Dec 29, 2022
I rejoiced with those who said to me, “Let us go to the house of the Lord.” Our feet are standing in your gates, Jerusalem. (Psalm 122:1-2)
Psalm 120 marked the repentant turn that began the journey to God. Psalm 121 marks the trustful journey up. And now, already in Psalm 122: we’ve arrived at our destination. “Our feet are standing in your gates, Jerusalem.”
Even though the journey is the backdrop of all of the psalms of ascent, the focal point of these psalms is not the journey itself, but the destination. It is a journey to God and to the place where God had caused his name to dwell among his people: Jerusalem.
That’s a good reorientation point for us, too. Because we’re good at the journey. We’re good at stringing together a life that works. We have all sorts of “common sense” and sayings and experts and best practices and YouTube how-to videos to navigate ourselves successfully through the journey of life. And we have to do these things—we have to work, keep up the house, raise the family, get where we need to go—because if we don’t, these things have real consequences. They make their demands on us daily.
But God doesn’t. If we don’t stop to pay attention to God… nothing really happens. If we don’t go up to worship on a regular basis… our life skates on just fine. No one has to go to worship. And lots of people have discovered this over the pandemic time with its lockdowns. Going up to worship is not “essential.” It is voluntary. It always has been: even in ancient Israel.
Sure, Israel had laws that said otherwise, but if you examine the record of faithfulness to this law given in our scriptures, you’ll find it ebbed and flowed, just like it does today. Faithful practice never lasted for more than a generation in the general population. And faithful practice usually never resumed until there were, well, consequences: like subjugation to a foreign power or exile to a foreign land. But Jesus has now shouldered all those consequences for us… so there really is only one reason left to ever go to worship. Do you know what it is?
God.
And unless that’s the reason you come—to meet with God, to be shaped by God, to grow in your love for God, to live in faithful response to God—then your coming is subject to the same shifting sands that have ever blown away the faithfulness of God’s people.
Of course, it works the other way too: in coming to worship, our pretenses and utilitarian uses for God and for worship are slowly stripped away as God does his work in us and as the relationship between us grows. We become part of God’s story, we are reminded of God’s presence, we receive God’s love, we are empowered by God’s work through his Son and Spirit. Slowly, the act of worship trains our emotions, our desires, our habits, and all of our lives such that we find ourselves in company with Psalm 122 among those who can say: “I rejoiced with those who said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’”