Finding a Resting Place for God
Proper 29
November 26, 2000

Finding a Resting Place for God
by James McCrea

Psalm 132:1-12, (13-18); Revelation l:4b-8

Our Psalm lesson this morning leads us to undertake a similar form of holiness. This Psalm is what is known as a "Song of Ascent," meaning that it was written to be sung or chanted as worshippers climbed the steep stairs leading up into the temple at Jerusalem.

Psalm 132 retells the story of David who brought the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem. As you may know, the Ark of the Covenant was a box created by the people of Israel while they were still wandering in the wilderness after leaving slavery in Egypt.

Inside the Ark were placed the stone tablets that held the ten commandments, that is, God's covenant with the people; along with a bit of manna, representing God's gracious provisions for the needs of the people; and Aaron's staff, the one that had miraculously transformed into a snake, representing God's unrivaled power over the world. Therefore, the Ark as a whole was a power symbol of the presence of God with the people of Israel.

Psalm 132 tells of David's determination to bring the Ark to Jerusalem and give it a place of honor. David is quoted as saying, "I will not enter my house or get into my bed; I will not give sleep to my eyes or slumber to my eyelids, until I find a place for the LORD, a swelling place for the Mighty One of Jacob."

In these days of the never-ending election, in which both sides are making legal claims based more on self-interest than on the needs of the nation as a whole, it's easy to be cynical and think that perhaps David, too, was motivated by self-interest. After all, it was to his advantage that the symbol of God's presence be brought to Jerusalem, the city he had only recently conquered and made the capital of the nation. And, yet, I think there was far more than self-interest at work in David's desire to bring the Ark to his capital.

The ancient Israelites had a very different idea of holiness than we do today. To them, the things of God could only be approached with the deepest reverence and awe. Most of us today have trouble quoting single verses from the Bible, but many people in those days had entire books of the Bible committed to memory.

But more than that, they had such a reverence for God's word that they could tell you, for example, what the middle letter of the book of Isaiah was. As many of you know, the name of God was considered so holy that they refused to dishonor it by saying it out loud. In fact, the scribes at Qumran — the community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls — believed that God's name was so holy that when they were copying a biblical manuscript and they came across God's name, they were expected to lay their pens down and take a ritual bath to purify themselves before daring to commit God's name to paper. They did that, even though it required them to build an extensive — and probably very expensive — water system in the middle of the desert.

The ancient Israelites were so devoted to God's word that they even gave special significance to the shaping of each of the Hebrew letters. For example, the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet is aleph, which looks to most English speakers like an X that has spent some time in a paint can shaker.

The ancient scribes noted that an aleph is made up of a series of pen strokes similar to the letters yod, vov and yod. Every Hebrew letter has a numerical equivalent and the numbers associated with yod, vav and yod are 10, 6 and 10, which adds up to 20. That happens to be the same total as the total of the letters making up God's name.

The point is that the ancient scribes didn't just copy words down by rote. Instead, as they formed each letter, they would be mentally reviewing mathematical formulas that related each letter to the name of God. 'the idea was that their devotion during the writing process would help bring some of God's presence to that scroll.

And it wasn't just the letters that were considered holy. Even the while space between the letters and words was thought to be holy because that space allows the reader to distinguish between the letters and words. All of this may seem very foreign to those of us in the modern Protestant tradition, because we have very little sense of that kind of awareness of the holy in everyday life.

Although we aren't often aware of it, we spend our lives like a Song of Ascents — that is, we are constantly on a journey, seeking those places where we can come to know the presence and power of God. But the reality is that those places are all around us, even though we rarely see them for what they truly are.

A Jewish philosopher and Bible scholar named Philo, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt during Jesus' own lifetime, wrote, "When the righteous [person] searches for the nature of all things, he makes his own admirable discovery: that everything is God's grace. Every being in the world, and the world itself, manifests the blessings and generosity of God."

Maybe it's a little ironic, but we, who have lost some of the sense of holiness in everyday life, have ourselves been made holy by the presence of God within us. Each of us is like a tiny Ark of the Covenant, becoming both a symbol of the presence of God in the world, and an example of the reality of that presence. But what would it mean if we really lived as if we were living Arks? That's a difficult thing for most of us to imagine.

Annie Dillard writes, "Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead — as if innocence had ever been — and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulses and tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to see the thread, weak and involved. But there is no one but us..."

Jesus once said, "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head" (Matthew 8:20). The home Jesus is longing for isn't a home made of wood or stone but one made of flesh and bone — a home inside you and me. Or, as a song by Paul Williams & Keith Thomas puts it:

"Come and be my honored guest forever. I will be at rest wherever you are. There's not another day of living I'll have to face alone. Build in me in a clean heart willing. Bring me back the joy of living...again. My one desire is just to be a temple of your love. So...Make my heart your home. Take it as your own. Light the fire and warm the house with perfect peace. Love is overdue, so I welcome You. Come inside and make my heart your home."

If we truly acted as if we were miniature Arks of the Covenant, what would happen if we treated other people the same way?

We are signs of the presence of God in the world. We are the God's ambassadors of grace and hope. "To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, and has made us to be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father — to him be glory and power for ever and ever! Amen."

(Comments to Jim at jmfpc@sbcglobal.net.)