After last week’s furrowed brows about ‘fear’, this psalm rings with those warm, positive poetic images that stick in the memory:
1 How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts!
2 My soul longs, indeed it faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God.
3 Even the sparrow finds a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, at your altars, O God.
And later, in this short psalm:
10 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.
11 For God is a sun and shield who bestows favor and honor. No good thing does God withhold from those who walk uprightly.
12 Happy is everyone who trusts in you.
I leave it at that; it speaks for itself.
Music
We do have a simple refrain suitable for a responsive singing of this psalm in the Psalms in the South library on Dropbox.
However, we shall turn on this occasion to the melodic tune HARINGTON, adapted from the old Scottish psalter of 1650, in Together in Song no 44. We look forward to Jon’s leadership this Sunday.
Psalms in the South 