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Psalm 1 37 is not on its face, the word of God. Certainly it is true that scripture as a whole is the word of God. And this sum is part of scripture and God be praised

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for all of that. But let there be no mistake, this psalm is not the voice of God . It is rather the voice of the people in crisis. It is addressed to anyone who will listen

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and maybe just, maybe one of the ones listening is God Tom 137 is a dangerous wildfire of a poem that threatens to get out of control and burn up everything in its path. It is a word

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we need to hear. The poet cries out from the battered soul of the eggs Ilic community in Babylon in the middle of the sixth century B C. E. And he asks whether it is possible to

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sing yeah. Song while a prisoner on mar dukes turf, We will spend most of our time together trying to answer that question. It's not the only solve that connects lament with the hope of revenge that's

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common enough in the psalter. But it is the only psalm to paint that connection between lament and revenge in the colours of such cold, naked, murderous anger. The song is embarrassing. Let's face it

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. It's vicious, violent beatitude at the end. Happy are they is abhorrent. Especially maybe even to us Moderns endured as we are. To broadcast, bloodshed. To read these last two verses is to

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turn one's head away and disgust. Better to ignore them, pretend they're not there. When I was young, there was a reggae group actually, they were german, but they were all jamaican in origin

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. So we call them a reggae group called Boney M. Maybe some of you are old enough to remember. They had a hit record using the first two verses of this song in a lilting jamaican rhythm

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. It went like this. Let's see if I can remember it by the rivers of Babylon. There we sat down when we remember. Yes, we wept when we remembered Zion, Sing it with me

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by the waters of Babylon. There we sat down . Yeah, we wept when we remembered Desire Young . And I remember the first time I heard that , By the time I heard it, I already

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knew how this psalm ended and I wondered how in the world they were going to manage that upbeat, innocent reggae rhythm with the last two verses about smashing babies against rocks. And the truth is, they

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didn't. After the first two verses of psalm 1 37 the song bailed out. It switched over to David's pious prayer at the end of psalm 51 let the words of my mouth and the meditations of my

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heart be acceptable in thy sight here tonight, cowards ! Well, I don't want to be a coward and maybe a fool, but I am willing if you are to walk open ID into the dark and

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terrifying universe of these words, I want to explore what it means to remember Zion and I want to suggest that if you sit beside the waters of Babylon , whether that's literal or metaphorical remembering, Zion comes

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at a cost to remember Zion is to dwell in places of darkness lit by fires of rage. So I'm 137 is the cry of refugees and exiles. People who have watched the swords and spears, the

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bombs and bullets of invaders level and burned the very structures of their lives. People who have looked at the dismembered corpses of their families and friends, people who have fled in the night, been frog marched

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to places of despair and hopelessness. People who have looked back over their shoulders to watch the western sun setting on the smoldering rubble of their dreams. These are the words of a people in darkness and to

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hear this song is the Us to dwell in some dark places. African slaves standing on the docks, in chains in Newport, Rhode island or charleston south Carolina, the Cherokee trekking the long trail of tears

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from Alabama to Oklahoma, jews stuffed into cattle cars rattling along the polish via dolorosa. From Warsaw to Auschwitz or Bergen Belsen, Syrian refugees begging at the borders of countries that do not want them or sinking

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in deflating rafts into the blue Aegean sea. To dwell in these places is to know that you will never again see the forests of West Africa or the green woods of the great Smoky mountains or the streets

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of Warsaw or the onion domes of Aleppo. It is to be overwhelmed in darkness and that is where this psalm begins. Yeah. Mhm or right. We begin with weeping. We weep for burned out

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homes and broken down walls for sacred places desecrated and despoiled for alters thrown down the holy of holies, violated, the ark of the covenant, overturned and empty. For the Royal palace, ransacked the throne

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of David abdicated for the great temple gates torn from their gate posts, lying shattered and burned in the street. We weep for those who died on the journey, starved or thirsty, drowned or abandoned,

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too weak, or too sick, or too young to walk another perilous mile. We weep because we made it to this destination, knowing all the while , that this destination is no place we want to

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be. Memory begins in weeping soon enough, though weeping gives way to silence the liars and salt trees , the drums and pipes, the violins and communes all hang soundlessly on the trees here no tune playing

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on their strings or vibrating their skins or reads this place. There's no place for music. Psalm 1 37 is positioned in the psalter immediately after the psalms of Innocence. The joyful songs of celebration, judean

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people used to sing on their way up to the temple for worship. I lift my eyes to the hills. My help comes from the Lord. I was glad when they said to me, let us

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go into the house of the Lord. Those who trust in Mount Zion, are those who trust in the Lord are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever. Only it doesn't.

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So I'm 137 puts the lie to all of that . The babylonians managed to move Mount Zion quite handily . Thank you very much. They burned it to the ground and those who trusted in the Lord,

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our cattle prodded across the desert at the point of a spear. Suddenly all the songs of Zion sound empty, hollow, discordant! Such a strange, bitter end to the joy of ascending the holy hill

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. Now there is no hill, there is no temple, there is no Zion, there is no hope, no wonder the liars are hanging in the trees. So it is that singing The Lord's song

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becomes the antics of the circus monkey. The bark of the trained seal, drained of its memory, drained of its meaning. Memory is hollow and the command to sing yet another song of Zion. There's

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nothing less than a cynical memory by those in positions of power and privilege. Every year, when february brings with it the observation of Black History Month, the mostly white choir in which I sing breaks out

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its repertoire of spirituals. We do the best we can. Every year the congregation responds to our efforts with a men's and thank you's. I'm glad they appreciate the beauty and grace of those powerful songs.

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They are good songs and they are well worth singing . And yet every year I have to confront over and over again the fact that I am no slave nor child of a slave, I am a descendant

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of captors and tormentors. These are not my songs and I can't escape the feeling that by singing them I am participating in that memory all over again. So it is at last that memory becomes an obscenity

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sweet songs of faith and trust. Taste of wormwood in the exiled mouth. Those who trusted in the Lord our come a cropper. We find ourselves in a land where the Lord is not God where the

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creed of the faith. Sheamus la belladonna, yellow Hannu Adana hear O. Israel the Lord your God . The Lord is one is a lie to remember as I am in this land is to curse,

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to curse. A faith turned false, turned to dust turned to dung. So must we forget the Lord song in this strange land? Maybe or maybe not? Well. Yeah. Right, right.

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Mhm. What? These words are an oath And like most oaths, they envision two possibilities. one possibility is that we forget Zion and I suppose it could be argued that that really is the easier path

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or at least the more pragmatic better to leave the past in the past, pronounce it dead and gone , get over it. Move on, undergo the anesthesia of amnesia. To forget is to walk the

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way of darkness and silence to be sure. But at least it is or will be at some point , a familiar darkness and a comfortable silence to forget is to ensure that the hand that once plucked the

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lyre strings never touches them again. Indeed, it recoils from the prospect if for no other reason than to strum the chords of home is too fresh in the memory to reopen a wound to lightly healed to

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forget is to ensure that the tongue that once sang the songs of Zion now sticks stubbornly in the palette so that neither song nor speech emerges, but only the inarticulate grunts and groans of pain and loss to

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forget, Zion is to sing no more forever. And maybe that's just as well, or maybe not . The other possibility implicit in the oath is to remember Zion and no matter how much it costs regardless

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of the pain, even if the memory is ashes in the mouth and obscenity on the tongue, it is to take down the liar and with trembling right hand, pluck the very chords that evoke all that

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has been stolen or burned or killed. It is to say the words that seem a cursed with tongues that are even yet uttering the curses. It is to sing a song in a place where that song

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does not belong precisely because it does not belong there . It is an act of protest and maybe just maybe of hope. In the fall of 1971, Rod Stewart had his first big hit. It was

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a song called Maggie May Wake up Maggie, I think I've got something to say to you. It's late september and I really should be back at school . No, I keep you amused, but I

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feel I'm being used. Oh, Maggie, I couldn't have tried any more. You led me away from home just to save you from being alone. You stole my heart. And that's what really hurts

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. I was 18 that autumn. And if you haven't guessed that song was the soundtrack of my college freshman year. I had just reached the age of military maturity. In the eyes of the United States

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, selective service and Vietnam loomed like a storm cloud over my life and the lives of my friends. There was something about Rod Stewart's gravelly irascible voice singing about lost opportunity and innocence and probably lost virginity that

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gathered of all our anger, all our hopelessness, all the fear. We were nurturing of dying in some dark, murky swamp in a corner of some foreign land, by the waters of Babylon Stuart through

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all that despair, back in the face of an imaginary older woman who, by the gift of some poetic magic became for us, the symbol of a country at whose hands we were pretty sure we were

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being used still to sing Maggie May at the top of our lungs was not to give up, but rather to cling to hope. However, forlorn that beyond the loss was a tomorrow that there might one

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day be, oh, day when we could resume our lives and get on back to school or at least steal my daddy's Q and make a living playing pool. Every time I hear that song, even

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now, a taste of that forlorn but not yet abandoned. Hope comes flooding back. Pat caught me singing in the shower this morning. Oh, Maggie ! I wish I'd never seen your phase. I'm

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sure she wondered what the hell had gotten into me and hell is exactly what has gotten into me and what gets into anyone in exile? Who has the temerity to remember Zion to choose, no matter the

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cost, not to forget to remember. Zion is to be enraged at all. That is not Zion and to be enraged is to burn with the very fires of hell more. Mhm, paul. I

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heard it. What? Hi everyone. Here's what ? How? Yeah, no, I'll just let that sink in for a minute. In the summer of 1965, the Watts section of Los Angeles exploded

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in racial unrest and riots. It all began on 11 August when a white California highway patrolman beat up marquette Frye, a 21 year old black man during a routine traffic stop, A fight broke out between

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police and bystanders and pretty soon all of Watts was in flames literally and figuratively, bands of angry black men fed up with years of abuse at the hands of what they deemed a racist police force. Sounds

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familiar exploded into rage and began setting fires to cars and buildings all across Watts Burn baby burn burn, baby burn was chanted by the crowds as they stood silhouetted against the blazes, like so many witches around

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a Shakespearean cauldron. The champ somehow caught up and spit out all the repressed fury born of generations of despair. It took four days for the fires to die down and the crowds to dissipate. And in

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those four days the nation got its first look at black rage. The riots left 34 people dead and did$40 million$1965 was such violence and destruction justified ? I suppose it depends on your point of view

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. White people, like the ones in my hometown of Birmingham Alabama were horrified that the prospect at the prospect that such violence might wash up on their doorsteps and thus was born a generation of political rhetoric about

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law and order, thinly veiled code words for keeping the black folks where they belong. But from the perspective of many african americans, the riots were the first sign of a growing new self awareness. A

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refusal to accept exile to continue tolerating dilapidated housing, police brutality, economic privation as if those things were normal. It was a cry of rage from beside the Babylonian waters and you can still hear it,

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that cry in Ferguson or Baltimore or charlotte. Now , let me be clear, I'm not advocating violence of any sort whether smashing the heads of babylonian Children , burning cars or buildings or beating up protesters at

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political rallies, violence may end a conflict, but it never ever resolves. It. Still in our haste to disavow bloodshed. Let us not try to sanitize this song and thereby ignore or explain away the

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fury and ugliness of these last verses. That's what's wrong with Boney M's song. It ignores a fundamental truth about remembering Zion, a truth that pulses beneath whatever veneer of gentility and good behavior we wear when

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we sit beside the Babylonian waters memory you see, is connected to rage. Whenever what we remember is a life we can no longer have or cannot attain to remember. Zion is to know the urge somewhere

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deep down inside of us, deeper than words probably can reach. The urge to cut down any barrier that would keep us from Zion, no matter what it costs, we are today, two weeks downstream

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from the presidential election and five days before the beginning of advent, you know, as I reflect on those two events, they seem strikingly similar to me . Both of them gather up hopes and dreams and

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translate them into lives, whether those lives are of a particular political candidate or a messiah politically and religiously , we cannot live without hopes and dreams. Those yearned for promises of a new kingdom and a new

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way. The problem is but all too often there , once they always those dreams are dashed and the promises are at best postponed. So it is that we find ourselves beside the Babylonian waters, trying all

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over again to understand what has happened to us and where we go from here, we find ourselves in darkness and enrage. We are not strangers to this place. So let us not shrink from it.

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Let us not surrender to bland acceptance of a new normal that is neither normal nor new. Let us not douse the fires of memory that may yet light the way to hope. Let us not forget Zion

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. For you see advent kindled its own blaze. It holds for us the grim warning from the lips of the baptize er in the wilderness to everyone who places their trust in the status quo, that even

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now the ax is laid to the root, and every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Burn baby burn before the kingdom is born and the baby laid in

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the manger. We must endure labor and delivery in the darkness before we remember Bethlehem, let us remember