You are a musician and have spent your entire life leading your people in worship to God, the same God that was no where to be found when the battles were taking place, the same God that has allowed your home to be destroyed. You have written songs about the glory of God and found joy in the praise of God. There is no longer any joy.
The soldiers who have taken you are godless, as are the peoples they represent. Their faith is in the false gods of their homeland, gods that exist only in their minds and in their lifeless statues. Your God is alive. You believe it still, but He is not to be found, so the soldiers openly mock your worship. They say, "Singer! Sing us a song about how great your God is!" But you can not sing. You can't give in to their taunts, plus the songs you know can't be reconciled with where you find yourself right now.
You want to go back home. You want your city back. You want revenge on your evil captors.
So you write a new song.
You write Psalm 137.
We don't read this psalm in church for multiple reasons. We have no connection to being ripped from our homes by invaders. We don't have any real passion for the state of Jerusalem. We don't need any divine retribution on the Babylonians. And mostly, calling for a blessing on anyone who kills a baby does not fit into the paradigm of how we follow Jesus.
But this is one of my favorite psalms. Its one of my favorites because of the violent honesty. This is no weak prayer about how the psalmist trusts in God's plan. He is devastated and in pain, and he can find no solace in how there can be any good in what's happening. This psalm is about a faith in God that has been pushed to the absolute and final limits of what it can take and then pushed a little further.
This is a new song, with no praise, no adoration, no joy. Its the song of a person who feels forgotten by God and who wants revenge on his enemies.
In our churches, we don't usually practice this kind of honestly. We might hide our failures and our doubts from others. We put on an optimistic face about how things will be ok, even if we can't really see any hope at all. This kind of dishonesty is almost acceptable in our communities, if not acceptable then at least understandable. We get it when someone doesn't open up and share their most difficult suffering. We do see it occasionally, when someone responds to the invitation and openly confesses indescrections. Or when someone is mourning a death. But when we see the bare, unfiltered emotions, we worry about the mental state of the person. Those times are rare, but its even more rare to see someone confess to feelings of sin: desire to hurt someone, desire to cheat, desire to be dishonest. These things we do not discuss unless they've been acted on.
What's worse, much worse, is when we let our brave face and dishonesty carry over into our prayers to God. We repress telling God what we really think. We hide from God our desires. We hide our attraction to sin. We don't tell God that we may not really trust him like we should, as if saying them aloud to God would destroy an already fragile relationship. As if we think that God can't handle or won't tolerate our wanderings.
This psalm calls for a new relation to God. Praise has been discarded from the vocabulary. There is no pretending to look on the bright side or see some bigger plan at work. Hatred for the enemy is worn like a jacket of a favorite team.
Its the kind of honesty that I want: joy when I'm joyful, angry when I'm angry, faithless when I'm faithless. With violent honesty, I want to be open enough for God to be able to work in me.
