“Shades of the present”

By Rev. Michael Stonhouse

Meditation – Saturday, October 14, 2023

Psalm 137 (Forward, p 77) CEV p. 639

Folks have often criticized certain ethnic groups, the English for instance, as being too stoic and unemotional—of course, excepting their English football games! When it comes to football, they can be quite passionate and quite emotional!

However, as we know fully well from recent coverage of the situation in the Middle East, and coverage over the years as well, that could not be said of many of its citizens. Emotions and passions, regardless of their source or their expression, run deep and are freely and openly expressed. Whether it is the sorrow experienced and expressed by Israeli citizens over what has happened recently or the outrage and fear, and in some cases, outright hostility, expressed within the Arab world, emotions and passions are very much on the surface.

We see something of this in today’s psalm. The majority of Israel’s people have been taken into exile in Babylon and while there, their captors are taunting them with demands that they sing for them some song of the homeland. Wrapped up in their sorrow and their memories of what ‘once was’, this is the very last thing that they can or want to do.

However, this taunting, these insults, give rise to other emotions, one that perhaps have been buried but nevertheless have long been there, namely desires for vengeance and revenge. Their desire and their prayer to God is that He will punish severely those who did these things to them and those who gloated in their destruction and defeat. Indeed, their desire for retribution takes a decidedly nasty turn: “May the Lord bless everyone who beats your children against the rocks!” (verse 9). (But now, in today’s scenario in Palestine, the tables are turned. This almost sounds like exactly what Hamas is accused of doing.)

So, what are we, in our so-called ‘civilized’ world, our more ‘dispassionate’ world, to make of this, especially as it is expressed in this psalm? Many commentators on the psalms have suggested that there is a psalm for almost every occasion, and for almost every emotion known to humankind. And so they suggest that this psalm is most appropriate for those times

when we feel terribly wronged, terribly oppressed, those times when we really do want to strike out at someone and ‘make them pay.’

What they suggest is that this psalm gives words for our feelings, that is, as a way of expressing our feelings out loud, and in private, without having to share them publicly or act upon them in any way. The psalms--and this psalm in particular--become a ‘safe’ way to vent our feelings to God, no less, knowing that God fully understands and is able to deal with them as none of our fellow human beings ever could.

Forward notes: “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered you, O Zion” (verse 1).

“This verse takes me back to the night of September 11, 2001. I was just a couple weeks into my freshman year of college and had joined the college women’s Glee Club. That night was our first rehearsal.

“We met in the lower level of the college chapel and learned a piece by American folk singer Don McLean called ‘Babylon,’ which includes the words of this Scripture passage in the lyrics. Upstairs in the chapel, a group was organizing a prayer service in response to the terrorist attacks, and the organizers came to find us when they heard our rehearsal. They asked us to sing ‘Babylon’ for the remembrance service.

“I kept my emotions in check as we sang in the chapel, but when I called my father later that night, all the feelings of the day came pouring out. Each time I hear these words from Scripture, I remember the heartache of that night, and I find solace knowing that the psalmist and countless others have wept, all in the presence of God the Comforter.”

Moving Forward: “What words of Scripture give you comfort?”

A concluding note: Of course, we have no idea of just when the author of today’s Forward Day by Day wrote those words, but they have an uncanny applicability to what many people are going through today, and not just in the Middle East, but in countless other places as well. It is good to know, and take to heart, that God is indeed with us through all of this, and that He understands and holds us in His loving, protective arms.