Abandoned by God?

Do you remember where you were when … ?

When the World Trade centres came down?

When the space shuttle Challenger exploded?

When Kennedy was shot? (Now that shows your age!)

What about when Russia invaded Ukraine or when Matthew Perry was found dead in his home?

Do you remember where you were when you got the news that …?

I remember where I was when …

I was busily getting our 5 year old ready for gymnastics and feeding our 3 year old and consoling our newborn when I got the call from Steve, on a business trip with his dad in Texas. “Robs, Dad’s gone. They couldn’t revive him.”

Suddenly we were launched into an alternative reality, one we could not have imagined and didn’t see coming.

Just like that everything can change!

An accident, a diagnosis, a job loss or miscarriage, a Cold Play concert.  Who of us has not been jolted out of life as we know it, life that is safe, comfortable, predictable, and delusionally untouchable?

Suddenly we’re launched into a catastrophe, into a foreign land of excruciating pain, stunned disbelief — into an unknown future.

You don’t forget where you were when …

In a culture that worships happiness, how do we worship and sing praises to God in the throes of grief?

In a death-denying society what do we do with our loss, our anguish, our anger?

Today, we’re looking at an ancient reflection — a poem, a prayer that weaves pain into words and gives permission for anger. It gives voice to the darkest moments and most terrifying emotions lurking beneath the surface, threatening to ambush us at any moment.

You may recognize the text we read this morning. Bob Marley made it famous. He gave it that reggae lilt. However, he simultaneously popularized it and robbed it of its impact.

This is a Psalm of lament and cursing. It’s raw and harsh and it’s included in the Bible. The author of this psalm (likely Jeremiah) is in a place of torment, of pain, a place of agonizing disruption. One day life was good. There was food and family, weddings, milestones to celebrate, joy and laughter. And the next day, catastrophe! Life as he knew it: predictable, comfortable, delusionally untouchable, was over.

Now he was in a place of desolation and sorrow; a point of excruciating pain where he can’t sing, he can’t muster up joy. He can’t even feign happiness (nor should he).

This lament may be historically located — it speaks of time in Israelite history, but it’s a universal refrain, a very human refrain. How can we sing and worship from a place of pain, of disbelief, of loss, of unimaginable sorrow, of uncertainty, of fear, of disappointment of anger? Psalm 137 schools us in this.

Psalms are poetry and that’s a clue about how to approach them. They have a unique texture to them. Much like fabric which has texture, text also has texture. We wouldn’t use burlap to wrap a baby, so we don’t use Psalms for something they’re not meant for. They’re not written to give us a detailed history, or precise doctrine, or systematic theology. They may contribute to those, but it’s not their main role. They’re in Scripture for a different reason — to stir the soul, express the heart, and help us pray with raw, poetic honesty.

Poetry isn’t decorative language, it’s disruptive.
It drags us into reality with a clarity we often miss in our casual, careless, carefully crafted, politically correct speech. Poetry doesn’t just describe life, it exposes it. Poetry grabs for the jugular. It’s not cosmetic speech, but intestinal. It comes from the heart, from the gut.

So when we come to the Psalms, we come expecting to find the experience of being human before God; of being human with God.

John Calvin, the 16^th century theologian, said the Psalms are an anatomy of all the parts of the soul.

Our reading today only took us to verse six. But the Psalm doesn’t end at verse six. There are three more verses. Verses that make us uncomfortable as Jesus-followers. Verses that were left out of Marley’s song and our tidy, curated lectionaries. The rest of the Psalm goes as follows:

O Lord, remember what the Edomites did
on the day the armies of Babylon captured Jerusalem.
“Destroy it!” they yelled. “Level it to the ground!”

O Babylon, you will be destroyed.
Happy is the one who pays you back
for what you have done to us.

Happy is the one who takes your babies
and smashes them against the rocks!  (Psalm 137:7-9, NIV)

This is not a hymn we sing, or a prayer we pray in our churches today. Nor should we.

Nor should we use this as reliable theology!

But, this Psalm is a gift! It’s a gift because it gives us permission to express the full range of human emotion to God. It’s naked and honest. Here, in the Bible, we have a precedent, we have permission to bring, uncensored, all the pain and rot and injustice and anger and expletives of life, to God in prayer. The things that fill our screens and bring us to helpless tears, and the things hidden in our own hearts that take us by surprise—the hurt, the doubt, the anger, and even the darker, nastier parts.

This Psalm is a gift because, I believe, we’ve lost the practice of honest lament, both personally and communally. We’ve lost the ability to be honest with each other and with God. (Sometimes church is the hardest place to be when we’re in pain).

I grew up in a faith tradition that was highly triumphalist.  Joy and victory were the predominant strains which left many on the margins. Lament was viewed as a lack of faith; sorrow, with a lack of ‘joy in Lord.’ After all, we’re supposed to be joyful in the midst of anguish, aren’t we? Even though, fully two thirds of the prayers recorded in Scripture are lament.

So, I love this Psalm! Rather, I should clarify that I love that this Psalm is here in our Bibles. It challenges and pushes against fluffy faith, mushy platitudes, and Pinterest clichés. It demonstrates that hatred, rage, suffering, injustice, and disappointment are not off limits with God. Rather, they are subjects for dialogue, for prayer, dare I say, for intimacy with God.

“By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered …” how life used to be, what we’ve lost and will never have back.

Some of you remember when Notre Dame in Paris was ravaged by fire. People stood on the sidewalk with candles, weeping, praying, and singing hymns, some of whom hadn’t darkened the door of the cathedral in decades, or ever. But Notre Dame is a symbol of God for Parisiennes, part of the fabric of their civilization, their nation, history, identity. It was catastrophic! Their heart was being ripped out of them.

In 587 BCE everything changed for the Israelites. The Babylonians invaded Jerusalem. The Temple was GONE. Not damaged, but demolished. The city was in ruins. People were slaughtered and deported far from home, imprisoned in a land not their own with a new culture, new language, new religion. This was forced migration to a hostile place. They weren’t just far from home, they were far from everything familiar and in their minds, far from God.

For the Israelites, land was not just land, it was everything. To be in the land meant God’s presence, God’s protection, God’s favour — the good life. So losing it wasn’t just defeat, it was divine rejection, divine abandonment. It was proof, or so they thought, that God was done with them. Their Temple (their Notre Dame) was gone! Their way of life, erased! Now their stuck in a foreign land which was the epicentre of evil. Alone. Disoriented. Despised by the population. Orphaned by God. Or so it seemed.

This gut-wrenching lament is not a nostalgic wish for the good old days, it was a cry for God: Where. Are. You? Have you ever experienced this? Sometimes in our darkest night, our deepest pain, God feels the most absent. We can feel orphaned, abandoned, by God. We can experience a cold, cruel silence.

This Psalm is offensive to our modern North American ears unless we’ve experienced toxic injustice or  piercing loss. Then you can inhabit this psalm and sympathize with the writer and share in the pain. When we think of excruciating pain, of those losing limbs and life in the Middle East today, the kidnapped children of Ukraine, how do we put that pain into words; into prayer? Are there words strong enough? How do you put your pain into words, into prayer? Are there words?

“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” Songs of Zion were a type of Hebrew victory song. They were upbeat and celebratory. Their captors demanded that they sing these victory songs in the midst of defeat. Demanding songs of God’s mighty power in midst of captivity and helplessness was essentially rubbing disgrace in their face. This was cruel! Though this probably wouldn’t happen to us like this, have you ever experienced the unintentional hurt of a well-meaning person desperately trying to alleviate your suffering (and their discomfort)? They quote you a verse, suggest you pray more, assure you that this is part of God’s better plan? Someone who encourages you to move on or to have the joy of Lord?

When we’re in grief and pain, exuberant praise can feel like salt in a wound, usually from someone who hasn’t lost much.

Instead of praise they cried: Remember, Lord, remember, what the Edomites did? This phrase is a  “Don’t you dare look away, God!” Don’t you dare forget how they destroyed our temple, our city, our identity, our future. How they took us into captivity, and ripped our children from our arms.”

This Psalm opened with, “We remember” and closes with, “Remember Lord!” The Psalmist assumes that If God remembers, God will act. ‘Remembering’ in Scripture is not just recalling or not forgetting but, acting. And yet, despite his confidence in God, the Psalmist has a deep need to be honest, to recount the cruelty, and to articulate pain.

What is translated, “tear it down” is a polite translation — a loin cloth on the text. It literally means, ‘strip her naked.’ It has a shameful nuance of nudity, of defiling dignity, which we miss in our English translations. “Strip Jerusalem naked!” In other words, expose, humiliate, defile her. It carries the weight of being violated. It fuels vitriol and a lust for revenge.

Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction … Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks. THE END. Just like that the Psalm finishes.

 Nothing has prepared us for this repulsive ending. It’s jarringly offensive. It’s a violent curse couched in the language of blessing. This twisted and perverse chorus expresses a reckless desire to destroy defenceless babies. It’s anathema to our modern ears. After all, we have the Geneva Convention and rules of war meant to prevent the slaughter of civilians (clearly we have a lot of work still to do). It recalls scenes of Nazi Germany, Mogadishu, Rwanda, Bucha, Gaza. Jeremiah could have said, we would have preferred him to say, because it’s in the Bible, and because it’s prayer: ‘May there not be any more heirs to replace these wicked people. May they cease to exist.’ Wouldn’t that have been nicer, tidier, more suited to Scripture and prayer? But he doesn’t!

Instead we have a raw ruthlessness in this wish. Bloodthirsty violence, visceral, uncensored speech — an affront to our polite, dignified, and acceptable way of praying. And that’s the point. It’s speech past the limit because it’s pain past the limit.

There’s a myth we believe: if only we could understand the reason for the tragedy, the evil, or could discern the supposed ‘silver lining,’ or ‘God’s will’ for our calamity, it would alleviate our pain and we’d experience peace that passes all understanding. It’s a myth! Pain needs expression, not answers, sympathy, not silver linings, and patience, not purpose.

Many cultures have grief rituals. The Irish have Keening — communal wailing, where people, often midwives, are hired to wail. They come to the wake and begin moaning and lead the grieving community in a chorus of wailing. As they all wail together, they’re not only grieving the recently deceased but remembering those lost through the years. They are wailing for all who grieve. The community brings together their collective pain in an act of communal lament. Falling apart is normalized, rather than normalizing ‘keeping it all together.’ What is the logic of keeping it together when everything is falling apart? Where is the compassion in that? Where did this come from? Doesn’t it seem like a cruel expectation?

Other cultures wear black for three, six, nine months or for life. Steve and I lived in a majority Italian town for years and would often see widows wearing black. I felt sorry for them stuck wearing black everyday. But that sentiment came from place of ignorance. Think about it. In a sense, it’s a sign to the world that ‘I may not be myself and perhaps need a little more grace today. My emotions may not be in check or make sense.’ It’s a Handle With Care label. How beautiful is that? And for the rest of us, to visibly see the extent of grief in our midst; to know that this person has lost someone precious, so Handle With Care.’ It keeps grief always before us — a reminder of how fragile life is.

“Remember, Lord.” Regardless of how violent and blood-thirsty this is, it is addressed to God. Despite the Psalmist’s vengeful hatred, he’s committed to speaking to God about it. Regardless of how scandalous it may be, he holds nothing back. He’s bold and unashamed in his expression and brings his thirst for revenge and his desire for justice to God.

Have you ever been wounded into hatred — betrayed, deceived, swindled — and then terrified and appalled at your capacity to hate? It’s safe with God.

This raw human longing comes from the bowels of suffering and is brought before God in all of its retributive vileness. It is left with God; it is safe with God.

It’s not our job to justify this prayer, to defend it, or to distill doctrine from it, but to enter it, to embrace the pathos and pain of it. We do so not only as those in pain but as those who live, work, and worship with those who have suffered loss, those who can’t yet see the light at the end of the tunnel, and to create space for this depth of emotion.

Hate needs to be prayed. Pain needs to be prayed.

Hate is the ugliest and most dangerous emotion. It reveals the depths we can stoop given the right circumstances. As Thomas Merton, the 20^th century monk, said: “All the atrocities of both World Wars and Viet Nam and Hiroshima are here, in my own heart.” And he’s a monk!

Psalm 137 is tenacious. It’s actually a defiant stand against evil. It laments, it grieves, it refuses to buckle to cheap joy or surrender to platitudes. It refuses to gloss over pain and fake happiness. Rather, it rails against it.

But it’s problematic to our Jesus-following sensibilities. It leaves us squirming, and seems out of place. It’s amazing that the ancient editors of Scripture didn’t expunge it, or at least the last verses, as Marley and our lectionaries have. They weren’t embarrassed by it. Rather they included it, uncensored, dignifying it as genuine, faithful prayer, as authentic and acceptable communication with God.

No, they couldn’t sing the songs of Zion — songs of celebration and victory — but they could sing other songs. They learned in the desolation of Babylon, in the presence of evil and pain, that God was there too; that God was giving them new songs; that God was affecting change within them; that God was revealing God’s self in new ways.

Faith doesn’t always resolve life, as desperately as we want it to, expect it to, and try to make it do so. There isn’t, for every personal crisis, a way out, an explanation, a happy ending, or a reassuring reason.

This Psalm just stops, it doesn’t finish. There is no happy ending, no resolution, no escape, no neat bow.  Rather, it insists that we stay in the middle of the disorientation, refusing to deny its reality, lamenting its reality! Refusing to put a bow on it.

Prayer is a conversation of the heart, in all of its experiences. To come to God in denial of our feelings is to come to God masquerading as someone else.

This Psalm and others say: Your feelings, reprehensible though they may be, are safe with, and welcomed by, God.

EUGENE PETERSON has said that, “It is an act of profound faith to entrust one’s most precious hatreds to God, knowing they will be taken seriously” (Peterson & Brueggemann)

Whether it’s hatred or pain of another breed, it is to God that we can bring all of it, uncensored, un-sanitized, in raw honesty. We can bring it to God who knows our hearts anyway; to God who longs to meet us in our pain, in our darkness, in our ugliness, and who will journey with us through it, and give us new songs.

The question is: will we name our reality? Will we face the raw truth within us? Will we embrace it, enter it, get angry over it, and then bring it to God in surrender and hope? Will we risk doing it as a community of faith, with one another, and for one another? It’s costly. It demands something of us.

Out of their weeping, came a resolve for new life. They learned to sing by the rivers of Babylon. They learned to sing again as a community of faith, a people of God, a family, in a most unlikely place, by the rivers of hate and pain and anguish.

Maybe you feel like you’re by the rivers of Babylon now, or you’re walking with someone by those rivers. Perhaps you’ve never named your pain or anger, afraid of the intensity of emotion, afraid of what God or others will think. Can I invite you, implore you, to pray it, all of it, in the quiet of your home, your car, on the dock, with a trusted friend or pastor or in your journal?

By the rivers of Babylon they sat and wept and were reborn. God continues to birth beauty from ashes, joy where there is pain. But first we must name it and bring it to God.

Amen.