'Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for
herself, where she may lay her young, even Thine altars, O Lord of
Hosts, my King, and my God.'--PSALM lxxxiv. 3.
The well-known saying of the saintly Rutherford, when he was silenced
and exiled from his parish, echoes and expounds these words. 'When I
think,' said he, 'upon the sparrows and swallows that build their nests
in the kirk of Anwoth, and of my dumb Sabbaths, my sorrowful, bleared
eyes look asquint upon Christ, and present Him as angry.' So sighed the
Presbyterian minister in his compelled idleness in a prosaic
seventeenth-century Scotch town, answering his heart's-brother away back
in the far-off time, and in such different circumstances. The Psalmist
was probably a member of the Levitical family of the Sons of Korah, who
were 'doorkeepers in the house of the Lord.' He knew what he was saying
when he preferred his humble office to all honours among the godless. He
was shut out by some unknown circumstances from external participation
in the Temple rites, and longs to be even as one of the swallows or
sparrows that twitter and flit round the sacred courts. No doubt to him
faith was much more inseparably attached to form than it should be for
us. No doubt place and ritual were more to him than they can permissibly
be to those who have heard and understood the great charter of spiritual
worship spoken first to an outcast Samaritan of questionable character:
'Neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem shall men worship the
Father.' But equally it is true that what he wanted was what the outward
worship brought him, rather than the worship itself. And the psalm,
which begins with 'longing' and 'fainting' for the courts of the Lord,
and pronouncing benedictions on 'those that dwell in Thy house,' works
itself clear, if I might so say, and ends with 'O Lord of Hosts! Blessed
is the man that trusteth in Thee'--for he shall 'dwell in Thy house,'
wherever he is. So this flight of imagination in the words of my text
may suggest to us two or three lessons.