Psalm 137: 1 by the Rivers of Babylon—There We Sat Down and There We Wept When We Remembered Zion
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Psalm 137: 1 By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. 2 On the willows there we hung up our harps. 3 For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” 4 How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? 5 If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither! 6 Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy. 7 Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem’s fall, how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down to its foundations!” 8 O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! 9 Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock! Psalm 137 06/13/2021 – Saginaw First U.M.C. “When Scripture Makes You Sick” Rev. Amy Terhune When Scripture makes you sick. I have to start there. Not to do so is to fail to acknowledge a huge elephant in the room and we need to acknowledge it. The last two or three verses of this Psalm are so unsettling that many a poet and artist have used the first six verses of this psalm and then just stopped, as if one could pretend that the author isn’t calling for violent retribution and bloodthirsty vengeance against infants and children. If the end of this psalm shocks you, sickens you, leaves a leaden heaviness in your stomach, then you are responding appropriately. When faced with the worst of humanity our revulsion for such sentiments proves the best of our humanity. Now you may well ask why I would read such a psalm. It’s a fair question. The easy answer is that this is the text our Michigan Conference used to center us this year. Of course, they focused on singing the Lord’s song in a foreign land – in other words: in a pandemic, in a horrid election year, in the midst of George Floyd’s murder and the upsurge of the black lives matter movement. The lessons of this year for the church are many. You don’t really need me to rehash it. You know. The conference did it well, and it was meaningful, and I’m not above shamelessly stealing things that are meaningful from time to time. But truthfully, it goes deeper than that. But first, let me offer a bit of background to put this in context Biblically. In his commentary on this Psalm in the New Interpreter’s Bible, J. Clinton McCann Jr. quoted H.J. Kraus who noted that Psalm 137 is “…the only psalm in the psalter that can be dated reliably.” [J. Clinton McCann Jr., “The Book of Psalms: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections” in The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IV, (Leander E. Keck et al, editors, Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996) pg. 1227.] The history is well documented. In 587 BCE, after laying siege to the city of Jerusalem a decade earlier and then installing a puppet king who ultimately rebelled, King Nebuchadnezzar gets tired of trying to negotiate, and the full might of the Babylonian empire swept into Jerusalem and burned it to the ground. They had help from some other peoples in the region – people of Moab (where Ruth was from), Ammon, and Edom. God only knows how many people died that day – they didn’t keep count – but when you pull down a city’s walls, burn every building to the ground, and all but annihilate its army, you can be sure that the death toll would have numbered well into the tens of thousands, and undoubtedly included many, many children and innocent civilians. The bulk of those Jews who did survive – particularly the educated and the elite – were rounded up and taken 600 miles by foot across the middle east to the capital of Babylon, which is located in present-day Iraq in the river valley between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The trauma of that event on the Hebrew people cannot be stressed enough. Even five, ten, twenty centuries later, the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile continued to shape and agonize the Hebrew people, only finally outdone by the killing of millions of Jews in the camps at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, Dauchau, and Auschwitz-Berlinka just 80 years ago. We need to understand that history and the trauma it inflicted in order to wrap our heads around Psalm 137. It begins with nearly unbearable grief, although the poetry of those first four verses is really quite beautiful. “By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows we hung up our harps. It was there that our captors asked us for songs; our tormentors demanded mirth (joy! festivity!) saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” Have you ever tried to sing when your heart is in your throat? Have you ever tried to sing when your face is so tight from holding in tears that aches with pain? You all know well that I’ve tried to preach when I get emotional and I can hardly choke the words out, so I can’t even begin to imagine what it’s like to try to sing the songs of your people, your history, your faith to a crowd that looks on what you hold sacred as mere entertainment and uses your own grief and your own songs against you a chance to cement their power over your people. The cruelty in that is sickening, too, isn’t it? At the Friday morning worship service for Annual Conference this year, my colleague, Rev. Jonathan Mays, who pastors the Greensky Hill Indian UMC up in Charlevoix spoke prophetic truth about how this psalm speaks to the experiences of subjugated peoples with these words: “Sooner or later the same systems that tried to destroy one’s culture then try to use one’s culture for their own entertainment. Some version of “sing us one of the songs of Zion” happened when slave owners demanded happy songs from slaves. Or when wealthy white people rode the train to resort communities here in northern Michigan to watch indigenous people put on an Indian show that probably looked more like the cultural character caricature of The Lone Ranger than the art and culture of real humans.” [from https://vimeo.com/561091441 16:40-33:22] He’s not wrong. Psalm 137 draws us into that grief as a means of educating us and teaching our hearts empathy. J. Clinton McCann Jr. goes on to explain about how Psalm 137 works in its readers throughout time. Moving us on to verses 5 and 6, which read: If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither! Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you; if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy”, McCann writes, “Addressing the personified Jerusalem as ‘you’ in vv. 5-6, the individual voice asserts that if Jerusalem is not remembered, then music and song will become impossible forever. The withered right hand will not be able to pluck the strings of the harp, and the paralyzed tongue will not be able to sing. As painful as it is for the people to remember Jerusalem, it would be more painful for them NOT to remember, for these memories offer hope, indeed life, amid the pain and devastation of exile. [NIB vol. IV, pg. 1228.] To sing the songs, to remember Jerusalem, is to remember who they are and who God is in the midst of their nightmare. Remembering is an act of resistance. As McCann notes, “to remember is painful; grief is always painful. To remember is unsettling; anger always unsettles. But to remember is also to resist the same thing’s happening again. To remember is to choose to live and to be faithful to God’s purpose of life for all people.” [NIB vol. IV, pg. 1229.] We Christians know all too well the power of memory. The night before he died, Jesus sat down with his disciples to remember the story of God’s deliverance from Egypt and the Passover of death secured the painting blood of a lamb on the lintel and the doorposts where Moses and his people were enslaved. And Jesus took the simple items around the table that they used to remember that deliverance in order to impress upon them the idea that God was about to deliver again. He took unleaved bread and he broke it and he said, “this is my body broken for you. Remember.” And he took the cup of salvation and he said, “this is my blood poured out for you and for many of the forgiveness of sins. Remember. Remember.” And still we gather, week after week, year after year, century after century, to remember the great paradox of faith: that in relinquishing control, Jesus took power over sin; that in dying, Jesus mastered life; that in his own brokenness, Jesus gives the healing that makes us whole. Remember. Jonathan Mays went on to point out this Psalm of Lament has been sung throughout history as a means of remembering. He writes of Psalm 137, “This song was sung in 1492 for as author Mark Charles said, “you cannot discover lands already inhabited”.