 If you've ever been to the Holy Land, I hope you've had the joy of going south from Galilee, all the way down the River Jordan to Jericho, and then turning right and going up the hill. And you go up and up and up. It's a long way because Jericho is the lowest point on the face of the earth, well below sea level. And Jerusalem, where you're heading for, is about 1,500 feet above sea level. So it's a long climb, whether you do it on foot or in a car or on donkey or anything else. And as the pilgrims in ancient times would make that journey, going to Jerusalem for the festivals, they would sing the songs of what we call the songs of ascents, which means the going up songs. And there are several of these, and in the Psalms there are numbers 120 to 134. So Psalm 132, which we're looking at now, is near the end of that sequence, and it's much longer than the rest of them, as though it is designed to give you the larger picture of why you're going to Jerusalem in the first place, why you should care, what's special about Jerusalem. And this provides them the rationale that says this is where God has promised to meet with his people. And that sense of going up to Jerusalem, of course, carries on into the Gospel stories, particularly in Luke, from Luke 9 all the way to Luke 19, there is a sense of Jesus and his followers being on this journey, going up to Jerusalem. So we're singing a Jesus song here, and as Christian interpreters we can see the original meanings and imagine how they are being retrieved in Jesus' day by his fellow Judeans and then by Jesus and his followers themselves. The thing that Psalm 132 is saying is residually odd for us modern Western persons. We tend to think that if God is going to do anything or be anything in the world, it would be undemocratic if God just did something in one place rather than every place or for one person rather than for everybody. But when we read the Psalms we realize, and actually when you're in Jerusalem, it seems to make a lot more sense, I've found, that God has said, actually I want to come and live here, not in order to be absent from the rest of the world, but to make this the place through which I will bless the whole world. And maybe that's part of the reason why some people have reacted to the Davidic Psalms in general and said, oh, they're very royal and very sort of aristocratic and we today in our democratic world don't like that kind of thing. And we prefer general truths rather than the scandalous idea that God might choose one family in one place and all that. But then we have become aware as well of the shrewdness of King David in choosing Jerusalem as his capital, as a place to unite all the 12 tribes. So we know all that, but actually there is a major biblical theme embedded here which we have to do business with if we're to understand Old Testament or indeed New Testament. And actually it's a cluster of biblical themes and it goes rather like this. In creation God makes a world, a heaven plus earth reality. We know from many cultures that a building which is a place where heaven and earth meet is basically a temple and Genesis 1 describes the building of this cosmic temple, God's own dwelling place. It's a place where he wants to come and live and the idea of coming to live somewhere is about building a house and then going and being at ease in it, taking your rest, not in order simply to sleep and do nothing, but in order to be at home. And the idea of taking your rest is about being at ease in a place. And God calls humans to be his partners, his image reflectors within his world. And after the fall and human rebellion and idolatry and sin, has God abandoned his idea of coming to live in his world, in his heaven and earth reality? No, God renews that promise. But he does so by calling one family, namely Abraham and his people, so that he can work back to the original intention and bring his creation to where he always intended it would be, though by now a much more circuitous route. And so Abraham's family become the people in whose midst God comes to live in the book of Exodus after the rescue from Egypt. God commands Moses to build the tabernacle and in Exodus 40 God comes to live there as a sign of his desire to fill the whole of heaven and earth. He fills this one place and Israel is the tabernacle bearing people. And then when King David builds the city of Jerusalem up to be his royal capital, he then wants to build a house for God to take over from the tabernacle, the tent. But in fact it's Solomon, his son, who builds the great temple in Jerusalem. And when he dedicates it, the cloud of God's presence comes and indwells that house as it did in the tabernacle before. And this is where God has come to take his rest, to be at home. Not in order to say the rest of the world doesn't matter, but as an advance statement of what God wants to do in and for the whole creation. So Israel as a family, the seed of Abraham, then gets focused on the king and Israel as the promised land then gets focused on Jerusalem and Jerusalem gets focused on the temple so that the king and the temple absolutely belong together. And they belong as the sign of God's claim on all people, as the means of God's claim on all lands. And the ultimate rest is in view, the rest of the new creation, the ultimate Sabbath towards which all the Sabbaths of Israel are pointing. And from a Christian point of view, when we read a Psalm like this we should see all of that pointing forwards to Jesus coming to be the heaven and earth person, the son of David, the temple builder, the temple in person, the one who launches the project of new creation, who says the time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is at hand.