“By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there we hung up our harps.
For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” - Psalm 137: 1-4
I am humbled by the way that the Psalms move from lament to prayer, despair to praise. I think that before I really understood the context of Psalm 137 I knew its power. It was set to Reggae music that played through the night in my college art studio and spoke to me again as I heard these words lifted up by Peter, Paul, and Mary. But when the words really gained life was as I spent enough time with the story of Israel to understand the despair of being exiled from home and needing to remember how to find joy and grounding in an un-chosen and un-welcome reality. For the Israelites, the Babylonians had laid siege to Jerusalem/Zion and had taken much of the population into that strange land by waves. The experience of trying to find God in the midst of that scattering, that diaspora state, becomes a powerful memory n the shaping of Judaism and then Christianity. Throughout history, God's people have sought God in those moments when their entire world was turned upside down.
Of course, we find ourselves in another scattered state of being. Slowly our communities are opening and we are trying to put back together the ways of life that we cherish. If we are wise, we realize that thus far we have been very lucky not to have watched the global wildfire of pandemic take hold here… but a good measure of that has looked more like luck than care or respect for this invisible threat. A brand-new virus has scattered us to our homes and to a new reality of social distancing and increased care for how we are to interact. As our world has changed, there is great cause for grieving. Significant life events are postponed or almost unrecognizably altered: graduations, weddings, funerals. Jobs and workplaces have changed and, for some, vanished. Teachers, pastors, and all of those people who have answered a calling to be in constant interaction with others have found themselves in a strange land of phone calls and computer interactions. There is a great grief that cries out from within many of us and it sounds a lot like those exiles sitting down by the river’s shore and weeping for what we remember of the past.
What we know of Israel’s time is that the time of exile also became a defining time for the people. I read scholars who attribute our having a written Hebrew Bible to that period of not being where the people wanted to be. If we read that Psalm, we hear the weeping and the lament… but I have also always been drawn to the sitting down by the water and hanging the harps on the branches of the willows. That image holds echoes of the 23rd Psalm’s story of restoration and care. Even in the midst of our trials, if we look up, we encounter God's life-giving activity: the waters of Babylon and a willow tree. Or for us, the loud proclamation from God is that God is very busy in our world in all that blooms and grows and has life in this season. If we only look up from our distress, we cannot help but to see signs of God's life and grace all around us.
There is a song to which I was just introduced that took words that are attributed to an unknown Jewish author during the second world war… the details of the attribution are quite unclear, but the text is incredibly simple and powerful:
“I believe in the sun, even when it’s not shining.
I believe in love, even when I don’t feel it.
I believe in God, even when God is silent.”
We are living in a time when we are encouraged to remember how good it will be to be together again, a time when our laments of grief might again be turned to songs of joy. But like the faithful through the ages, we don’t know the timing of that return. So in this moment, in this place wherever it may be, we are invited to open our hearts in faith and to believe and to trust and to see God's hand at work all around us.
May God continue to bless us and to bind us together across time and space as we hold fast to hope and love.
We have been working hard to discern how and when we might be able to gather again for worship…
There are some in our community who have been expressing their longing to be able to reconnect in some safe physical way. There are others who are content to ere on the side of caution and wait until all is once again safe for us to gather. This is new territory for all of us, and all that we are learning from a health/science standpoint suggests that things will not change dramatically anytime soon. We are also aware that gathering inside our sanctuary with a large group for a prolonged period (some say more than 15 minutes) greatly increases our risk should.
In the effort to support our community we have been exploring the possibility of worshiping outdoors a couple of times this summer – being outdoors where we are mostly not re-breathing the same air is a significantly safer option for us. We finally secured some dates earlier this week for us to be able to experiment with this kind of gathering. We are required to have no more than 25% capacity in the park (the same guidance that we would be under when we are finally cleared to open the church). It is also required that everyone maintain a six-foot social distance, and wear face masks. These services will be a learning experience for us to see if we can gather together in a way that allows us to see each other’s sparkling eyes peaking over a mask, to share in worship, and still to be as safe as we can be. All the health guidelines suggest that large gatherings of people over a sustained period of time presents the greatest risk for transmission of this new corona virus. Being outdoors will help mitigate the risks but cannot remove them. For those who wish, let us humbly gather and witness to how we can love one another enough to seek to keep each other safe and set a faithful example for our community. For those who feel uncomfortable gathering or are in any high-risk group, we will continue to post our worship services online.