Welcome/Call to Worship
Good morning! I’m Pastor Ashley Dargai. To those here in the chapel and those joining us online: we are so glad you’re here!
This morning, we will sing songs of worship, pray together, hear from scripture and one another, as we move toward the pinnacle of our service: the table of our Lord, where we will take the bread and drink the cup in remembrance of our most Gracious Host, Jesus. The purpose of our time together each Sunday is to bring our hearts closer to the heart of God, so I invite you to participate as much or as little in our prepared liturgy as your spirit is willing.
A couple of announcements before we begin:
There are visitor card in the pew in front of you—if you arrived during the pandemic or later, of if you have moved and have not updated your info with the church, please fill it out and drop it in the offering plate when it goes by later in worship.
Our adult Sunday School class began last week in the Heritage! As the Pandemic Response Committee monitors the COVID situation in our area and we await the building’s unpacking, we have a Table Talk class for adults meeting at 10 AM in the Heritage. There is also a combined children’s and youth class available at the same time under the porticache.
This Saturday, October 23, we will have a work day here at the church, beginning at 8 AM. If you can’t make it right at that time, come whenever you can! You may have noticed that we still have a lot of boxes to be unpacked and sorted, so this is the day we will be working together to get the church in working order.
This Saturday is also Food Hub! There’s a sign-up sheet at the welcome table if you’d like to help pack bags and hand them out.
On Monday, November 1 at 7 pm, we will have our annual All Saints service in the Heritage Chapel. This service is to remember those who have died and gone before us. It’s a solemn service where we light candles, pray, sing, and take communion, trusting in the promise of the communion of saints, that the Lord’s table stretches across all thresholds, including death.
Over the next few weeks, as we move toward Covenant Sunday on November 7, we will be examining stewardship from various liturgical lenses. Today, we will think about stewardship as it intersects with the table.
We continues new series today: Wishin’, Hopin’, Prayin’: Longing for God in a Chaotic World. Today, we explore a striking song of the Israelites.
Let’s pray to turn our hearts toward God for this hour.
Spirit of truth, open to us the scriptures, speaking your holy word through song, through the bread and cup, and through offering ourselves, and meet us here today in the living Christ. Amen.
Litany of Faith
One: I pray that the eyes of your heart will have enough light to see the hope of God’s call,
All: The richness of God’s glorious inheritance among believers,
One: And the overwhelming greatness of God’s power that is working for those who believe.
All: God’s power was at work in Christ when God raised him from the dead and sat him at God’s right side in the heavens,
One: Far above every ruler and authority and power and dominion, any power that might be named not only now but in the future.
All: God put everything under Christ’s feet and made him head of everything in the church, which is his body, the fullness of Christ, who fills everything in every way.
(Ephesians 1:18-23)
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you.
Join me in prayer.
God of gentle rains and warm sun, God who encourages growth, we are creatures who sometimes grow quickly, and sometimes get stuck.
God of freedom and liberation, of binding ropes being cut, we are bound in ways we don’t always understand or recognize.
God of exodus and exile and homecoming, God who calls us to leave where we are and come home; help us to have the courage to make the journey and to trust in the path.
God of health and healing, God who wants us to be made whole, we come as a people who are wounded in body and in spirit, people who seek healing.
God who has laid out a way for us to live, who has give us rules for living in community, we come as people who sometimes go astray, people who stretch the rules.
God of grace, we come as people who live through that Grace.
And we praise you for the growth,
We rejoice in being set free,
We dance along the path that leads u home,
We give thanks for the healing we have received,
We relax in the knowledge that we are forgiven
And we live as people of Grace.
Amen.
And so we pray together the prayer that our brother and redeemer Jesus gave to us…
Our Father, who art in heaven
Hallowed be Thy name
Thy Kingdom come
Thy will be done
On earth as it is in heaven
Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors
And lead us not into temptation
But deliver us from evil
For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever.
Amen.
Sermon
Psalm 137
By the rivers of Babylon—
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
2
On the willows there
we hung up our harps.
3
For there our captors
asked us for songs,
and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,
“Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
4
How could we sing the Lord’s song
in a foreign land?
5
If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither!
6
Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,
if I do not remember you,
if I do not set Jerusalem
above my highest joy.
7
Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites
the day of Jerusalem’s fall,
how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down!
Down to its foundations!”
[Now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord.
Wait. That’s not what it says. What does it say—*mumble a reading*. No, that can’t be right—the Bible can’t say something like this, surely. *Look at Bible*
Ah, no, that’s what it says. Yikes. Okay, then, let’s finish this Psalm. I suppose I should issue a content warning here: violence against children. Here we go. ]
8
O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us!
9
Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against the rock!
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
Thanks be to God? Really? That’s what we’re going with? Okay, I’m just clarifying.
I used to sing this Psalm a lot in college. I went to a Church of Christ university, so we’d sing our a cappella version: “By the rivers of Babylon…”
And then we’d get to the crux of the psalm: “How could we sing King Alpha’s song in a strange land? So let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord…”
I used to think it was a really nice song until I stumbled across the real deal a couple of years ago. And then I was like, “Wait, what?”
I mean, we all know that the Bible has some pretty terrible things in it, right? Anybody who says different has clearly not read Judges or Ezekiel or Habakkuk or Amos or some of Paul even? I mean, Genesis alone has a lot of shocking content, so next time someone is like, “The Bible tells us to all get along and God is love and that’s it” you can rest in your smugness knowing that they have clearly not even finished the first book.
But this is a big yikes, right? This is liturgy. The Psalm is a song likely sung in worship. Like a collective song, like the whole assembly singing together. Like, Gini fires up the piano, Nicole steps up to lead us in, and we start singing that last line and end with “Selah.”
I’m cringing even joking about it, y’all. I thought about setting it to the tune of “Come and Find the Quiet Center,” but I was afraid that I would be smited, and I don’t even believe in smiting.
Maybe we should back up before I have a conniption.
Psalm 137, is one of the only psalms in all 150 of them, that can be dated. The rest of them are approximations, guesses, shrugs—but this one we know was composed either during the Babylonian exile, so 587-539 BCE, or immediately after. I know that feels like a million years ago—BCE time is like the Twilight Zone in my mind, but this is a big deal. We have hard time dating dinosaurs, and here we are, giving a 60ish year window for this Psalm. If the nerdiness of this fact does not interest you, I get it, we’re moving on. But the particularity and specificity of this psalm is what we need to remember.
So if you can access the far recesses of your mind, you will remember that the story goes that Israel finally gets a king and gets to be like everyone else. They have the action figure that everyone else does in their class. We start with Saul and move from there. Some kings are good, but most of them range from “Eh” to terrible. They build a temple thanks to Solomon. Shoutout to the rich and wise king with questionable marital morality—spoiler alert, he had like a million concubines. But I digress.
But then, big scary Babylon comes to town. And ol’ Babylon is crushing kingdoms and taking names. Jeremiah and Lamentations both detail the atrocities of what happened when Babylon arrived on Israel’s doorstep and let’s just say that the Babylonian’s actions at that time inspired the last verse of Psalm 137.
The Israelite people were slaughtered, carried off to Babylon to be enslaved, and some very, very poor people stayed behind in the rubble, ruins that contained a toppled Temple—the site of what was the center of communal and religious meaning-making.
And according to this psalm, the Babylonians taunted the Israelites, telling them to sing a song of Zion for their entertainment. Like slaveholders demanding dance and song from those they systematically trafficked and enslaved, like the Nazis forcing the Jewish people in concentration camps to sing the songs of their people as a cruel joke, the Babylonians demanded the suffering, grieving, traumatized Hebrew people to sing the songs that were only reserved for the holiest of days, in the holiest of places, in the most treasured times of their hearts.
How does one sing a song like that? Of course the Israelites resented their sacred songs being treated as objects of mirth for their tormentors. These songs were not made for entertainment but for the survival of the people of God. They were formed in the crucible of suffering this people had endured in the past, having first been led out of enslavement in Egypt, across the wilderness depending only on bread from heaven, and finally into the Promised Land having lost whole generations along the way. These songs are not for taking lightly. They are not something you can just set to any old tune on the fiddle or harp at the whim of an oppressor.
And yet.
The history, the mythology, the very stories of identity that passed from generation to generation in the Hebrew people began as campfire stories, as camp songs. How did they pass along the promises of God as a nomadic people and then as a people weathering the tumultuous reins of kings? They had a barbecue, which is kind of accurate, and sat around the fire, and began, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now, before anything was created: God’s spirit was hovering over the waters. Boo!”
And the story charted Father Abraham’s journey from Ur across the wilderness, followed Joseph as he was betrayed by his own brothers and became a captive of Egypt. They told the stories of the military conquests of King David, leaving out the questionable decisions of Israel’s own acts of genocide and devastation.
The theme of all these stories is God’s faithfulness to Israel. The refrain of every step of the journey is God is with us.
So the Israelites seem to be in a predicament. On one hand, they are not going to sing the songs of Zion in God-forsaken Babylon for the entertainment of their tormentors. Obviously. End of discussion.
But. The only way to hold on to a shred of their identity as a people, to keep in tact what fragile threads of connection remain, is to sing the songs. To tell the story. That’s where hope comes from. They sing to remember how to hope.
And as painful as it is for people to remember Jerusalem at this time of acute trauma, it would be more painful for them not to remember, they say. Their hands would wither and be unable to pluck a harp or strum a lyre. Their tongues would be paralyzed so that not a note could they utter. Remembering keeps them moving, keeps them going, even as it feels like they are walking on broken glass.
So, they sing, we’ve got a tune for you. We remember how our neighbors the Edomites not only watched as Jerusalem fell, but they cheered Babylon on. May God visit you, Babylon, they sing through clenched teeth, in the same way you have visited us. Divine retribution, diddly do. Violence against everyone you love, diddly da. Suffering and hatred and torment so that you may feel everything we feel, selah.
Looking back at the version I was given in college of this song, “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord,” it seems like the one who changed the lyrics did not think that the Israelites’ version was acceptable in the sight of God.
That kind of prayer was not appropriate apparently.
Now don’t get me wrong, I do not think that a host of mostly white, middle and upper class Protestant Americans should be singing about genocide. Not a good look, let the record show.
But it does feel like the alternative, sanitized version of this song was a critique of a certain kind of prayer. Certain kinds of feelings. Certain ways of engaging with unutterable pain and anguish.
And it’s not just the Church of Christ. When’s the last time you heard this complete Psalm in worship? I have never heard it read in its entirety. It’s been shut out of various lectionary rotations.
It seems like a lot of people don’t know what to do with this kind of uncomfortable prayer, this longing for vengeance as a response to suffering and oppression. Better to shove it way down and ignore it rather than confront what is going on here in this Psalm. That’s a healthy coping mechanism, right?
But I wonder if honesty could be a synonym for holiness.
Like if we can’t bring our truest, grossest, most horrific thoughts to God, then where do we go? What do we do?
Because according to what we have read here today, misplaced longing can lead to hatred, violence, control, and vengeance. It doesn’t seem like bottling that stuff up is going to ferment it into fine wine, but rather it’s going to create some toxic sludge that will seep out in its own way.
I mean, wouldn’t it be wise to invite God into our worst inclinations? Might it be an act of profound faith in Emmanual—God with us—to entrust our most precious hatreds to God, knowing they will be taken seriously.
Now, just because the Israelites said they wanted terrible things to happen to the innocent children of Babylon does not mean God was going to do Israel’s bidding. God is not a slot machine, God is not Santa Claus—we cannot coerce or manipulate or boss God around. Jesus gave a big LOL to that notion and slipped through the angry crowds every time.
But I wonder if this Psalm in its shocking ending gives us permission to say the unsayable to God.
To not feel like we have to give a happy ending to every song we sing. To not feel compelled to end every prayer with, “But I trust you have a plan, God. You work everything for our good, O Lord. All shall be well, Great God of Heaven.”
Those things may or may not be true. But God does not need the ego stroked or the bows tied to hear our prayer.
Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who wrote a memoir of his time in Auschwitz, said frequently that he can tolerate the memory of silence, but not the silence of memory. We can remember in silence if we need to. But we must resist efforts to silence those who remember. To silence the remembering within our own hearts, within our own community.
Last week, we talked about how the answer to our longing is hope, and when all we see ahead is devastation and despair, that hope comes from looking back and remembering.
If singing is how we remember our story, who we are, where we are headed, what we are even gathering for, then may we sing, even if the song is unsettling. Even if remembering means we feel pain or discomfort or grief or even shame. May our honesty become a pathway to holiness. Amen.
Sharing Our Resources
Here at Azle Christian Church, we believe that stewardship encompasses our whole lives: our time, our energy, our resources, our care. It’s more of a framework or approach to our Christian life rather than a solitary act of giving. In our text today from Psalms, we considered how the Israelites were stewards of their collective story, their sacred practices, and their people. We invite you to give in ways that honor your relationship with your resources and with God.
There are many ways to support and resource the ministries of Azle Christian Church: Venmo, giving online, giving box, offering plate.
The deacons are going to hand these plates over during our final song, starting at the front row and they just to need make their way to the back where a deacon will collect them. You can drop your offering, an “I gave online card,” or an information card.
Invitation
If you’d like to become a member of this faith community, or if you’d like to become a disciple of Jesus, please talk to me after service or sometime this week.
Benediction:
Please rise in body or spirit for our benediction, the final song, and the Doxology.
May we feel emboldened to bring all of our prayers to God, trusting in the Keeper of our songs to transfigure our hearts and soothe our spirits. Amen.