Today’s Advent Reflection is from Peter Illingworth.
Our God and Our Church.
Psalm 48
Great is the Lord and highly to be praised, in the city of our God. His holy mountain is fair and lifted high, the joy of all the earth. On Mount Zion, the divine dwelling place, stands the city of the great king. In her palaces God has shown himself to be a sure refuge.
For behold, the kings of the earth assembled and swept forward together. They saw, and were dumbfounded; dismayed, they fled in terror. Trembling seized them there; they writhed like a woman in labour, as when the east wind shatters the ships of Tarshish. As we had heard, so have we seen in the city of the Lord of hosts, the city of our God: God has established her for ever.
We have waited on your loving-kindness, O God, in the midst of your temple. As with your name, O God, so your praise reaches to the ends of the earth; your right hand is full of justice. Let Mount Zion rejoice and the daughters of Judah be glad, because of your judgements, O Lord.
Walk about Zion and go round about her; count all her towers; consider well her bulwarks; pass through her citadels, that you may tell those who come after that such is our God for ever and ever. It is he that shall be our guide for evermore.
Reflection
Doing a spot of research into the background of Psalm 48, I found that the King of Assyria, attacked the fortified cities of the Kingdom of Judah in a campaign of subjugation around 700 BC. He tried to besiege Jerusalem, but it withstood the attack and soon after the psalmist celebrated and rejoiced in the ‘City of our God’: the towers, the ramparts and citadels and, in particular, the temple within Jerusalem. The psalmist encouraged people to walk around Zion and admire the solid, life-saving architecture.
I first stepped into St Michael’s Church in the summer of last year. I admired the tower, the arch of the roof and golden roof bosses, the stained glass and the pristine stonework, but it was as the congregation responded to the first few lines of the liturgy
Young or old, we welcome you,
Happy or Sad, we welcome you,
Rich or poor, we welcome you …
and as we sang, “Calm me Lord as you calmed the storm … Enfold me Lord in Your peace”, that I realised I was visiting a church in the true meaning of the word – a gathering of people who love God and practise love with those they meet. I was very aware that I had entered a building in which people met with God.
I have missed being able to go to Sunday morning services when we literally ‘gathered together’ to worship. During full lockdown I have missed being able to even enter the building. But the source of Comfort and Joy that I can still experience isn’t limited to the building because God is omnipresent. In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul wrote, ‘Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you?’ and I feel I can rejoice with Paul and the psalmist because God meets us where we are and we can live within our own ‘temples’.
Reading Psalm 48 a second time I realise that the source of the psalmist’s Comfort and Joy was not so much the city and the temple but God himself, whom the Jews worshiped in the temple. Just over 100 years later the first temple was destroyed and the Jews were exiled to Babylon, but God never left them. Although we may feel as though we are exiled from the church building we love, we can rest assured that God can live in us by his Spirit and we can say with the psalmist, ‘This God is our God for ever and ever; he will be our guide for evermore’.