Scripture: Psalm 137
Sermon: Song of Exile[1]
Topics: exile, Babylon, homesick, resistance, anger, shame
Preached: March 19, 2017
Rev. Mike Abma
Preamble: This morning we will be turning to a psalm written by an exile in Babylon. It has a harsh ending, as you will soon see.
Apparently Bryant was asked in his Oral Comprehensive Exam at Seminary how he would preach Psalm 137?
And apparently Bryant’s answer was, “I wouldn’t.”
That has been the running joke between us — I am preaching from Psalm 137 and, true to his word, he is not.
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!
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!
This is the Word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God
INTRODUCTION
(listen to Don McLean’s Babylon on his 1971 album American Pie)
You may recognize that piece.
It is Don McLean singing the last song on his rather famous American Pie album of 1971.
Margaret Bendroth, who is now the Director of the Congregational Historical Society, tells about how that song captivated her and the crowd she hung out with when she was a student at Cornell in the 1970’s.
Back then everyone was singing it.
And why was it so captivating?
Well, for one thing, it has a haunting and beautiful simplicity –
especially with a banjo.
But being raised a CRC girl,
Margaret grew up singing the psalms.
She grew up knowing the Bible.
She had a sense that the Babylon in that song
was not simply the Chaldean empire of long ago.
It was not even the Babylon — the code name for the Roman Empire —
that John uses in his book, his vision, Revelation.
No, Babylon had a deeper meaning.
Babylon represented a world set against God,
Babylon was any culture set against his will and his way.
All the people singing that Don McLean song
were longing for a different world, a better world,
a more just world
a more loving world.
The people singing this song were homesick people.
BY THE RIVERS OF BABYLON — EXILE NOT EXODUS
It may seem odd having residents in this country,
citizens of this country
born and raised here
feeling homesick in their own land.
The reason it may seem odd to you
may partly be because the Exodus, not the Exile
is the main Old Testament metaphor in your life.
According to the Exodus narrative, or the Exodus metaphor,
People flee slavery,
People flee oppression,
People flee injustice
And they find themselves on the shores of this land,
the Promised Land,
The City Shining on the Hill.
That is the Exodus narrative applied to the here and now.
But the question is: is this really the Promised Land?
What I would like to challenge you with this morning
is to see the Exile rather than the Exodus as your main metaphor,
your main Old Testament metanarrative as they say.
For as countless Biblical scholars attest
it is really the Exile that is the defining crisis of the Old Testament.
In Babylon the Jews were strangers in a strange land.
But even when they eventually returned,
the shadow of exile came with them.
For centuries
they remained oppressed,
They remained occupied,
They remained strangers even in their own land.
Exile was an identity they knew and lived for centuries.[2]
Those of us in the Reformed tradition have a deep sensitivity to exile.
One of premier theologians, John Calvin, was an exile himself —
Kicked out of his home country of France
He was a refugee in the Swiss city of Geneva.
In many ways, Calvin wrote his theology from the perspective of an exile.
That is why he wrote,
No doubt, the children of God,
Wherever they have lived,
And whenever they have lived,
Have always been strangers, foreigners, and exiles in this world.”
So when this Psalm begins,
By the rivers of Babylon,
There we sat, there we wept….”
This is not only the song of long, long ago.
This is our song.
This is our lament.
We are those people singing
Because we are in Babylon, but not of Babylon,
in this world, but not of this world.
Living this side of Eden, we are homesick people.
SINGING IN A FOREIGN LAND
The second part of this psalm asks the question:
“How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”
How can we sing
In a hostile environment
In a culture that dismisses what we hold sacred?
How can we sing?
The subtle question is,
Does this psalm sing or not?
Are the exiles silent or not?
Here is the danger every exile faces —
Living the way everyone else seems to live,
Doing what everyone else seems to do,
Valuing what everyone else seems to value,
Conforming fully to the culture around us.
To put it in the language of this psalm
The danger is
Being swallowed up by Babylon,
Being swept up by Babylon,
Being silenced by Babylon.
That is the very danger the middle of this psalm confronts:
If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!
If I do not remember you, O Jerusalem,
let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth.
If I do not set you above my highest joy, O Jerusalem…..
The middle of this Psalm is a song of resistance,
resistance to the strong pull,
the tenacious tug of the dominant culture.
And I do think it is a Song.
And I do think it was Sung.
I say this because – despite the way it is printed —
The first part of this psalm is very prose-like;
The last part of this psalm is very prose-like.
But the middle —
this call NOT TO FORGET —
well, this middle part is pure poetry.
If any part of this Psalm
looks like a Song,
sounds like a song
feels like a song
it is this middle part.
And so it should be
because
Singing is a way of Remembering Who You are.
Singing is a way of Resisting the strong pull to forget who you are.
In the last 1920’s, the American tenor, Roland Hayes
stepped onto the stage of the prestigious Beethovensaal Concert Hall
in Berlin Germany.
When he stepped onto that stage
the crowd began to boo and hiss.
This was Germany when Fascism was on the rise.
And Roland Hayes was an African American singer.
Hayes stood on stage,
with his arms folded
his eyes shut
waiting for the hissing and the booing to subside.
But the noise did not subside.
So Hayes began to sing,
With his strong and soaring tenor voice
He began to sing
Lord, thou art my peace, my peace thou art.
And as his voice ascended
And as his voice ascended,
The noise descended
Until that whole great hall was silent
Except for his voice,
Except for his song.
When he finished, the crowd erupted in applause.
Songs remember.
Songs resist.
And songs are beautiful when they resonate
With a better way
A better world
When they resonate with Jerusalem,
The New Jerusalem,
The Kingdom we long for
The Kingdom we work for
The Kingdom we sing for.
ANGER REDEEMED
But now we come to the end,
That troublesome end
To what is otherwise a moving psalm, a song of exile.
What do we do with this final call for vengeance on the Edomites?
What do we do with this final call for pay back to the Babylonians?
Every preacher would rather skip these verses.
Many lectionaries in fact do that very thing.
But here we are,
Trying to do justice to this psalm
Trying to do justice
To the raw emotions of this psalm
To the anger, the rage, the wrath,
That boils up whenever
goodness is ruined
And whenever beauty is defiled.
They say human anger is a secondary emotion.
That anger comes from somewhere, somewhere deeper.
I think below the anger at the end of this psalm sits shame –
for isn’t the ultimate shame
having to witness the abuse of your very own children.
Out of that shame
There is a call for justice,
There is a call for vengeance – to hurt these Babylonian babies the way the
Israelite babies were hurt.
They want pay back.
That is at the heart of this last section.
Happy shall they be who pay you back vs. 8
More literally it is
Blessed shall they be who pay you back.
Here is the odd thing about this verse:
The word for Blessed/Happy is only used for humans.
But the word for Payback is only used of God.
So the riddle of this verse is,
Is this payback going to be by a human being or by a divine being?[3]
Here is the answer to that riddle.
It is by the one who is both human and divine.
But listen ….it goes so differently than the Psalmist assumed
For Jesus, the Beloved One, the Blessed One,
leaves his home,
Jesus becomes an exile,
Jesus enters Babylon, our world, for our sake.
Then Jesus, the exile,
prays that the judgment of God
The wrath of God
The vengeance or payback of God
Falls not on Edom or Babylon
But on his own body, on his own head.
Jesus did all this
to restore home to the exiled sinner
and to restore the exiled sinner to home.
Through Jesus the Blessed One
We know who we are
Through Jesus the Blessed One
We know to whom we belong
Through Jesus the Blessed One
We know where we are going.
CONCLUSION
Dear people of God,
Exiles, strangers, foreigners in this world,
God has given us a new birth into a new hope
through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
God, whose memory holds the future
God, whose mercy hold the past
God whose listening is our present
God will bring us home at last.
Amen
-
Also the title of David W. Stowe’s recent book Song of Exile: The Enduring Mystery of Psalm 137, Oxford, 2016 ↑
-
Both Walter Brueggemann and N.T. Wright emphasize this exile metaphor/narrative. ↑
-
Christopher Hayes makes this observation in “How Shall We Sing?” Horizons of Biblical Theology, Vol. 27, Dec. 2005, p. 54. ↑
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