The Rivers of Babylon

Proper 22C
Lamentations 1:1-6
Psalm 137
October 3, 2010

The Rivers of Babylon

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

Just as Jeremiah had warned, the other shoe dropped. Jerusalem fell to the armies of Nebuchadrezzar, King of Babylon. After nearly eighteen months of siege, there was no food left in the city. The defenders of Jerusalem were exhausted by hunger. Zedekiah and a few companions attempted to escape by night but they were soon captured. In the presence of Nebuchadrezzar Zedekiah witnessed the slaughter of his sons. They put out Zedekiah’s eyes, bound him in fetters and led him away, this petty king who had dared to defy the gods and the armies of Babylon.

Zedekiah did not go into exile alone. With him went all the leadership of Judah—the nobles, the soldiers, the artisans, leaving only the peasants and common people behind to till the land and to keep gold flowing into the coffers of Babylon.

Judah now had a governor, the captain of Nebuchadrezzar’s bodyguard, in place of a king. Judah was now a backwater province in a vast and sophisticated empire. The governor burned the Temple, the royal palace, and all the great houses of Jerusalem. He looted every Temple implement that could be melted down—all the bronze, silver and gold. He broke down the walls of Jerusalem so that the city could not be defended.

So says the account in the second book of Kings and, while it may not have all the details historically correct, it doubtless is faithful to the thoroughness with which the servants of Babylon did their job.

The people of Judah—and especially those of Jerusalem—had endured bad leadership, a year and a half of imprisonment in their own city, and the looting and damage that came after the fall of the city. They watched the defenders get cut down. They stood by in helpless rage as jack-booted Babylonian thugs defiled their holy places. They cowered in anguish as women and girls were raped and infants tortured and killed. And then, starved though they were, they were lined up and marched off to the northeast, toward the Tigris River, through the heart of the Babylonian Empire, and then, finally, southeast to the city of Babylon itself.

The Judeans had lost their land. They had lost their independence. They no longer had access to the holy places that had anchored their lives in space. They were forced to live among a people who knew nothing of the sacred rhythms that had anchored their lives in time. They were taken to a place of strange tongues, strange foods, strange habits of dress, and strange gods.

Perhaps the worst of it was that they had been living under a promise. They had thought that God would protect them. They had thought that Zion—the place of God’s own dwelling—was safe. But the defenses did not hold. The promises failed. And now they found themselves forced to live in a place they could not call home. They were in exile.

It seemed God had deserted them. And, to make matters even worse, they suspected that God had good cause to desert them. It was not just that they had suffered an awful calamity; in some sense it was their own fault.

How did they survive? How do the people of God survive when the worst case scenario turns out to be hopelessly optimistic? Well, to be honest, I assume that many of them did not. How many lost their lives or their minds on this ancient Trail of Tears we do not know and cannot know.

It’s remarkable that we know anything at all about them. Of course, there was a history written by the winners, the Babylonians. This was all duly recorded in the annals of the kings of Babylon so that all coming ages would know that Nebuchadrezzar was a mighty warrior who lived in the favor of his gods. But that story is lost. For once, history was not written by the winners, but by the losers!

The losers survived, somehow. Even more remarkably they didn’t simply melt away into the population of their conquerors. Somehow they remained a people. Conquered, they were not destroyed. Exiled, they lived. How?

One thing they did was to turn their pain into poetry and their anger into anthems. They wrote their wrath and sang their sorrow. Some poet or poets of exiled Judah—and it was probably not Jeremiah—wrote the book of Lamentations in our Bible. Whoever wrote our lesson for this morning was a skilled poet. According to one scholar the poem moves through no less than three distinct kinds of literature in the first eleven verses, as if the depth of the poet’s anguish, sorrow and rage cannot be contained in any one form.¹ And yet, at the same time, the poem is carefully controlled and crafted. Of the five in Lamentations, the first four poems are acrostic, that is, the first letter of each of the twenty-two verses together form the Hebrew alphabet.² The pain is real and its expression is genuine, but it is not without order or structure. Perhaps the poet is looking back on the disaster from far enough away that he or she is no longer overwhelmed by it.

If so, then the psalmist who wrote Psalm 137 is still in the midst of the catastrophe, too close for artful speech. Newly arrived in Babylon and finally able to sit and mourn their loss, the survivors cannot imagine ever singing again. Their harps are hung up to collect dust. Their repertoire of holy songs is reduced to a source of entertainment for pagans. “Come on,” urge their jailors, “sing us one a’ them Jew songs!” It’s impossible for the psalmist even to imagine.

Instead, his or her heart is filled with revenge fantasies, imagining the walls of Babylon torn down to the bedrock and its infants dashed against the rocks. It’s hard for us to imagine these words being used for worship. I was surprised to find them in our hymnal, as squeamish as the editors of our psalter seem to have been. But I couldn’t bring myself to ask you to use them in worship, so I read them instead.

We have a hard time with the place of so-called negative emotions in our spiritual lives. We try not to feel those things or think those thoughts but the harder we try the stronger they seem to be. We try to banish such feelings. We would never pray to see our enemies treated in the way that they have treated us.

After 9/11 and the loss of so many, so many, so very many fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and husbands and wives, we didn’t pray for the deaths of the fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and husbands and wives of someone else. Nevertheless that is what the last nine years have brought. Doubtless many bad people were killed along with the innocent, but the innocent have died in their tens of thousands. We didn’t pray for their deaths, but they happened.

In contrast the psalmist prays for revenge. The psalmist entertains revenge fantasies. The psalmist takes those fantasies, takes all that rage and horror, and turns it into language, into conscious thought, and places it into God’s hands. And that, apparently, was the end of the matter. We have no evidence that Psalm 137 was a prelude to baby-killing.

We imagine that we are morally superior to this psalmist because we won’t pray such things. But today we will gather at the table with our brothers and sisters from all around the world. Among those gathered with us will be Christians of Iraq and Afghanistan. How many of our fellow guests will come missing family members? And will they charge us with fratricide?And what will say in return?

Maybe, just maybe, it would have been better to have prayed for revenge, to have included Psalm 137 in our service, to have admitted our own rage, given it to God and left the matter in God’s hands. I can’t know for certain.

While we do not yet know whether we will survive our exile in the world into which 9/11 thrust us, we do know that the people Judah survived theirs. They raged and they wept and they did it all before God. They turned their weeping and their revenge fantasies into poems and prayers.

“How can we sing Yahweh’s song in a foreign land?” the psalmist asked. How, indeed? And yet these words were embedded in a song. The psalmist sang the unsingability of exiled Judah’s situation. And in that song, life in exile became possible.

So, if these texts are sources for seeing ourselves as the church, what do they tell us? Who might we become if we took these texts seriously? Or if we seriously let them take us?

We might be a people who sing. We would sing our praise and our thanks. We would sing our joy. We would sing of justice. We would sing of peace.

But we would also sing of sadness and loss. We would sing of anger and grief. We would sing of pain and longing. We would sing for ourselves and for each other and for those who cannot sing and for those whose song goes unheard. We would sing for the widows and the orphans. We would sing for the bereft. We would sing for the angry and for the bitter. We would sing for the hopeless.

And, as long as we sang, the reign of God would be present in our midst. In our song, there would be a little bit of home that could still give us hope against the day of our return. In our song, God would come to us still, even when the place where we find that we must live is not a place that we can call home.

“How can we sing Yahweh’s song?” the psalmist sang. Yes, precisely.

©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1 Dianne Bergant, "The Challenge of Hermeneutics: Lamentations 1:1-11: A Test Case," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2002).

2 Chapter 3 is composed of sixty-six verses. Verses one through three all begin with aleph, the next three with beth, and so forth.