Natalie Bowerman
World Communion Sunday 2013
Texts: Psalm 137, Lamentations 1: 1-6, Luke 17: 5-10
When I
was in seminary, my girlfriends introduced me to what has now become the “classic”
‘90s sitcom, Friends. We had one
favorite episode in particular that we liked to watch together that I was
thinking about a lot this week while I was preparing to preach on these texts, and
especially this week’s Psalm, Psalm 137. This particular episode begins with
most of the principle characters sitting around watching the movie Old Yeller. Lisa Kudrow’s character,
Phoebe, walks in toward the end of the movie, and is totally clueless as to why
everyone is so sad watching one of her favorite childhood movies. When one of
the other characters explains to Phoebe that the reason they’re so sad is
because they’re watching the end of Old Yeller, it’s revealed that,
ironically, Phoebe had never actually seen
the end of Old Yeller. As many times as
she’d seen the movie growing up, every time she got within about fifteen
minutes of the end of the movie—right after the scene where Old Yeller
victoriously saves his family from being attacked by a wolf—phoebe’s mom would
turn off the TV and say, “That’s it! The End!” So as they get to the scene
where the family very tragically decides that they’re going to have to put poor
Old Yeller out of his misery because he’s suffering from rabies, Phoebe is
horrified that this scene is in such a sweet movie, and screams at the TV, “No
no no! The end! THE END!”
The
reason why I share this with you is because so often our church’s tradition has
done with Psalm 137 what Phoebe and her mom did with Old Yeller. We’ve embraced the first few verses, the romantically
sad words of a man who misses his home, a man who writes,
By the rivers
of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.
But we have a problem with the ending. As many times as the
words of this Psalm have been set to music, to liturgy, as many times as these
words have been quoted in books and in film, we have made sure to stop short of
where this heartbreakingly beautiful Psalm takes a turn to anger, and words of
violence and vengeance. The last two verses, which say,
O daughter of
Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is the one who repays you for what you
have done to us—happy is the one who seizes your little ones and dashes them
against the rocks.
Are there more difficult words to read anywhere in the whole
Bible?
It’s no
wonder at all that we try to avoid reading these words when we can. What are we
supposed to do with these words? These words that are so angry, so harsh, and
so downright cruel that that they seem to fly right in the face of everything
our faith is about? How can we, as Christians, use these words? And how are we
supposed to reconcile words like, “Happy is the one who seizes your little ones
and dashes them against the rocks!” with the words of Jesus, who said, “Love your
enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.”? It’s really providence that
the Revised Common Lectionary appointed Psalm 137 as today’s Psalm so that we
can face these questions together.
We don’t
get to pick what’s in our Bibles. As tempting as it may be, we can’t ignore a
passage like Psalm 137. In the thousands of years that have passed since this
Psalm was first written, it has remained in our Canon of scripture for a
reason. As easy as it may be to do this, we can’t pick and choose which Bible
passages we’ll read, and use, and draw inspiration from—and which we’ll just
forget about. The Bible, the WHOLE Bible—yes, even Psalm 137—is the inspired
Word of God. But, as I’m sure you all know, our Bible offers us much more than
the inspired Word of God. The Bible offers us the genuine, heartfelt words of
people—people who have lived in the same fallen world as us, and walked through
every moment of life, every experience, trusting in God.
There
isn’t much we know for sure about the man who penned Psalm 137—in antiquity,
people wrote anonymously—but we do know that he was from the Southern Kingdom
of Israel. And from the raw emotion with which he writes that words of Psalm
137, we can be sure that he lived in the Southern Kingdom when it was conquered
by the Babylonian Empire. The Psalmist’s words may strike us as chilling and
unfathomable, and that may always be the case when we try to read these words. But
we can’t understand the psalmist’s words unless we journey with him through his
pain.
So
first we need to understand that Judah, the Southern Kingdom of Israel, was not
only this man’s homeland. The Kingdom of Israel, in the eyes of this man and everyone
he loved, was not just a home. It was a promise. The Kingdom of Israel,
symbolically captured by the emotion-filled word “Zion”, was the promised land
of the Jews, the sons and daughters of Jacob—Jacob, their ancestor, who God
called Israel himself. God delivered his people from enslavement in Egypt
through many years in the wilderness, to this, their sacred home—the one and
only Israel. Israel was the home of the people of God.
But it
was more than that. Israel was not only the home of God’s people, but of God
himself. Under the wise leadership of King Solomon, the Temple was built in
Jerusalem—not a Temple, the Temple. And to the people Israel, a
people who understood their world in a very tangible, concrete way, the Temple
in Jerusalem was not just a symbolic place of worship, but the very dwelling
place of God. God LIVED in the Temple.
And
then Babylon came.
Between
the years 587 and 586 BCE, Babylon invaded, conquered, and utterly destroyed
Judah. The Southern Kingdom was decimated. God’s chosen home, God’s sacred
promise to his people, was obliterated. The Temple, the dwelling place of the
Lord, was leveled.
But
perhaps most devastating to the people Israel was not the total destruction of
their land, their property, or even their Temple, but the terrorism inflicted
on their people. The haunting words of the psalmist drive right to the heart of
where his people were hurt the most—watching their children slaughtered right
in front of them by the invading armies. After this brutal attack, many of the
surviving people of Judah were taken away from their homeland and forced to
live in exile in Babylon. They had no home, no family, no future, no hope, and,
as far as they could see, now that their Temple was gone, no God. This psalm
was penned from the depths of this man’s grief for this senseless trauma.
And I
want to tell you, in case it isn’t clear by now, that I love this Psalm, Psalm
137. This, out of all 150 Psalms, is my favorite. And if that strikes you as
odd, or off-putting, or dark coming from your pastor, I want to assure all of
you that I do not, in any way whatsoever, endorse violent acts of vengeance.
And
neither, I greatly suspect, did the psalmist.
Because
people didn’t put a date on their writings in these days, we can’t know for
absolute certain when this Psalm was written, but we can make a very strong
educated assessment that thjis Psalm must have been penned after the exiled
Jews began returning to Judah, after the year 538 BCE—that is, after the
Babylonian Empire was conquered by the Persian Empire.
So if
we’re going to really understand Psalm 137, then we need to know what this
Psalm is, and what it is not. Although on first glance these
words might read like a hate-filled Dear John letter to the enemy, this Psalm
is not that at all. This Psalm was NOT written to the Babylonians—by the time
these words saw paper, the Babylonian Empire was long gone.
Rather,
the way this Psalm came to be is more like this:
One day
a man was in deep pain—deep, deep grief for the most terrible things his eyes
had ever seen in his life. And even though these terrible things had happened
years ago, he was still haunted b the memories. So he sat down and did the only
thing he could—he wrote a Psalm. Really, a prayer to God. He told God what was
on his heart—everything that was on his heart. He didn’t try to make it sound
good, and he definitely didn’t try to make himself look good. He just wrote.
When I
was taught about prayer, back when I was a kid in Sunday School, I was taught a
very specific way to pray, that I’m sure a lot of you know—head bowed, eyes
closed, hands folded, saying very nice, gentle words to God. And that is a beautiful way to pray. But it’s not the
only way. That’s not the only way that we’re allowed to talk to God.
It can
be really hard to know how to talk to God about the difficult, trying things in
our lives. But we don’t have to put on a show for God. God knows us. God knows everything about us. God created every
part of us, even the parts we don’t think look so good. And God is as much the
God of our sorrow, anger, and grief as he is the God of our joy and
thanksgiving.
When
the psalmist sat down and wrote those angry, cruel words, shacking as they may
look to us, he was showing a profound, admirable, beautiful trust in God. He trusted
God with his heart. He trusted God with his grief. And he trusted God to see
him on his worst day—because he knew that even if he sounded like a terrible
person, he wasn’t, and he couldn’t compel God to love him any less.
But,
most of all, he trusted God’s justice. The psalmist was really saying, through
his words, God, this is too much for me. This is too big for me. I can’t fix
this. Please, take this from me, and make it right.
In
time, God did make it right. Friends, if you ever sit down for a minute and
just thumb through the book of Psalms, you might hazard a guess that the order
they show up in the Bible isn’t the order they were really written in, and it
isn’t. Long ago, committees of thoughtful men sat down and numbered the Psalms
this way, to be in this order in the Bible. And, intentionally, just two Psalms
away from these words of total agony and heartbreak, we hear the words of
comfort, assurance, and trust that we find in Psalm 139, which says to us:
For you
created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you
because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know
that full well.
In good times, in bad times, in all times, we can trust in
God with the same brazen, fearless honesty as the psalmist. And we can trust in
a God who brings healing to even our deepest wounds. And with even the tiniest
amount of that trust, that faith, even faith no bigger than a mustard seed, as
Jesus said, we can be restored from despair to joy.
Amen.
