“1. As the deer pants for the water brooks, So my soul pants for You, O God. 2. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God; When shall I come and appear before God? 3. My tears have been my food day and night, While they say to me all day long, “Where is your God?” 4. These things I remember and I pour out my soul within me. For I used to go along with the throng and lead them in procession to the house of God, With the voice of joy and thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival. 5. Why are you in despair, O my soul? And why have you become disturbed within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him For the help of His presence.” Psalm 42:1-5 (NAS95)
The psalmist was responsible for worship music for Temple services, sort of like a modern “worship leader” in many of today’s churches. For reasons not mentioned in the psalm, the psalmist is cut off from worshipping at the Temple and he misses both his faith family and his experience of the joy of worship. He cries out, “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God; When shall I come and appear before God?”
Just what was the psalmist missing? First of all, much of what was sacrificed on the Temple altar became food for the priests, worship leaders and the worshippers themselves. Holy days were a community feast, a holy church potluck!
There was pageantry, music on a grand scale, and great spectacle. For instance, the harvest holiday of Sukkot or Feast of Tabernacles included lighting four gold menorahs at sundown in the Temple… and each of the Menorah’s were 75 feet high! Each menorah was filled with gallons of oil and the huge wicks were made from the old robes of the Temple priests twisted together. When the lamps were lit, the whole city glowed!
This psalm is a lament of thirst for the experience of God’s Presence; the absence of that experience feels an awful lot like the absence of God, but the psalmist clearly knows the difference and he refuses to despair. God is not absent; but the joy of worship is. So the psalmist focuses his thought on the person of the living God saying, “O my God, my soul is in despair within me; therefore I remember YOU!!” (Psalm 42:6)
By now you should realize that many of us have a common lament with the psalmist. Like him we too are separated from the joyful experience of worshipping the living God together. Many of us worship by gathering in front of our TVs and it is nothing like the joy and warmth of actually meeting together with our faith family in places we have learned to set aside for holy purpose.
We are in exile from worship.
We used to go to the well of our Christian life once a week, throw down the bucket, and draw up friends, a joyful choir of community singing, discussion that enlightened and encouraged, taking communion while actually communing with everyone, sitting in a sanctuary that helped set aside our time and order our restless spirits, we enjoyed the care and instruction given to our children by instructors who care about our children, we shared hot coffee with warm hearts, potlucks and a general, recreational change of pace from our daily lives.
Now, we come to the same well once a week, throw down the same bucket and draw up… nothing but God!
God regularly allows the powerfully good, incarnate blessings that represent His presence in our life to be crucified, just like His incarnate body in Jesus Christ. He is even willing to withdraw the powerful blessings of joyful worship together.
This is so that those good things do not become idols… as even Jesus’s body had become to his followers.
It is also that He might be transformed, even transfigured into a new and more powerful revelation of Himself and deepen our relationship with Him. He doesn’t so much change in those times as grow deeper, wider and higher in the truth that He taught us.
We mourn our exile, but there is ample reason to stay hopeful in our discomfort. Whenever we purposefully set aside time and space for the holy purpose of meeting with God with praise, thanks, reflection on His Word and the fellowship of communion, we worship Him. God is blessing His Church around the world by dislocating them from their fondest imaginings of Him and bringing us to a fasting that will take us deeper into Him and away from our idolatrous fixations.
“Why are you in despair, O my soul? And why are you disturbed within me? Hope in God, for I shall again praise Him, The help of my countenance and my God.”
Each month a member of the Cook County Ministerium will offer Spiritual Reflections. This month’s contributor is Pastor Dave Harvey, who has served as pastor of Grand Marais Evangelical Free Church since February of 2008.
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