we need to taken care of our kingly shield.
Having prayed, we step back and look around at our sanctuary surroundings.
Better is one day in your courts
than a thousand elsewhere;
I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God
than dwell in the tents of the wicked (Ps. 84:10).
While many would look at the world outside of the sanctuary as the “real world,” the psalmists disagree. Here in the sanctuary, we’ve encountered Reality. All other realities are shadows of the one Reality.
Because of this, a day in the sanctuary is better than a thousand days on a tropic island beach. It’s not that those thousand days elsewhere are unimportant and that the places we go during those days are meaningless. And it’s not that the rest of the world is vacant of God. It’s that God is uniquely present in the worship of his people and therefore in the place where he is worshiped. Other places and other times derive their meaning from the One we worship in our sanctuaries.
If every place is holy, then no place is holy. But if we set apart a place as holy for the worship of God, then we can take that holy experience into the rest of the world with us.
Because of this, the psalmists recognize that it’d be better to be a poor doorkeeper at the sanctuary than it would be to be wealthy and godless.
For the LORD God is a sun and shield;
the LORD bestows favor and honor;
no good thing does he withhold
from those whose walk is blameless.
LORD Almighty,
blessed is the one who trusts in you (Ps. 84:11-12).
And so the psalm ends in the golden glow of the sun and surrounded by a shield, each manifestations of God’s provision for and protection of his people.
This is the perspective of those who view their lives through the lens of worship. They have walked through the Vale of Tears on their pilgrimage to be with God in his sanctuary. They know suffering. But they know a Reality greater than their suffering. By orienting themselves toward God, they have reoriented the rest of their lives and their sorrows seem smaller in the light of God’s sun.