Upheld

What do you do when your life is a mess and you are so angry with God that you could spit in God's face? Too many of us crawl into a hole and refuse to come out until things are better. The book of Psalms offers a better answer, though; and this sermon considers what that is.

Psalm 137 is one powerful psalm! (You might want to take a look at it before you read this sermon. Don't worry -- it's short.) Preachers tend to stay away from it, because they don’t like to face what’s in it – especially not its ending! Oh, it starts innocently enough. It begins with a peaceful image of rivers and trees blowing gently in the wind. But then, that beautiful scene turns into a nightmare. We find that the psalmist has been brutally wrenched away from his homeland, and is a prisoner in a foreign land. As we continue to read, his grief increases. The holy city of Jerusalem is gone, burned down to the bare earth by an invading army. Its inhabitants have been brutally slaughtered. Even little children were not spared. The psalm ends with a cry for revenge: “Babylon, you bully, one of these days the same thing will happen to you! I can’t wait for that day! On that day, you’ll watch your own children being slaughtered, and you’ll know how we feel.”

This psalm is a product of the Babylonian Exile. That exile began in 586 BCE after the armies of Babylon swooped down on the Israelites like a great bird of prey and conquered their nation. The Babylonians overran the city of Jerusalem and destroyed it down to its foundations.  Whoever was not killed was dragged off to Babylon. The only Israelites left in the land of Judah were illiterate peasants who posed no threat to Babylon’s authority. No wonder that Psalm 137 is the very essence of grief, anger, and despair! The exiles had lost everything: their Temple, their city, their homes, their possessions, and their families. Who wouldn’t grieve in a situation like that? Who wouldn’t hate the ones who had done such dreadful deeds, and cry bitterly for revenge? I probably would; and so would you. Those exiles had hit rock bottom.

And we can feel for them! Oh, we may never have been torn away from our homes and our families and sent into exile; but all of us have felt angry and helpless at one time or another. Maybe a loved one died suddenly. Maybe a doctor told us news that we didn’t anticipate. Maybe an opportunity we had yearned for was unfairly snatched away from us. Whatever the reason, we’ve all had the rug pulled out from underneath us. We end up on the floor before we even knew what hit us. I can remember a time in my own life when I suffered so many personal losses that I became numb. I felt anger, grief, despair, and then… nothing at all. I just put one foot in front of the other and tried to get through each day as it came.

Maybe you’ve felt that way, too. Most of us have. Those are the times when we have had so many blows rain down on our heads that we can’t even stand up any more. We’re like the woman in the old TV ad who took a bad fall, pushed her medic alert button, and cried, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.” We may giggle at that cheesy ad; but the reality is that most of us feel that way every now and then. Of course, we haven’t taken a literal fall. We’ve fallen emotionally and spiritually. Those can be the worst falls of all. How can we get up from those falls? How can we be hopeful when we don’t see any reason for hope? How can we recover when all we see ahead of us is pain?

Psalm 137 doesn’t give us an answer to those questions; but the book of Psalms itself does. What happens if we enlarge our focus from just Psalm 137 and include the psalms that are around it? Psalm 136, the psalm that comes before it, is a litany. Part of it is meant to be read by a leader, while the rest of the psalm are the responses to what that leader says. The leader reminds the people of all that God has done for them in the past: God created all that is; God brought Israel out of Egypt; and God brought them into the Promised Land. Then, after each statement of what God has done, the people respond, “His love endures forever.” 26 times the people respond, “His love endures forever.” It’s pretty tough to miss the point: God’s love is forever, regardless of what happens to us! Following Psalm 137 is a psalm of praise. We used part of it as our call to worship this morning. Psalm 138 begins with the statement: “I will praise you, O Lord, with my whole heart!” and concludes by saying, “The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me. Your love, O Lord, endures forever. Do not abandon the work of your hands!” How can we miss the point? God is faithful to us, even though it may not appear to be the case at the time! The voices of Psalm 136 and Psalm 138 hold up the hopeless, crushed voice of Psalm 137, a voice that has no praises of its own.

I’m convinced that the placement of these psalms isn’t accidental. I believe that the psalmist is telling us something by surrounding a psalm of bitter lament with psalms of praise. Those psalms that remember with gratitude what God has done for us hold up the one between them that cannot lift up its grief-stricken head. And isn’t it the same way with us? When we are crushed by what life throws at us, we need to be upheld by those who are around us. It doesn’t matter whether we have been felled by one gigantic blow, or whether we have been worn down by the drip, drip, drip of daily problems. When our lives are lying flat on the floor and our faces are ground into the dirt, we need help getting up.

It is then that God uses those around us to help us do just that. Sometimes those people are family members or close friends who sympathize, listen to our cries of distress, and encourage us to keep going until we get through our dark place. Sometimes that help comes from people we don’t even know, whose kind words just happen to be what we need to hear in the midst of our grief. And surely that help comes from our own community of faith – here as we worship together. When we cannot worship – when we are, in fact, so angry at God that we never want to darken the doors of the church again – that is when we most need to come to church and worship. When we cannot praise, or sing, or even pray, others around us will do that for us. When our lives are the embodiment of Psalm 137, those around us will take the role of Psalm 136 as they remember God’s faithfulness, and that of Psalm 138 as they offer their praises.

And one day, we will discover that our wounds are beginning to heal. We may not be dancing yet. We may not even be standing up yet. We might only be sitting up gingerly. But we’re off the ground, and we’re looking ahead again. That is the day that we move out of Psalm 137 and look towards Psalm 139. Do you remember what it says? “Where can I go from your Spirit, O God? Where can I go from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there. If I make my bed in the underworld, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the morning and fly to the farthest side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, and your right hand will hold me fast.” When we fall and can’t get up, God is there with skin on – in the people who love us, who encourage us, and who worship for us when we can’t do it ourselves. Thanks be to God, whose love does indeed endure forever!