Saturday, October 11, 2014

Saturday, October 11, 2014

Psalm 137

I am spending a moment trying to guess your reaction to the ending of the Psalm. 

Disbelief at what you’ve read? Horror? Anger at having been led into reading it? Or maybe you’re just surprised and shocked.

The reality is that those terrible words in verse 9 are a part of our Holy Scriptures. Interestingly, if you look up Psalm 137 in your Book of Common Prayer you’ll only get to read up to verse 6. Whether out of a sense of taste or to protect our hearts and minds from turning to violent thoughts, the difficult verses are expunged. The more current way of thinking is that we don’t need to like those terrible verses, but we need to deal with them. They might not be appropriate (or comfortable) for a worship service, but we need to wrestle with them. In understanding where the Psalmist is coming from we might understand ourselves a bit more. Such fury is a real part of being human. Imagine the scene described earlier in the Psalm: the Israelites are rounded up by those who sacked their city and destroyed their Temple. They’re made to play their songs, and those patriotic anthems of victory are not only hollow,  they are utterly embarrassing. 

I have just returned from an ecumenical gathering to pray for persecuted Christians in the middle east. “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock” is hard to read after having just prayed about seeking peace for all, and eschewing the temptation for revenge. If violence and retribution really did bring about lasting peace, then we would have accomplished it years ago. But it doesn’t and we haven’t. 

So I wrestle and argue with Psalm 137:9. While I’m not at ease with it, it does show me that in our prayers we can be honest. Even brutally so. 

I share some thoughts from Barbara Brown Taylor that reflect my view of how we are to relate to our Scriptures:

My relationship with the Bible is not a romance but a marriage, and one I am willing to work on in all the usual ways: by living with the text day in and day out, by listening to it and talking back to it, by making sure I know what is behind the words it speaks to me and being certain I have heard it properly, by refusing to distance myself from the parts of it I do not like or understand, by letting my love for it show up in the everyday acts of my life. The Bible is not an object for me; it is a partner, whose presence blesses me, challenges me, and affects everything I do. 

• The Preaching Life (Cambridge: Cowley Publications, 1993), 56.

- Matthew Kieswetter