Psalm 137 "If I Forget You" Scott Hoezee

One of the lesser-known results of the 1991 Gulf War was the revival of an ancient form of Arabic writing known as "execration poetry." These curses in verses are poems which adhere to strict literary conventions, and yet the purpose of these poems is pure insult. Once upon a time in Middle Eastern history there were actually wandering troubadours who made their living as minstrels of malediction, peddling their poetic put-downs for a profit.

Because Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait caused rifts within the Arab world, this ancient form of insult underwent a revival. One Saudi poet composed this ballad to give voice to the disgust many Arabs felt toward Hussein: "Saddam, O Saddam/ Of our flesh not are you./ Claim not to be a Muslim/ For you are truly a Jew./ Your deeds have proved ugly/ Your face is darkest black./ And we will yet set fire/ To your bottom and your back."

We don't typically associate poetry with lambasting insults. Certainly we do our level best not to associate the Bible's poetry with such maledictions. Yet students of the Old Testament are uncomfortably aware of many psalms similar to Arabic execration poetry. The "impreccatory psalms" are highly adept at hurling insults and calling down curses.

But perhaps nowhere in Psalms is such a vehement issuing of curses more prominent or more chilling than the concluding line of Psalm 137. Here is a stanza that appears to take great delight in the splattering of baby brains. Here is a line from our own sacred Scripture which describes the kind of thing we've heard with horror from Kosovo. Here is a description of something which, were any of us ever actually to witness such a thing, would make us physically sick and provide grist for a lifetime's worth of subsequent nightmares.

Psalm 137 is the only psalm that is historically precise as to when and why it was written: it's about Israel's period of exile in Babylon. Long about the year 687 B.C. Israel was conquered by the Babylonians. The beautiful capital city of Jerusalem was burned to the ground, including the singularly glorious Temple of Solomon.

When I was about seven-years-old my family belonged to Alger Park CRC here in Grand Rapids. How well I recall one particular memory about that church. It was about 10:30 at night on Christmas Day. Our extended family had just left after a day of yuletide cheer. My mother was getting me ready for bed when a neighbor banged on our door, screaming that our church was on fire. Since we lived only one block from Alger Church, my mother immediately threw back the curtains in our den, only to reveal an inferno shooting out flames from where an hour earlier a beautiful stained-glass window had been.

Alger Church had not been attacked, had not been purposely set ablaze. But the loss of such a physical place hurts. But suppose you were ancient Israel. Suppose that in addition to loving the glory of Solomon's Temple, you also believed this particular structure was the only place on the face of the earth where God Almighty dwelled. Suppose you believed that Mount Zion was the headquarters of Yahweh's kingdom and that maintaining that headquarters was vital to the salvation of nothing less than the entire universe.

If you even can imagine that, you might gain some understanding as to what the Israelites felt. The wrecking of Jerusalem was no local defeat or political setback. This was cosmic! This had ramifications affecting all generations! So when Babylonian concentration camp guards teased the Israelite refugees by demanding they sing some of the happy songs of Zion, the Israelites were more than melancholic, they were galactically angry!

This was not simply a matter of nostalgia, a longing for the good old days in Jerusalem. This was a matter of faith. To sing a song of joy to God's glory in Zion when Zion was a ruin would be an act of betrayal to God. "How can we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?" they plaintively pleaded. How indeed? To sing the songs of their Lord in a foreign land would not only cause them personal pain--it would betray God. This they would not do. They would not allow anyone to turn Yahweh into a joke. Far too much depended on this God to let anyone turn the songs of Zion into a circus sideshow merely to amuse the bored minds of these thugs.

So far so good, at least from the point of view of theology. But this psalm does not end with this stalwart refusal to make God out to be a joke. Instead it shifts into the mode of malediction, of intense cursing. So intense is this desire to see God's enemies get theirs that this poet issues a beatitude on anyone who twirls Babylonian babies around by their ankles before popping open their skulls against the pavement.

There are scores of beatitudes in the Bible, but this is the only one that blesses someone who does so dire a deed. And I checked this out in the original Hebrew this week and despite the translation of "happy" in verse 8, this is, as a matter of fact, the same word used in many other psalms such as "Blessed is the man whose sins are forgiven . . . . Blessed is the one who trusts in God . . . . Blessed is the one who fears God." But here this same kind of divine benediction and beatitude is extended to the one who does to Babylonian babies what this psalmist obviously saw the Babylonian soldiers do to Israelite infants.

The fact that the Babylonians had committed this same atrocity against Israel may qualify this a bit. We can understand so severe a reaction coming from someone who had witnessed such horrors. Perhaps at one time or another in our lives we've even been with a friend who had recently experienced some heinous loss because of the stupidity of another person. And so if you are sitting with a mother whose son had been killed by a drunk driver, you understand the dynamics of what may make her erupt to say, "I wish that idiot would go get himself good and drunk and then drive his Buick straight into Lake Michigan!"

We may not share her desire for vengeance. We may not appreciate her bloodthirsty desire to see this man floating among the seaweed at the end of the Grand Haven pier. But for now, given the dire intensity of her grief, for now we will listen to her spout off without shouting her down or correcting her or telling her to not say such awful things.

And maybe that's how we need to take the end of Psalm 137, too. Perhaps this line is in the Bible not because it represents the right way to think but simply as a reflection of how many people do in fact think when evil has ripped their lives to shreds. Not everyone agrees with this, of course. John Calvin said we should not be too upset with this psalmist since it was God after all who put this thought into his head and so that, according to Calvin, makes this OK. I don't know about you, but that explanation does not help me much.

Calvin also, along with Augustine and a host of others, tried to soften this by making it an allegory. In our lives we shouldn't think of these infants as real babies but instead see them as a kind of metaphor for our own temptations. If we find ourselves drawn to pornography or prone to anger or increasingly lazy, better to take these sinful tendencies while they are still like little babies in our souls and smash them into the Rock, which is Jesus. Better that than to let them grow and mature and so ruin our spirituality. Again, that's a clever interpretation but it doesn't solve the scandal of Psalm 137's concluding sentence.

So I think we can understand why the psalmist says this, borne as it is of a pain too wrenching to imagine, yet without concluding that this was a nice or even proper thing to say. We can understand why he wrote this without thinking it provides any kind of a role model to follow in our attitude toward the sinful people around us.

Beyond the horror of that last line, however, there surely is a larger truth in Psalm 137 that we are supposed to pay attention to. There is an underlying lesson here about the nature of who we are, or who we are supposed to be, as God's own people in the midst of a world that mostly doesn't embrace God the way we do.

In some ways the Israelites had it "easy." On the one hand there was Jerusalem and God's Temple in it. That was, according to God's own revelation to them, the headquarters for Yahweh and so was the theological center of the universe. On the other hand there were all the other nations outside Israel and when those nations threatened Israel, they threatened God--indeed, without knowing it they ultimately threatened even their own salvation as it would one day come to the whole earth through Israel's Messiah!

Israel, in short, had an easier time than we do with the "us and them" scenario. In fact, three times in the opening couple of verses of Psalm 137 the psalmist throws in the loaded word "there." There in Babylon they wept, there they hung up their harps, there they were tormented. The psalmist wants to hammer home the fact that Israel was over there and not home where they belonged. It was all fairly clear-cut for Israel.

It reminds me of 1984 when I spent some time near and then in East Germany. The Berlin Wall between West and East Germany was such a clear dividing line between the free culture of the West and the shut-down communist culture of the East. Small wonder that the Germans found a shorthand way to refer to the difference: people on both sides of the wall would merely punch the air with an extended thumb and refer to the folks "drüben" which means "there." It's just like the beginning of Psalm 137: the difference between Israel as God's home and everywhere else was stark enough that just the word "there" summed up the whole scheme of the theological universe.

From everything she knew, based on all that God had taught, Israel was right to feel protective of Mount Zion and its holy Temple. On this all depended, and so the people who threatened Zion, like the Babylonians, were properly seen as God's enemies first of all who had to be thwarted, militarily if necessary, for the long-term good of the earth.

That's why I suggested a moment ago that in some ways Israel had it easier. Because as Christians we believe Israel was right about being the bearer of global salvation: it has come through Israel's Messiah, the Christ of God, Jesus. And we now are called to be equally earnest about protecting that holy salvation even as we bring it to the dying world around us. It's just that we face some complicating factors. For one thing, we no longer have such a geographic sense of location. In fact, the message of Pentecost is that now you and I, every last one of us, is God's holy Temple, filled with God's Spirit.

So we need to have all the seriousness about ourselves that Israel once had about the Temple. But we have the added complication of needing to have that seriousness even as we move into and mingle with the wider world. We cannot stay physically separate from others the way Jerusalem could. Not only that, but we have Jesus' example to follow: an example that says it is precisely to the lost, lonely sinners of the world we need to go first.

That's part of what got Jesus into such deep trouble with the Pharisees. They were still operating on the Israel-Babylon mentality that said Israel was here and everyone else was drüben, over there, and the two needed to stay distinct. But Jesus broke all the rules by time and again approaching lepers and women and prostitutes and Roman centurions and dead bodies and demoniacs and just generally everyone. And he did it because now that the Christ of God is here, it's time to break down those barriers. Once upon a time those barriers had been like the walls of an incubator, nurturing salvation the way an incubator nurtures baby chicks. But with Jesus' advent the time came to move out of the incubator to let salvation fly out into all the world.

We're called to do that, too. But it makes matters dicey. It's not always easy to demonstrate to the world how we are different even as we mix into the world. But precisely because things are more complex in a post-Pentecost world we need to re-double our efforts to keep alive the kind of zeal we see in Psalm 137. No, not the zeal that wants to smash into bits every person who opposes us--our Lord's example and his incessant calls to love more than counter-balance this one line of vengeance and retribution.

But we are called to have this fervent desire never to forget what's what in life. Given their wretched concentration camp existence in Babylon, it was not easy for the Israelites to remember Jerusalem--in fact it was painful to recall the glory of the Temple. To remember Jerusalem hurt, but it quickly becomes clear in this psalm that to forget would be to betray no less than God himself! And so they will never forget who they are, never forget what God was up to in the universe, never forget that everything depended on their faithfulness. That's why the psalmist agonized over how to sing the Lord's song in a foreign land.

I wonder how often we even tumble to that question, much less fret over it. We know that we need to sing God's songs in all the "foreign lands" where we, as God's mobile temples, go. We need to give voice to our faith in so distinctive a way that others will hear that song and want to know more. We want others to sense that there really is something different about us, so much so that the shape of our lives over against the shape of the typical person's life will look like a drüben kind of distinction in comparison.

But does that happen? Or do we find ways to sing the Lord's song here in church with little or no appreciable impact on how we live in Babylon the rest of the week? Again, Israel had it comparatively easy in being able to see and so draw distinctions. We have to work harder, but do we? Or do we mostly see no contradiction between our Sunday words and our Monday-Saturday worlds? How do we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land? As we sit beside our culture's streams of influence in the office and at the mall, in front of the TV and at the beach, how do we maintain a voice and a song that will sound remarkably different, and maybe also refreshing, in the ears of the world?

It's finally a bigger question than we can answer this morning. It may have as many different answers as there are different people in this sanctuary. Each of us has his or her own "Babylon" where we live as God's holy temple and so where we need to find ways to carve out a distinctly Christian way to be a lawyer or a homemaker, a teacher or a doctor, a mechanic or a real estate agent. Each of us has his or her own breakroom or lunch room or cafeteria or family room where we need to discern the distinctive sounds of the Lord's song in a cacophonous world of competing melodies, not a few of which seek to drown out the Lord's gospel song in favor of the tunes of Babylon.

The psalmist in verses 5-6 says that he'd rather have a lame hand and a mute mouth than to forget the God of life. How many of us have such a fervent faith? How many of us would dare to say we'd rather lose our jobs and become utterly silent than betray Jesus with patterns and words that hinder, instead of help, his kingdom in this world?

In his recent book The Divine Conspiracy Dallas Willard makes the bold claim that many Christians in America today have simply forgotten that the goal of the gospel is to make us Jesus' disciples. We have forgotten that we are supposed to be like Jesus, really be like him, in all of life! Jesus did not come to lend a hand with a little Ann Landers-like advice, didn't come all the way down here in a virgin's womb just to dispense tips on how to spruce up the edges of your life like some Martha Stewart prototype. He came to remake us into himself. As such we can know for sure that we are not called to hate or despise the folks who are drüben, over there, but the urgency of the gospel depends on our having some sense for drüben. The question Psalm 137 lays in our laps this morning is whether or not we have that sense. Or have we forgotten Jerusalem after all?