All the lonely people

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.

² There on the poplars
    we hung our harps,
³ for there our captors asked us for songs,
    our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
    they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

⁴ How can we sing the songs of the Lord
    while in a foreign land?
⁵ If I forget you, Jerusalem,
    may my right hand forget its skill.
⁶ May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
    if I do not remember you,
if I do not consider Jerusalem
    my highest joy.

⁷ Remember, Lord, what the Edomites did
    on the day Jerusalem fell.
“Tear it down,” they cried,
    “tear it down to its foundations!”
⁸ Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
    happy is the one who repays you
    according to what you have done to us.
⁹ Happy is the one who seizes your infants
    and dashes them against the rocks.   Psalm 137

 

I can only remember two occasions in my quite long life when I have felt seriously, agonisingly lonely.

 

There was the first night I spent at university - I had never been away from home alone before, and though I was only fifty miles away, it might as well have been a thousand (and there were no mobile phones in those days). And then, in my hitch-hiking days, I was on a kibbutz in Galilee when somebody casually mentioned at breakfast that there was a letter for me – but no-one knew where it had been put. Oh the sheer misery! the childlike need to cry! the pathetic self-pity!

 

But that’s all. How fortunate I have been.

 

Which makes it quite hard for me to get inside the skin of the person who wrote this little psalm.

 

“By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion…” So it begins.

 

In the year 587 BC the historic city of Jerusalem (Zion) was destroyed by the cruel Babylonians, and the writer of the psalm was clearly one of the many Judeans who, at some point afterwards, was taken off into captivity, not knowing if they would ever see Israel again.

 

Picture them, then, sitting “by the rivers” in this foreign country, and giving way to tears as they conjure up in their minds Solomon’s magnificent temple, the political as well as spiritual heart of their nation. Picture them pitifully “hanging their harps” (the instrument great King David played!) on the poplar trees and refusing to obey the taunts of their guards, “Come on, sing us one of your Zion-songs!”, spoken in a strange language.

 

“Sing? Sing for joy? In this God-forsaken place? That would be a betrayal of everything I value in belonging to the people of Israel!”

 

We get a strong feel for how Israelite religion was part and parcel of their lives and woven into their history – descended from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, forged into a nation by Moses and the experience of the Exodus, bound together by the law of God, and inspired, uplifted, challenged, often rebuked, by a succession of fiery prophets.

 

And there, in the heart of the city, that magnificent temple, where solemn worship was offered, sins confessed, sacrifices offered up.

 

And now this… after the rivers and green valleys of Israel, the massive Babylonian plains criss-crossed by what were possibly man-made irrigation canals.

 

Two completely distinct thoughts occur to me.

 

First, we are reminded of the very close connection that universally exists between “religion” and “culture” (think of the Jewish Passover festival, or the Muslims’ Ramadan, neither of which are purely “spiritual” events).

 

For me, as essentially a life-long free-church evangelical, “sacred music” and art, buildings and architecture, rituals and robes are, to borrow the in-phrase, far more of a turn-off than a help. Certainly, I can admire a magnificent cathedral (perhaps, even more, a mosque), but they “don’t do anything for me” in a spiritual sense. I’m planning to watch the coronation next month – but pretty much simply as a historic, once in a lifetime event.

 

Fair enough. But a danger lurks in wait for me: the sin of arrogance, of feeling superior to all those poor saps who will be revelling in the whole thing and foolishly imagining it might have something to do with their relationship with God. “Huh! empty ritual!” I’m tempted to snort.

 

Yet, for all I know, many of those people may have more of Jesus in their little finger than I have in my whole body. Arrogance! Or to use an even shorter word, just plain pride. Lord, have mercy on me!

 

Yes, there is a real danger that “faith” is hollow and lifeless, just going through outward forms of worship and focusing on the aesthetic rather than the genuinely spiritual. It’s part of our responsibility not to let that happen to us, to remain humble and teachable, and to leave it to God (who else!) to judge where somebody else stands whose way of worship is different from ours. As long as it’s Jesus who’s at the centre…

 

The lesson to learn: things that we may tend to dismiss as merely “cultural” or merely “religious” may in fact become instruments in the hands of God.

 

My second thought is simplicity itself… Psalm 137 is supremely about loneliness. This raises the challenge: How good are we at spotting the lonely person and making them feel wanted, welcomed and loved?

 

It may be somebody who has just moved in down the road; somebody I sit next to on the bus; somebody with or without a foreign face or a foreign accent; somebody new in church and looking lost; somebody who could very well have a label hanging round their neck: “I am a stranger – please say Hello to me!”.

Somebody whose heart is aching because they’re yearning for that tiny speck of the planet that we call… “home”: the lure of the familiar. Familiar places, familiar sounds, familiar smells, familiar people, familiar food – all of them are of no real importance, of course. Until, that is, they are far, far away.

Lord, give me the eyes to see, and the compassion to respond to the lonely people all around me. Amen.

Jesus said: Then the King will say to those on his right “Come, you who are blessed by my Father… For I was a stranger, and you invited me in…” Matthew 25:34-36