On a Sunday morning, a few years ago, Connie and I found ourselves in my hometown.  When the worship times at Methodist Churches we belonged to did  not jibe with our schedule, we decided to go to the church that I grew up in. We arrived a bit late and sat in the back. During the greeting time, Margaret Anne made her way from the choir loft to the back rows to greet us. After greeting us she made a hasty retreat back for the anthem. We then settled in for the sermon. Almost immediately, I disagreed with the preacher. Feeling some theological frustration, I whispered to Connie “was the church this conservative when we worshiped here?” Connie put her finger to her mouth to shush me as if I was eleven. I was tempted to play Spelling Bee or check announcements on my phone, but resisted. I tried to re-engage but my frustration deepened and I released my mind to holy day dreaming. My mind wandered over to the stained glass windows that I loved as a child. I noticed John the Baptist had blonde hair and blue eyes. Jesus was almost as white. I wondered if our church homecoming was a mistake. Then, I thought of Margret Anne and how she taught Youth Sunday School with my Mother for decades. I thought how proud my dad, the chair of the deacon board, was when our Baptist church elected her as one of the first female deacons.  I saw Don and Matt, two of my dad‘s good friends, faithful deacons always taking care of people. I remembered how Connie and I first chatted standing around the pulpit, how Barb West decorated Fellowship Hall for our rehearsal dinner, and how we exchanged our marriage vows right there. I laughed thinking how my home church made me the youth director at nineteen. I thought of dad’s and then mom’s funerals in that sanctuary.  When friends asked about church, during brunch, there was no thought of theological frustration, I simply remembered so many people who had poured love into Connie and me.  

“How lovely is your dwelling place, oh God of all creation.” I wonder if three thousand years ago, the Psalmist’s mind wandered during worship? Our Psalm seems to be tracking well enough with the bulletin, but then… well listen 

How lovely is your dwelling place,  oh God of all creation. My soul longs, even yearns, for the Lord’s courtyards. My heart and my body rejoice out loud to the living God!

But then the sanctified day dreaming begins: “Yes, the sparrow too has found a home here; the swallow has found herself a nesting place where she can lay her young beside your altars! Those who live in your house (both deacons and doves) are truly happy; they praise you constantly. Those who put their strength in you are truly happy; pilgrimage is in their hearts.

Three times a year, pious Jews made a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem. The Bible prescribes more holy weeks than most Americans get in vacation each year. (Leviticus 23)  21 Holy Days set apart from ordinary time for community wide worship, celebration and feasting.  Deuteronomy 16 bans working during the festivals and includes everyone in the party: “celebrate in the presence of the Lord your God—you, your sons, your daughters, your workers, the Levites, the immigrants, the orphans, and the widows who are among you. Remember how you were (excluded as slaves in Egypt, and leave no one out).”  Reading about the feasts and burn offerings in Leviticus may feel strange to us, but I like to think of them as a big church homecoming service and barbeque.  

It is interesting that both First Kings (5 & 9)  and Second Chronicles (2) name how Soloman forgot Egyptian slavery and forced immigrants and minority groups to build the Temple. Just because something unjust happened in the Bible does not mean we are called to repeat unjust history, maybe the misguided history is there for us to learn from.  I could preach 3 sermons about that, but today, let’s acknowledge that the Temple was stunning. Solomon brought in a Phoniean design house to build what was considered the most stunning temple and palace complex in the ancient world. The Temple’s exterior featured a carved stone grape vine and the inside featured carved cedar, intricate tapestries, and golden fixtures.  The Temple sat on the top of the highest mountain. Enslaved people and animals flattened a square mile courtyard around the temple. Porticos, porches, archways, fountains, and gardens filled the Temple courtyard. Pilgrims passed through the Temple gazing at the tapestries, carved cedar panels, and golden artifacts, but most people worshiped outside in the courtyard.  

The Psalmist takes the worship experience with them off the mountain top as they return to ordinary time. They hold a “pilgrimage of the heart”.  Encounters with the holy rarely end with the benediction they transcend the moment and continue to resonate with us in our hearts.  

Worship has never been about production values.  It appears our Psalmists grew bored with the sermon or liturgy and engaged in some holy daydreaming. Dwelling in the space, they see the birds flying around the Temple: Yes, the sparrow too has found a home here; the swallow has made herself a nest laying her young beside God’s altars. The Psalmist hears God’s Word in the reading of the Law and preaching of the Prophets, but also in the songs of sparrows and the shift flight of the swallow catching mosquitoes as the sun sets. God brings us hope in words spoken around the altar table and in the joy of tossing a prayerful sparrow a little piece of our sacred bread. The Psalmist sees God in sacred songs and in swallows feeding her young before sunset. 

Maybe we might do some holy daydreaming. I wonder, did the Psalmist dream about our Boundless God  as the swallows rode the wind and soared above the Holy of Holies? Did the sparrow sing of God’s transcendence as she ate her bread atop the holiest place on earth, a space only the high priest entered once a year wearing warning bells to not startle God and with a liturgical rope tied to his ankle to drag him out in case God smote him for some unconfessed sin? (Leviticus 16) Have you ever seen a swallows nest, I am sure the Temple custodians hated them. Did the swallow’s unclean nest so near to the altar preach a sermon that day? 

In his book, The Universal Christ, Father Richard Rohr writes that God uses three things to seduce us out beyond ourselves (into worship, awe, transcendence and transformation): goodness, truth and beauty.  Howard Thurman in Jesus and the Dispossessed speaks of two paths that allow us to encounter Jesus: great suffering and great love. Perhaps, all of these: deep suffering, deep love, goodness, truth, and beauty open our souls to the possibility of meeting God? 

The Psalmist agrees with Howard Thurman about experiencing God amid suffering.  The Psalmist notes “As we pass through the Baca Valley ( a desert or as versions read “the valley of weeping “), they make it a spring of water. Yes, the early rain covers it with blessings.”  The Baca Valleys come, I have known two long nights of the soul, where my spirit felt almost dehydrated. It is interesting that the Psalmist does not say “they find water in the desert” but “they make springs of living water”. Somehow amid suffering, renewing rain falls. I left my two tear-filled valleys somehow more spiritually alive. 

Father Rohr writes: “The proof that you are a Christian is that you can see Christ everywhere… Authentic God experience always expands your seeing and never constricts it. In God you do not include less and less; you always see and love more and more. The more you transcend your small ego, the more you can include.  “Unless the single grain of wheat dies, it remains a single grain. But if it does, it will bear much fruit,” Jesus Christ says (John 12:24). We can dwell in the house of the Lord anywhere. 1 Chronicles 29 reminds us that “the earth and everything in it belongs to You Oh Lord”!  Where is God not dwelling? God speaks with the hymn and the humming birds racing around our feeders. Do we sabbath long enough to see God in, through and all around us? 

Will you make a pilgrimage in your heart? Rohr describes how he often sees the Divine Presence while looking at his black Labrador, Venus: “When you look at any other person, a flower, a honeybee, a mountain— anything —you are seeing the incarnation of God’s love for you and the universe you call home.”  

Such universal notions of experiencing God in the Bible and the bee’s flight path challenge the gatekeepers of orthodoxy, but seem about right to everyday mystics like me who believe in a God who restlessly tries to open our hearts, minds, bodies and souls to the Holy.  God woos us with undeserved love, transcendence amid suffering, beauty, goodness, truth, and transformation.   We Wesleyans call God’s wooing prevenient grace. These pilgrimages of the heart, let us see the world anew.  

Well you may be wondering how a sermon about our seeing God in crows and creeds and  swallows and sermons has to do with our series about Christ-like speech?  I think to change our conversations we need to change our hearts.  Jesus said, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”. (Matthew 6:21) And Jesus taught that the things we treasure in our hearts will spill out of our mouths. (Mt 12:34). If we hope to change our conversations we must change our hearts.  

Will we people who make pilgrimages to the Temple and keep a pilgrimage in our hearts?  “those who put their strength in God are truly happy; pilgrimage is in their hearts”.

Oh, we so need to step away from ordinary time, speech and work and enter the world of awe, wonder, transcendence, beauty, goodness, and love. We step out of the death-dealing conversations to be renewed by an inner conversation with all things holy. Will we dwell in God’s courtyards, hearing God in the sermon and the songbird, Deuteronomy and Holy Daydreaming, Philippians and feeding the hungry? 

Oh come let us make a pilgrimage in our hearts, allowing worship to change our hearts, our hearts to our conversations, and maybe our conversations can change our world. Come join me in making daily pilgrimages in our hearts.  Amen