Reflecting On Psalm 137: Spiritual “Exhaling”
June 19th, 2006 by Matt Heerema | Posted in Theology
The following is a piece of a message I gave together with Brad Barret at Stonebrook Community Church. You can listen to it here.
My sister has a bumper sticker on the back of her car that says: “If you aren’t outraged, you aren’t paying attention.” Even though I’m fairly sure that this sticker is intended to be a slight against our current political administration, it is a fairly accurate observation.
We get angry, frustrated, outraged. Life stinks from time to time. I think this is one of the few shared human experiences. If you are at all paying attention to what’s going on in the world out there, you should be outraged. I believe we are designed by God to be bothered by injustice, inhumanity, crime, suffering, and these things are going on around us all the time; either to us directly, or to someone we know, or for sure someone we’ve heard about. Just flip on the evening news sometime…
I feel like we have this unwritten rule in our Christianity, that we always are supposed to be happy. And if we aren’t happy, we are supposed to act happy, to put on a smiley face. And sometimes I feel like this goes double for me. Who wants a discouraged worship leader!? There are days where if I were to get up here and play what was on my heart, you’d all leave, terrified, and covering your children’s ears. And now, there is some truth here. It is my duty to serve the church, and help us to honestly express praise to God through music. Though oftentimes, I wonder if we’re missing an important piece.
Check this out. From our very own Bible. From the Psalms, where a lot of the inspiration for our praise songs come from. It is a prayer to God, by David, a man after God’s own heart, right? A man who was very intimately connected to God, and probably our best example of a worship leader that we have in the Psalms.
Psalm 109:6-13 (NLT) Arrange for an evil person to turn on him. Send an accuser to bring him to trial. When his case is called for judgment, let him be pronounced guilty. Count his prayers as sins. Let his years be few; let his position be given to someone else. May his children become fatherless, and may his wife become a widow. May his children wander as beggars; may they be evicted from their ruined homes. May creditors seize his entire estate, and strangers take all he has earned. Let no one be kind to him; let no one pity his fatherless children. May all his offspring die.And he goes on like this for like 20 verses! But my favorite one is this one:
Psalm 137 (ESV) By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors, mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill! Let my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth, if I do not remember you, if I do not set Jerusalem above my highest joy! Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem, how they said, “Lay it bare, lay it bare, down to its foundations!” O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us! Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!The end. No resolution. No “But I will trust in the Lord”. No neat, tidy, wrap up. No instant relief of the pain. Do you feel the intensity in that Psalm? Reveling in the thought of ripping a helpless child out of it’s mother’s arms and throwing them against sharp rocks and watching their guts spill out onto the ground. That’s pretty sick. But my guess is that the author of this Psalm wasn’t some sort of maniac, my guess was this is exactly what happened to HIS child. He’s not thinking infanticide here, he’s thinking revenge. “Blessed is he who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rocks (the way you did to ours). And now you’re asking me to play a happy song for you? Die. I’d gladly pay someone to kill you so I can watch you die.” Pretty encouraging, eh? I realized this week what it is that bugs me about Christian radio. I can’t really complain about the quality of the music, at least any more than I do about the quality of pop music in general. Christian music has caught up to the rest of the world in production and quality. What bugs me is that a lot of the time I don’t need “Shout to the Lord”, I need “Shout AT the Lord”. I need Metallica’s “Kill ‘Em All”! I need Rage Against The Machine. I need to feel that for a while. “Positive and Encouraging” is not what I need a lot of the time. What would be encouraging for me is to know that someone else is feeling what I’m feeling right now, I need to know that I’m not alone in my frustration, and VERY few Christian artists write about that, and the ones that do DON’T get played on Christian radio. Walter Bruggemann, in The Message of the Psalms, says:
“Much Christian piety and spirituality is romantic an unreal in its positiveness. As children of the Enlightenment, we have censored and selected around the voice of darkness and disorientation, seeking to go from strength to strength, from victory to victory. But such a way not only ignores the Psalm; it is a lie in terms of our experience… The Jewish reality of exile, the Christian confession of crucifixion and cross, the honest recognition that there is an untamed darkness in our life that must be embraced – all of that is fundamental to the gift of new life.”It might come as a shock to you to know that over 50% of the Psalms are of this kind. Only about 30% are of the happy “praise the Lord!” type Psalms we typically think of, and write our music based on. There is a reason for this. God gave us these songs for a reason: because we need them. Jesus models for us why we need them. Psalm 22 was hard and heavy on his mind… I think God had David write that Psalm not only as a prophecy, but as something for His son to turn to in the greatest moment of agony any human being has ever suffered. And if we say that the Holy Spirit (which is the Spirity of Jesus) inspired the Psalms, then we can say that Jesus had David write this Psalm because he knew he would need it… Read Psalm 22 sometime and picture Jesus reciting it while hanging on the cross. It’s incredibly moving in that context.
22:1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? 2 O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest. 7 All who see me mock me; they make mouths at me; they wag their heads; 8 “He trusts in the Lord; let him deliver him; let him rescue him, for he delights in him!” 14 I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast; 16 …a company of evildoers encircles me; they have pierced my hands and feet — 17 I can count all my bones— they stare and gloat over me; 18 they divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots.A few weeks ago, I realized that I was having a severely hard time wanting to play music. I was frustrated with the fact that I had to get up and play music every other couple Sundays. I didn’t want to practice, I wasn’t excited about any of the songs I had to pick from, and I was definitely not excited about having to play in front of [our church]. What I eventually realized was that I had forgotten to breath in this way. I realized it when I sat down to read Psalm 137, and found myself really, really connecting with it, though I wasn’t sure why. I wasn’t in a “foreign land”, I didn’t have any “captors” who were tormenting me. And yet I felt this Psalm through and through. After reflecting on it for awhile I put it into my own words:
I’m leaving my guitar at home. I’m locking it in its case and throwing away the key. I’m not in this, These people aren’t into this I’m not even sure God is into this… Let’s be honest, how can we sing to God When our minds and our hearts are completely focused on, consumed by something other than Him? If I’m not thinking about you, God, go ahead and stop me from being able to play In fact, if my mind isn’t on you, if I’m putting YOUR agenda first just shut me up…What was going on was basically that a lot of little frustrations had piled up, and I hadn’t been exhaling them. My soul/mind/heart was so bogged down with these things that I wasn’t ABLE to focus on God. I needed to exhale. This Psalm, and the one after it helped me to do that. There have been other times when this Psalm hit home for me too. I have been so angry with people that I felt those last several verses. They went something like this for me:
You saw what they did to me, God! You heard what they said to me! [Fill in the blank name], I can wait to see you get what’s coming to you. I’d gladly give someone half of everything I owned to see him do to you What you did to me. Oh I can’t wait for that to happen… How sweet it’s going to be…
You know what’s interesting though? Once I expressed these things to God, once I stopped mulling it over in my mind, and stewing on it, and LUCKILY (or at least, hopefully) before it spit out on to anyone else, God brought me peace. Isn’t that weird? Once I TOLD HIM what was going on, he comforted me.
Check this out. Philippians 4:4-7
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything…
I think this might be where we get our false notion of needing to be happy and encouraged all the time. But keep reading:
…but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
FIRST we have to TELL HIM what’s on our minds, what is bothering us, we need to request what’s on our mind to him, and THEN we can have peace, and THEN we are able to not be anxious…
Are you angry? Frustrated? Don’t just sit on it. Don’t just swallow it, stuff it down, that will make you numb. I think we have a lot of numb people here this morning. Jesus wants you to feel. He wants you to feel these emotions and bring them to him. He wants to comfort you. He wants to be that close to you. Take it to him. He’s been there.
This entry was posted on Monday, June 19th, 2006 at 11:51 am and is filed under Theology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
[…] (At Stonebrook Community Church, we have been doing a series on The Psalms. Last week I posted a reflection on Psalm 137, and “Spiritual Exhaling” at RockWorship.com. This article is a continuation on that thought, helping me to process the Psalm and the example David gives us in it. It is also posted at Rockworship.com -Matt) […]
[…] I posted the notes from my portion of this message over at Rockworship.com. […]