Sermon: Let Glory Come In

The whole of religion is in the psalms, every response human beings can make to life and to God: lament and praise, despair and hope, fear and confidence, resignation and faith - and all things in-between.  We overhear the prayers of individual men and women, and of the community of Israel uttered out of every conceivable human situation.  Because of this, they have always been at the heart of the church's worship.  In the Book of Common Prayer, the entire Psalter was to be recited in the course of the daily services once a month, a tradition we keep here at the cathedral.  In the Rule of St Benedict it was once a week.  Many desert fathers recited all the psalms from memory once a day.  They are a mirror of the human soul in its tragedy and triumph, one of the great summits of spiritual intelligence not only in the Hebrew Bible but in the history of all religion.

I want to speak tonight about one of them, Psalm 24 which will be sung during tonight's office of Compline.  It's a well-known psalm, not least because of Handel's chorus ‘Lift up your heads' in Messiah. Traditionally this is one of the proper psalms for Ascension Day.  But in Common Worship Daily Prayer, the psalm is set as the opening canticle at daily morning prayer.  And this is close to what was probably the original life-setting of the psalm in ancient Israel.  Psalm 24 is what we call an entrance liturgy, a song sung at the threshold of the temple.  Perhaps it began life in the ceremony of installing the ark of the covenant in the sanctuary. We can imagine the procession stopping in front of the closed doors of the holy place and the priests knocking for admission: open up so that the King of Glory may enter.  From inside comes the liturgical question: who is the king of glory?  From outside comes the response: ‘It is the Lord strong and mighty, even the Lord mighty in battle'.  Once more the question is put and the answer given: ‘Even the Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory'; he who now comes into his sanctuary to be enthroned in splendour, the everlasting guarantee of his presence among the people he has chosen.  And no doubt this great event was re-enacted each year by a liturgical procession into the holy place while this psalm was sung.  

So one of the psalm's themes is that the temple is God's sanctuary, the sacred place that symboliseds presence, kingship, covenant promise.  But we need to imagine how Israel would have understood this.  In the ancient world, holy places such as temples and shrines were symbols of the world itself, a microcosm of the universe in its perfection and good order.  Indeed, a medieval building like this cathedral is consciously constructed as an image of the cosmic order: its patterns, its symmetries, its colours, its scale and its stability were intended as an enduring image of a divinely ordered creation.  Worshippers crossed the threshold of this sacred space and entered a transcendent world that spoke of the universe as the sphere of God's presence and God's reign.  So the psalm opens with a celebration of creation: ‘the earth is the Lord's and all that therein is; the compass of the world and they that dwell therein.  That is to say, the presence of God in the sanctuary points to his presence in creation.  It too is a temple that utters its own unconscious worship and praise to its Creator: ‘the heavens declare the glory of God: and the firmament sheweth his handy-work' as another psalm puts it. Creation is God's sanctuary.   

And like the temple building itself, the creation is stable and trustworthy, for ‘he has founded it on the seas, and established it on the rivers'.  Even the subversive, chaotic powers of the flood that the ancients feared more than anything else know their bounds and will never transgress them - a very common theme in the psalms. In the beginning, in Genesis, the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the formless, terrifying deep.  Day by day God spoke, and brought about an ordered, structured world: the dry land, the lights of heaven, plant life, birds, fish, animals, human beings - everything belonging in its place.  So if we read the beginning of the Psalm in the light of the end, we have a profound insight about religious faith.  It is that religion can never be confined to the sanctuary, but belongs to the whole of life.  It is thoroughly worldly in its scope.  There is ultimately no such distinction as the one we commonly make between ‘sacred' and ‘secular', for everything is made sacred by the fact that the earth is the Lord's.  What we do, who we are here in church, before God, is no different from what we do and who we are in the world.  More than that: to celebrate God's coming into the holy place and his presence there is to celebrate his coming to the world and being present in the creation.  The psalm has a global ecology.  It tells us that Advent is more than the hope that God will come to his holy place.  It is the promise that he will come to the world that is already his and bring to it his justice, healing and peace.  In this missionary season, this psalm is an Advent mandate for environmental seriousness.  We care for the world and treat it with courtesy because of whose it already is: not ours but God's. 

So the temple is his sanctuary and creation is his sanctuary: these are the insights of the first and last parts of the psalm.  Sandwiched between them is the central section that asks, in the light of all this, who is fit to stand before God and worship him?  Once again, you can picture how the worshipper, conscious of the immensity of the world he or she lives in, approaches the sanctuary whose God is greater than all imagining, and is stopped at the threshold.  Before going in, that worshipper is forced to ask some fundamental questions.  ‘Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?  And who shall stand in his holy place?'  This recalls another question the Psalter puts so searchingly.  In Psalm 8, a human being surveys all that God has made, the immensity of the heavens, the wonder of a planet teeming with life, and asks: what is a mere mortal that God should even consider this tiny part of the creation?  Psalm 24 answers by offering a list of virtues that will be found in the person who comes to worship with integrity: ‘those who have clean hands and pure hearts, who do not lift up their souls to what is false, and do not swear deceitfully. They will receive blessing from the Lord, and vindication from the God of their salvation.'  You could summarise this as someone who embodies the values of God's law, the torah - recalling that the scrolls of the torah are themselves the object of the pilgrimage the worshipper makes to the holy shrine.  Jeremiah speaks of the days of the new covenant when the torah will be written on human hearts.  St John speaks of worshipping God ‘in spirit and in truth'. 

The inwardness of this central section of the psalms is in powerful contrast to the outer sections which are all about what we can see and experience in the temple and in the world that both belong to God.  But the point is clear: the individual worshipper too belongs to God.  Just as the temple is his sanctuary, and creation is his sanctuary, so each worshipper, each human life is also his sanctuary.  And when God takes up residence in human hearts, he brings to them what he brings to the temple and to the world: divine order, pattern, and stability.  The virtues of torah are the virtues of a well-ordered life, the life consciously lived in the light of God's covenant gift of loving-kindness, and our covenant duty of obedience and loyalty.  So the worshipper, pausing to ask in what spirit it is possible to enter God's holy presence, knows what is required.  It is to embody the same order and goodness that creation exhibits; and to lift up the gates of the heart and mind and soul so that the King of glory may come in and reign there.  So just as Advent summons the church and the world to acknowledge God's reign, so it summons each individual into a renewed awareness of what it means to be a citizen of his kingdom.  ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock' says the risen Christ to the luke-warm people of Laodicaea.  God's coming is an invitation and a call to personal seriousness and spiritual intelligence.  ‘Such is the company of those who seek him, who seek the face of the God of Jacob'.     

At my ordination as a priest, the choir sang a well-known anthem that is a favourite of mine, Expectans Expectavi:

This sanctuary of my soul, / Unwitting I keep white and whole,Unlatch'd and lit, if Thou should'st care / To enter or to tarry there.

With parted lips and outstretch'd hands, / And list'ning ears Thy servant stands.Call Thou early, call Thou late, / to Thy great service dedicate.

The ‘I' is first and foremost the individual disciple, you or me, the man or woman in the centre of the psalm.  But if we are becoming the place of God's sanctuary, then his presence creates a movement beyond ourselves.  ‘I' becomes the people of God together celebrating the advent of their king in glory, and flinging wide the gates to welcome him.  And this in turn becomes a sign of a world that will one day enthrone him as king in its midst, and be delivered from all that spoils and enslaves it.  The psalm offers us a vision bigger than ourselves, bigger than our church, in fact, as wide as the earth.  It announces that one day the Lord will be recognised as king by the entire human family.  By singing this psalm in Advent, we remind ourselves that this season is a time of joyful expectation because of God's movement of love towards all people, and towards the whole of creation.  We celebrate the dawning of the day when the psalm's great vision is fulfilled and the earth is the Lord's and all that therein is, not battered and broken as it is now, but made beautiful once more, transformed into the new heaven and the new earth of which our reading spoke, and for which we long and pray. 

Compline Address, 7 December 2006

Psalm 24