Psalm 122 "For the Sake of the House" Scott Hoezee

It took perhaps no more than one or two seconds and yet it packed a wallop. Eons of past history and a welter of contemporary passions could be sensed in a flash. What I am referring to took place one week ago today. As the climax of his pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Pope John Paul II visited Jerusalem. The aging pontiff shuffled along in eighty-six steps as he approached the Western Wall, perhaps the most sacred site in Judaism. As is traditional, he placed a small slip of paper containing a prayer into a crevice in this ancient wall, which is all that remains of the city of Jerusalem as it had been standing in Jesus' day. Then, as the New York Times reported it, the pope stepped back a pace and fluidly made the sign of the cross with his right hand.

It was in that instant that so many crosscurrents, so many religious passions, so much ancient history and so much of this world's present problems became focused like a laser beam on that one spot. The Times stated that when the pope made this sign of the cross, "a hush carpeted the plaza." And well it should have! Those of you familiar with Judaism know that the symbol of Jesus' cross is not exactly a favorite among Jews.

Chaim Potok was in town this past week for the Calvin College writing conference. If you ever read Potok's novel, My Name is Asher Lev, then you no doubt remember the scene from late in that book when the Jewish artist Asher Lev, having thought long and hard about how best to depict some of the agonies of his mother's past life, finally settled on the symbol of the cross. His painting "Brooklyn Crucifixion" showed his mother and a cross in one glance, thus causing a scandalous uproar among Asher's fellow Jews. The symbol of the cross, after all, reminds Jews of the one whom Christians believe is the true Messiah. Worse, the cross has also long been used in some of the Christian church's darker moments of anti-Semitic pogroms against the Jews--a series of sins for which Pope John Paul II had himself made a confession only a week prior to his visit to Israel.

Yet there was perhaps the world's most famous reminder of the Christian faith, standing at a Jewish sacred site (also claimed by Muslims as holy), making the sign of the cross. Seen the right way, that moment could be construed as a way to bring us into Psalm 122 this evening. Because despite all that has changed over the millennia, one of the Bible's features that remains stubbornly in place is a tight focus on the city of Jerusalem.

A good deal of the "action" in the four gospels takes place in Jerusalem, most especially the entirety of what we now call the events of Holy Week. Jesus wept over Jerusalem, lamenting its sinfulness and predicting the destruction that did indeed come to the city in the year 70 A.D.--indeed, the fact that the pope stood in front of a ruin at the Western Wall is a reminder of just that destruction by the Romans now nearly 2,000 years ago.

But even after the first destruction of Jerusalem in 587 B.C. leading to the Israelite exile in Babylon, the subsequent prophets of Israel like Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others continued to locate the future fullness of God on Mount Zion in some kind of restoration and return to the Holy City. That theme continues clear down to John's vision in the Bible's last book, Revelation. There it is a New Jerusalem, descending ready-made from heaven, that becomes the focal point for John's apocalyptic visions of God's kingdom.

Even short of such future visions, however, are all those parts of the Bible that celebrate the Jerusalem of the past. Psalm 122 is a good example. This Hebrew poem is one of fifteen psalms extending from Psalms 120-134, each of which is labeled "A Song of Ascents." The sense of that title is that these were pilgrimage songs sung by Israelites as they ascended up to Jerusalem. Not surprisingly, therefore, the terms "Jerusalem," "Zion," and "house of Yahweh" occur with great density and frequency in these fifteen psalms.

In Psalm 122 there is no missing the absolute specificity of the geography. This is a song about a very real city. The immediate setting appears to be the pilgrims' arrival, as indicated by verse 2, "Our feet are standing in your gates, O Jerusalem." The travelers have just now arrived and so are marveling at their initial glimpses of the city.

The psalmist marvels over the architecture of the place, specifying for us the walls, citadels, and closely compacted structure of the city. Special note is given to the halls of justice in Jerusalem as the place from which wise decisions for God's people are issued. Because of all this, the psalm concludes with prayers for peace. Jerusalem is a place of refuge for God's people in the midst of a hostile world. So the psalmist begs God to keep Jerusalem intact, to keep its walls strong and its gates secure so that the people living there can know also an internal shalom founded on the outer sense of living in a safe haven.

Given all of that, this must certainly be among those "songs of Zion" referred to in Psalm 137--the songs which the Babylonians sneeringly asked the Israelites to sing while in exile. But how could they sing such songs in a foreign land? How could they quote a psalm about Jerusalem's wonderful fortifications when, as it turned out, none of them was sufficient to keep the Babylonians out? How could they sing a song celebrating Jerusalem's walls when those walls were a smoldering heap of rubble and a haunt for jackals?

How could they celebrate Jerusalem when Jerusalem was no more? Then again, we can ask the same question of ourselves tonight: what can we do with this psalm, how can we sing this song of Zion when we ourselves are not connected to this city? Many of us have never been to even the current Jerusalem, much less to the one Psalm 122 celebrates. The city referred to in this psalm long ago ceased to exist. Even the city Jesus knew was not the same one but a re-built Jerusalem with a new temple erected by Herod to replace Solomon's Temple, which had been thoroughly trashed 600 years before Jesus' birth. Today even that city is lost to us, having been replaced with the modern city of Jerusalem.

So there is still a place called Jerusalem in pretty much the same geographic location as the city celebrated in Psalm 122. But does the presence of Psalm 122 in our Bible mean we can naively apply these words to that current city? The simple fact is that few, if any of us, do that. We do not use Psalm 122 as a spur to make our own pilgrimages to Jerusalem. Even if we read Psalm 122 as part of our morning devotions, we do not then use this poem as a reason to pray for the peace, security, and well-being of the present-day city in modern Israel. Even if some of us have traveled to the Holy Land to, as the pope just did, "walk where Jesus walked," it is not the city of Jerusalem or what it used to mean to the ancient Israelites that draws us. Nor do we come home only to become instant advocates for the security of Jerusalem. We do not begin to pepper our prayers with petitions for the Israeli security forces or with pleas that God keep their armored personnel carriers strong and fierce in defense of the Holy City!

So I ask the question again: what do we do with this psalm? Aside from being an historical curiosity or a reminder of how the Israelites once regarded their capital city, what can we Christians make of or learn from Psalm 122? I suppose it's possible to answer that question by saying, "Not much at all." It is possible to say that this just is one of those places in the Bible that is all about history but not at all about today. We can appreciate the poetic artistry of this psalm the same way we can admire the work of Homer from the ancient Greek tradition. But beyond such a literary study and historical lesson, there's not much here. Perhaps, then, it would be best just to move on to Psalm 23 or something.

But it will come as no surprise to you that I do not plan to take such a dismissive approach tonight. Even with a full recognition of this psalm's historical specificity, I still think there are truths reflected here which stay stable across the ages. Perhaps what I am about to say will seem like a bit of a stretch, but if we believe in the unity of the Scriptures as inspired by God's Holy Spirit, then we are allowed to look for certain themes that run throughout the entire Bible and make some connections accordingly.

The main thing I want to key on this evening is the ultimate reason why Jerusalem was celebrated the way it was. The reason was not political, though the political viability of ancient Israel contributes at least a little to the background of Psalm 122. But politics was not the main event here, and neither was nostalgia nor the sheer wonder all travelers experience when visiting some place new. No, the main spring for this psalm's bubbling prose is the presence of Yahweh in Jerusalem. God had revealed that his peculiar dwelling on earth was, for that time at least, on Mount Zion in the Holy Temple. For that time in the wider flow of salvation history Israel was the target of the covenant--a covenant whose promises finally extended to all the nations of the earth whose future beatitude depended on the faithfulness of Abraham's descendants.

In short, God was there. God was doing something cosmic through Jerusalem. The covenant was in bloom there, replete with the global salvation it portended. This was why Jerusalem deserved its place of honor. This was why it was a worthy destination for pilgrims. Today many people go to the Holy Land to think about the past, about what happened to Jesus, to walk where Jesus walked, as in the past tense. It's pious nostalgia that draws many. But back when Psalm 122 was written it was not only what Jerusalem had once meant in the past but what it promised for the future that was vital. God was on the move there, his Spirit was present, and he was doing a marvelous work in the sight of his people.

But with Pentecost's outpouring of God's Spirit onto all his children, with the revelation that we are now all temples of the Holy Spirit, the Christian tradition has over time diffused this specific sense of location or place. We do not have a single locus for our piety. Churches in Grand Rapids, for instance, grow thicker than hair on a dog's back with every denominational variation conceivable. We don't even tend to regard our own congregation as necessarily different from the others. We may like and prefer our own congregation, but only a truly foolish or arrogant person would say that God's presence is only at Calvin Church in ways flat out not true of any others.

Well and good. But while most of this is a natural outcome of what the New Testament reveals, is it possible we have also lost something which we should not have lost--a truth of which even so ancient a relic as Psalm 122 can remind us? Perhaps so. The "problem," if we wish to label it thus, ties in with something that, all by itself, is not a problem at all but a true blessing; namely, the holy presence of God's Spirit in each of our hearts as well as in every true Church of Jesus Christ on the planet.

That's a real blessing but it tends to blunt our sense for sacred spaces and for the divine presence. How easily our minds slide from the notion that everything is truly holy to the notion that, therefore, nothing is particularly holy. If our faith did have one central, identifiable sacred shrine, we would probably venerate that place, protect it, speak gently and reverently about it. But because we have a multitude of churches each of which is regarded as similarly holy, our sense for this very holiness gets washed out. One is as good as another, or not, we think. There's nothing particularly special about, say, Calvin Church, and so we perhaps have less motivation to pray for its well-being while also perhaps having more willingness to criticize it as though we were speaking about no more than the Rotary Club. Sometimes we find ourselves criticizing the church with about as much ease, and for pretty much the same reason, as if we were complaining about the way Meijers stocks its produce section.

Now, of course, it could be alleged that precisely because we do honor and value our congregation we have a stake in all it does and so, for this reason, are concerned to point out places where we think the church is getting off the beam . Perhaps. The more strongly we feel about something, the more passionate we are about its workings and doings. But then we should be equally quick to celebrate what is good and to make praising God for it a feature of daily piety. In fact, only if we can first discern, and then celebrate, and then thank God for all the manifold evidences of his sacred presence in this place would we then maybe be in a position also to fret about other things.

But how often do we make praying for God's peace within this place a priority? How often, in assessing some note we're about to send to someone or in pondering something we want to say to the staff, the Council, or even privately to a friend in the narthex, how often do we weigh those words against the sacred integrity of this place? How often do we ponder if what we're doing will contribute to God's peace within these walls or whether we are harming that shalom in ways that are only destructive and not up-building? For each of us, starting with the person speaking at this moment, it seems that the tendency to complain comes easier than the tendency to build up and to give thanks. How glaringly something can stand out if we don't care for it but how unobvious to our eyes are the multitude of things for which we each ought to be giving thanks to our God in Jesus Christ every single day!

Our faith does not have a "Jerusalem" where we locate the full presence of God or of his advances in covenant love. What we do have, however, is the presence and work of God's Spirit in each of our hearts as well as, collectively, in this place. What we do have is pulpit, font, and table, each of which we believe is a dispenser and means of grace. And the fact that we could, if we wished, simply pull up stakes and transfer to another, very similar congregation ought not blunt for us, or make us the less wondrous about, the work of God in this place.

"For the sake of my brothers and friends, I will say, 'Shalom be within you.' For the sake of the house of the LORD, I will seek your prosperity." In other words, for the sake of one another, bound together as we are in cords of unity through our mutual baptism into the triune Name of God, and also for the sake of that same God, the Son of Whom gave his all for us and meets us each week in this place--for the sake of all that, let us indeed determine to seek the peace and blessing of also this very specific place. Granted, Calvin Church is no Jerusalem, but neither is it just another club. "I rejoiced with those who said to me, 'Let us go to the house of the LORD.'" May just such a holy fervor and deep-seated joy consume also us, the people of God in this place who are privileged, to quote the last vow we each took in our professions of faith, privileged "to join with God's people in doing the work of the Lord . . . everywhere." Amen.