"The Lovely Narrative of
 God’s Presence and Work"

Preached by John DeBevoise
At Palma Ceia Presbyterian Church
 On July 8, 2001

How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts! My soul longs, indeed it faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God.
Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, at your altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God. Happy are those who live in your house, ever singing your praise.
Happy are those whose strength is in you, in whose heart are the highways to Zion. As they go through the valley of Baca they make it a place of springs; the early rain also covers it with pools. They go from strength to strength; the God of gods will be seen in Zion.
O Lord God of hosts, hear my prayer; give ear, O God of Jacob! Behold our shield, O God; look on the face of your anointed. For a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than live in the tents of wickedness. For the Lord God is a sun and shield; he bestows favor and honor. No good thing does the Lord withhold from those who walk uprightly. O Lord of hosts, happy is everyone who trusts in you.
       Psalm 84

My own experience with scripture, particularly in the devotional life, is that scripture that you read over, scripture that you pray over, scripture that you come back to in a pattern over the course of a week, or again and again in your life, that those scriptures have a way of getting into your heart, into your mind, into your soul. That the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, will then work with those scriptures and bring them back to you, bring them to your memory and bring them to your own thinking at different times in your life. The Spirit will bring those scriptures back to teach you, to prompt you, to comfort you, to nudge you, to challenge you.

For example, if in a particular devotional help, I am reading a psalm every day for a week, I almost invariably find that certain phrases from that psalm will come back to me. Not necessarily at the moment of sharing in the devotional discipline…it may be just the reading of words at that point. But later in the day, in a meeting, when driving along in the car, in the midst of a problem, the words, some passage from that scripture, will come back to my memory. I believe that is the prompting of the Spirit, the work of the Spirit helping me.

I wonder if that’s your experience, too.

In June, one of the psalms I was reading devotionally, and the principal psalm, was this Psalm 84, because it was the lectionary psalm. I wanted to share with you some of the ways that this scripture came back to me as I walked through the month. In the second week of the month, I got on an airplane at Tampa International, headed towards the meeting of the General Assembly in Louisville. I got on it in a hurry because I had put things off until the last minute, being distracted by other needs that had to be attended to. So I sort of packed in a flash and threw the materials that I had to take with me into a duffel bag and raced up to the airport, jumped out, and got my baggage and my body on the plane just in the nick of time. I was maybe the last passenger on before they shut the door.

Up we went, and off we took into the wild blue yonder. I was looking through some of the materials I was needing to study as I went to the General Assembly. We were about fifteen minutes into the flight when all of a sudden the plane started turning very hard to the left. Generally I leave the flying of the planes to the pilots because they do a better job than I do of flying the planes. But in this case, I noticed we were turning hard to the left, and as I’ve flown out of Florida, we almost always just head north, unless we’re going to Haiti, and then we head south. So I couldn’t help but just sort of watch the scenery change. And then I noticed the way the plane was dropping in altitude. Before very long, we were at what I would call landing altitude, flying above the houses.

Sure enough, in a minute the pilot came on the intercom and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, you may have noticed that we have turned back toward Tampa. That’s because the gauges and instruments that we have here in the cockpit are telling us that one of the engines is on fire. We don’t think it is, but we have to trust these instruments, and so it’s in your best interest for us to take this plane back at this time."

So for about the next ten minutes, I sort of saw my life go before my eyes in the review. That’s a natural kind of reaction, I guess, of people on an airplane whenever you hear something other than what you’re used to hearing come from the pilot. I said to myself, “They’ll get this on the ground…" but on the other hand, I found myself thinking, “What is it I needed to have done before I met my Maker that I have not remembered to do at this point?" I bet there were a lot of passengers sort of thinking through that life review.

I tried to think about my faith as a way of comforting myself, but all I could remember was a joke that Dr. Bill Oglesby used to tell where when he was on a plane that suddenly had to make a landing, a Christian friend leaned over to him and said, “Bill, don’t worry. Remember Jesus said, I will be with you always." Dr. Oglesby said, “No! What he said was, Lo! I will be with you always!"

So I was worried. And then all of a sudden this line from the psalm came to my mind. “For a day in your courts, O Lord, is better than a thousand years here in this earth. Far better is a day in your courtyard than a thousand anywhere else."

It wasn’t particularly the line I would have chosen to come at that moment, because right then I believed the psalm, I was willing to negotiate for two or three more days in someplace else rather than even a day like a thousand years in the Lord’s courtyard. But then I realized that we all are headed towards the Lord’s courtyard. While we may not be able to control the particular moment in which we make that landing, that ultimately is the destination for each one of us.

The psalmist was telling me that whether it was to be that day or whether it is to be another day out in my earthly future, the psalmist was telling me, “John, don’t be afraid," reassuring me that a day in the Lord’s court is far better than a thousand days that we have known in this life. It was a word of comfort to me.

They took the eighty-eight people that had been on the plane, once we had landed safely, began the process of getting us on a bunch of other planes to take us to our destinations. It was about three o’clock in the afternoon. Finally at about eleven that night I left Cincinnati, which is where they sent me to get me to Louisville, in the re-routing. As I was flying from Cincinnati towards Louisville, I was praying. Praying about the General Assembly and about the Presbyterian Church. I was asking the Lord to help the church as we went to this meeting. I was worried about the church. I was asking the Lord to hold the church together in peace and in the common spirit around Jesus Christ. I was thinking how many Presbyterians would be thinking about this General Assembly and must be praying about it, too.

When we landed in Louisville, I got off the plane and sort of expected to see a welcoming party there. I thought that probably most of Louisville would be aware of the fact that I was a commissioner to the General Assembly, and that they could probably tell that about me as I got off the plane there in the airport. There was a big banner that said “Welcome Presbyterians!" there in the airport. But most of the people, I noticed, a big crowd of them right outside the gate, were actually gathered in another circle. I looked over there to see what the fuss was about, and they had a banner, too. That banner said, “Our Korean angel has landed!"

Looking at the group, I realized that there was an uncle and a grandmother, and a couple of cousins. They were all looking, sure enough, at a beautiful Korean baby that the proud adoptive mother was holding there. She had just stepped off the plane that I had been on, carrying this new child, this baby that she had brought back from Korea. There was this baby’s family, for the very first time, welcoming this Korean angel who had landed in their midst.

I was sort of embarrassed, thinking about all of my prayers that the Lord would take care of the General Assembly, and there all along, the Lord was doing another work, taking care of this baby from another country across the sea, getting it there and getting its family together for it. I thought maybe the Lord could take care of the Presbyterians, too. He seems to be able to hold the world together pretty well.

I looked at that baby and I thought of this line from the psalm: Even the sparrow finds a home, and even the swallow, the Lord provides a nest for, at the Lord’s altars. Even this baby, the Lord had provided for and had found a home for.

About a week later, I went to Colorado on a family vacation. We went with a number of other families. I went to the Young Life Family Camp out in Buena Vista, Colorado, called Trails West. It was a great experience! We rode horses and we fished for trout in the stream, and we danced at a square dance, and I bought a cheap cowboy hat. We did all those things that you want to do if you go to Colorado.

The truth about me is that, although I am embarrassed to tell you, this is the first time I had ever been west of the Mississippi. So when we landed there in Denver, it was the first time that I had ever seen the Rocky Mountains. Wow…. Of course as many of you have seen them, the only thing to say about them is that they are impressive. As I got into the car that we had rented and started to drive through the mountains, I found that the mountains kept kind of summoning my faith forward. I found that I couldn’t look at the majesty of those mountains, some of which go higher than fourteen thousand feet, without thinking about the majesty of God who had created them.

One day in the week we climbed to the top of one of the mountains, called Mount Princeton. It’s almost thirteen thousand feet high, and the highest of the Rockies are a little over fourteen thousand. This one was nearly thirteen thousand feet. A whole group of us went to the top of the mountain. We actually got in cars and drove to about twelve thousand feet and hiked up from there. Boy, the last thousand feet seemed like a great and wonderful journey for us! We started out in kind of a rolling trail across the ridge, headed towards the summit. Children and parents going together, and I felt like that scene from “The Sound of Music" where they cross the Alps at the end, carrying a little child on my back.

Then we got to a place where the trail started going up, and so some of the adults stayed back with the smaller children, but I wanted to go for the experience, so I started to go up the trail. About halfway up that second part, the trail began to stop moving horizontally and started going vertically. It wasn’t very long before I found myself, in at least what seemed to me, doing a vertical climb up the side of a mountain. Have you ever found yourself in a place where you didn’t expect to be, and if you had seen you were going to be there, you wouldn’t have chosen to be there? I found myself suddenly in the midst of snow on this mountain, and it was slushy, and I was looking for handholds, knowing that I’m a big fellow that if I fall twelve thousand feet, I don’t bounce very well. I was scared at that moment.

But I made it to the top! And it was worth it, because when I got to the top of this mountain, I was able to look three hundred and sixty degrees at the panoramic view of the Rockies. How majestic they are! I found myself, all of a sudden, thinking of this verse: How lovely is thy dwelling place, O Lord of hosts! I remembered how the Israelites thought that God’s presence was at the top of the mountain. And I could understand that! How lovely is thy dwelling place, O Lord of hosts,  I remembered from this psalm. My innermost being longs, indeed it faints for the court of the living God; my heart and my body sing for joy to the living God.

Being on the mountaintop made me feel that way. This psalm became the vocabulary that gave expression to the way I saw the Creator at work in the beauty of those mountains.

Towards the end of the week, I sat on the verandah of the room we were staying in at the lodge. Early one morning (there was a beautiful view from the verandah of the Cottonwood Pass and the Buena Vista Valley, and several of the mountains) I was praying and thanking the Lord for letting me be there that week and thanking the Lord for all of this beauty, and sort of all of a sudden being sensitive to the presence of the Lord, looking for the Lord out there in that view. In that prayer, all of a sudden a hummingbird showed up. It came in suddenly and hovered immediately in front of me, just about half the distance between me and Patricia now, just hovering there. I’ve seen hummingbirds before, but this one, this one came and hovered right there and it didn’t leave. It just stayed, as if it were looking at me! I thought, Are you a messenger?

I was thinking of the Hebrew word for angel, messenger from God. Are you a messenger of the presence of the living God? The bird didn’t move. It just hovered right there, and I thought, If you are a messenger from God, O Lord give me some sign. The bird veered about ten degrees to the right. It went up and hovered right there. The bird and I stayed together and prayed for a full minute, and then the bird was gone.

What do you do with experiences like that when they happen to you? What do you do with that? Faith, I find, is the business of having to decide if that moment was the presence of God or if it wasn’t. God never is content with just sort of answer the question as I asked it in the prayer. The hummingbird never says to me, “Yes, I’m a messenger from God." It’s always kind of left in the tension of that moment, and God calls for me to be a kind of partner in faith. “You decide, John."

Faith is the trusting the belief that God is present in the experience we are having. I found myself thinking of this line from the psalm. “Even the sparrow finds a home , and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, at your altars, O Lord of hosts."

I want to ask you if you’ll look at this psalm with me and see if you hear in it the voice of the living God speaking to you. If you read this psalm and if you pray over it and if you meditate on it, I believe you will find the scriptures coming back to you. And the Spirit, I think is at work in that, seeking to nurture your faith. Seeking to teach you. Seeking to lead you. Seeking to call you into faith.

You can find this psalm on page 207 in the Hymnal. I hope you’ll turn to it for a moment. Psalms, you know, are meant to be sung, because only music can give us a voice to express our faith. And sometimes only music can be the vehicle of bringing the faith to us. Words are not always sufficient. I was surprised, when I went looking for this psalm in the Hymnal, this psalm that I had been living with all month long, to find that the name of the tune for the psalm is “Merle’s Tune,â?? which was my grandfather’s first name. What do you do with stuff like that?

Faith sees the providence of God at work in those kinds of encounters. I am going to ask David Matthews if he will play the psalm through once, and after he’s done that, I’ll ask those of you who can read the little black dots that move around on the page to join with me in singing the first verse. Then I’ll invite everyone to join on the second and third verses, as we hear the Lord speaking to us through this psalm together.

© John T. DeBevoise, 2001