WHEN THE SOUL CRIES
In Anger
Psalm 137
8.30.06
I don’t know if any of you were as shocked as I was, two weeks ago or so, when I turned on the news and all of a sudden, ten years after the fact, they find the guy who apparently killed JonBenet Ramsey. In 1996 on Christmas Day, this beautiful six-year-old girl was found murdered in her basement. And for ten years, everybody was wondering, “Who was it? Was it the parents?” and then this guy comes forward in Thailand and says, “I was there when it happened.”
Those of us who are only kind of mildly interested in those types of things (we don’t watch CourtTV or MSNBC) are surprised. Some of you who watch those sorts of programs over and over have been wondering who killed JonBenet. Those of you who have been wondering have a sense of “Finally, they found out who did it. Maybe finally there will be a sense of justice.”
This Psalm taps into those feelings of justice -- those feelings of anger and justice and sometimes confusion. This is a Psalm that’s probably one of the hardest passages in the entire Bible. In fact, on Thursday I thought, “I need to find an easier passage to preach on.” But we’re going to dive right in. One of the hardest passages in the Bible. Let me give you a heads-up. The man (or woman, although we assume it is a man) who wrote this Psalm was an eyewitness to some of the worst war crimes ever committed, an eyewitness to the most heinous things that humans have ever seen. So you need to have that as information before we read this Psalm. This is a Psalm after a war and is the reflections of a person after that war.
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!
This is God’s holy, inerrant, and life-giving Word to us; thanks be to God.
If we polled the men in this room and found out what you really struggle with deep in your souls, probably the #2 thing we would find would be anger -- anger that either gets poured out on everybody around you like a blind man with a machine gun, or anger that gets stuffed in the good, Southern, stoic, male fashion: “swallow your feelings.” It’s probably a problem of many in this room. Certainly I would put myself in that category. Anger: How do we deal with it?
It’s not just men, though. Bring it home. Wives and women who are here saying, “Yeah, I wish my husband were here to hear this today...a sermon on anger, he needs to hear that” -- let’s bring it home and ask that question of ourselves. As we begin looking at God’s Word, who am I angry with? You ought to be able to come up with at least ten or fifteen without thinking too hard. What do I do with it? What should I do with my anger? The Psalmist taps into this very volatile emotion. Seeing how he deals with his anger, we can find out something about how to deal with the anger that we sometimes find in ourselves daily, even if we don’t realize it.
The first thing we can observe is that the Psalmist locates his anger. “What is the warm soil in which my anger is beginning to grow?” And we see that it starts in his grief. Look in verse 1: “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion.” He’s weeping for Zion. Now, what is that all about? Let me give you a brief history: This is probably somewhere around 550 B.C. and they’re in this country of Babylon. If you know about the history of the Bible, what often happened is that this superpower, Babylon, came against this little speck of a country, Israel. They were sweeping through the Middle East, and Israel happened to be one of the countries they were sweeping through, and they came and surrounded the capital city, Jerusalem, and they besieged it. When the city fell -- and what happened next is what often happened in ancient times and it probably still happens now -- once the city fell, the soldiers came in and went wild, and that means everything that you can imagine. In fact, it probably means things that you can’t even imagine. It certainly meant burning, pillaging, looting, and ravaging, and murdering, and raping. And going from house to house, ridding themselves of the next generation of potential rebels. So they would go from mother to mother, and from baby to baby, and they would take that crying infant, clinging to life at its mother's chest, and they would rip that baby from its parent, take it by the ankles, and…. That’s what they did, a hundred times over.
Everyone that was left in the country, they carried off to Babylon. No wonder he’s weeping. You’d be weeping, too. And there’s a deep grief, a thousand miles from home. And what’s the memory seared into the Psalmist’s mind as he thinks back on Jerusalem? It’s the same memory that would be seared into our minds: mutilated babies lying all over. Little Hannah from next door. That’s what he remembers as he sits by the river in Babylon. “I stood there and remembered that day.” And so when he comes down to verse 8, and he kind of longs for someone to pay back the Babylonians and we draw back in horror, guess what? You’d be longing for that, too, if you’d lived through what the Psalmist lived through.
But there’s more than that going on: The soldiers are showing up and taunting them. These guys are musicians and did you see it in verse 2? “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?" And here’s what’s going on: “Hey you, slave, you wearing chains down there, Israelite! We’ve got some time on our hands. Sing us a song. Go ahead, sing us a song about how your God is the great God. Sing us one of those songs about Jerusalem.” And we can almost hear them falling down in laughter. And the musician, in the only act of defiance he can give, just says, “No, I’m not going to sing under these circumstances; I’m going to weep instead.” But his weeping, this grief, quickly turns from a cousin of anger to anger itself. And we see that in verse 6: “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!' "
Now what’s going on here? Remember that Babylon is this big superpower, Israel is just a speck, but down the road is another speck: Edom. And the Edomites hate the Israelites and they make a treaty with Babylon. So, the day that Babylon comes and surrounds the city of Jerusalem, all the Edomites come out and bring their popcorn, peanuts, and their beer. They’re all set up, they’ve got their lawn chairs out there, and they’re just waiting for Babylon to tear it down, tear it down, tear it down. And you can hear as the temple in Jerusalem is brought down -- as it burns and they pull it down to the very ground -- you can hear the Edomites outside the town yelling, “Yeah! Yeah!” And the Psalmist burns with anger. “Remember, O Lord, the injustice.”
His anger doesn’t come to full flame until he realizes just how deep is the injustice that was done in Jerusalem that day. And psychologists will tell you that anger and our sense, our perceived sense, of justice are closely related. If you think about it, that’s how it works in your own soul. This week I asked my seven-year-old to help me with my sermon. She’s a pretty amiable little girl, she doesn’t tend to be angry a lot, and she gets along with people for the most part. So I asked her, “Rebecca, what is it that makes you mad?” And she looked at me -- smiling even when she said this, but you could see the fire burning in her eyes -- and she said, “It makes me furious when Abigail bites me.” I can understand that, why that would make you angry: It’s not right! It hurts and it’s simply not right. Well, think about you -- what makes you angry? Usually it has something to do with our sense of justice. The guy pulls in front of me in the fast lane and slows down to 45. That’s not right! My sense of justice has been invaded. Of course, it’s more serious than that a lot of times – someone hurts you, and it’s not just hurt that’s involved; it’s also anger. And you say, “It’s not right. It wasn’t right that they did that.” And it appeals to our sense of justice. It’s not right that this little six-year-old girl was assaulted and murdered.
It tells us that there is a proper sense of righteous, holy anger. We tend to think that all anger is all bad all of the time and we should avoid it. But there are at least two instances in the life of Jesus where there was no question that he was angry. In Mark, chapter 3, he shows up to heal a man with a shriveled hand. The religious leaders show up to see if he’s going to break their rules. It says in Mark 3 that he was “filled with fury” at the religious leaders. He wasn’t furious at the sinners; he was furious at the religious leaders, because they didn’t want to do the right thing. They wanted to keep man-made rules that would keep this man from being healed.
And there’s another time when he’s at the tomb of Lazarus, his friend who has died, and it says that Jesus is angry. "It’s not right that this friend of mine has died!" Did you know that it’s not right? That it’s not how God designed things for people to die? And so there are certain things that really demand holy anger. If you’ve never been angry at anything, you’re not like Jesus. There’s a holy anger.
Now, what's the problem? My anger is usually not holy. My anger often has something to do with someone just irritating the tar out of me, imposing themselves on my agenda, as if everything should work the way I think it should work, and when you get in the way of that I get angry. And so our anger is always mixed; it’s not pure; it’s not refined or distilled. We get angry about things that aren’t really unjust. Or, we get justifiably angry, but what we do with it makes things even worse. I hurt the people close to me or take my anger out unjustly on people around me. But what does the Psalmist do? He weeps. He says, “I’m going to remember Jerusalem. I’m going to stay here. I’m not going to give premature resolution to my anger. I’m not going to pretend it’s not there; I’m going to stay here for a while.” We shouldn’t be shocked by his anger, because if we were in his situation, we’d be much the same. We have to understand and locate where our anger comes from.
What does he do next? Something unexpected. He prays his anger. In verse 6 he’s praying about Jerusalem, and in verse 7 he takes his vengeance and hatred towards the Edomites to God. Not to the Edomites; he takes it straight to God. There, what he would find is that his emotions would begin to be purified. This is what has been so revolutionary for me this summer as we’ve looked at the Psalms. Here’s the biggest thing I’ve learned this summer: What the Psalms tell us to do with our emotions is to bring them naked into the presence of God. When you’re feeling guilty -- not if you’re feeling guilty; when you’re feeling guilty. When you feel shame about things you’ve done or have been done to you. When you’re afraid or scared to death. When you are depressed and struggling with despair or suicidal thoughts, and darkness is your closest friend. When you hate people around you...you bring it to God. That doesn’t seem right to us, does it? It doesn’t seem right to me. That’s what we see the Psalmist do. The tendency for religious circles is to think this way: “I know I’m not supposed to worry or be angry at people, and I know I’m not supposed to be bitter. And I just shouldn’t feel this way. And you know what? I’m not in a prayerful frame of mind, so I’m not going to pray. I’m going to wait until I get into a prayerful frame of mind -- I get rid of my anger, I get rid of my shame, I get rid of my guilt, I get rid of my fear. When I get rid of that, then I can pray.” Is that not what we do? Is that not what you do? Maybe it’s just me. So we don’t pray.
And you know what else we don’t do? We don’t ever get over our anger, or our shame, or our guilt, or our fear, or our despair. Because the Psalms are like the good news that is the center of Christianity. One of the central nuggets of Christianity is this: You don’t have to get your life together before you come to Jesus. Do you hear that? When was the last time that was good news for you? You don’t have to get your life together before you come to Jesus, for the first time or for the thousandth time. In fact, if you wait until your life is together.... Some of you are waiting and you know it isn’t happening -- when I get in shape I'll join the gym; when I get the house clean I’m going to have the maid come over; when I get my life together then I’ll come to Jesus; when I get my soul and my emotions together, then I’ll pray. You see, the Psalms are a reflection of the gospel. You don’t have to have your emotions together to pray! Pray your anger. Pray your fear. Pray your despair. Pray your bitterness. Pray your worry. We get it upside down.
This morning, it was about 6:30 and I was practicing the sermon, and I realized that I had a situation in my life with someone that had been causing me a lot of pain. Someone I’ve known for a long time -- not somebody in this congregation, but it could be. Someone I’ve had a friendship with for a long time, and it has just crumbled in the last month. And I’ve just been carrying it around like a tumor. That’s what I’ve realized. I’ve been carrying around this tumor, this distress, this pain, this anger, this sadness, this bitterness. And I haven’t been dealing with it...and who wants to deal with that? I’ve been carrying around a tumor. How many of you are carrying around tumors this morning? And this morning at 6:30 I stopped practicing and I said, “Ok, Lord, you and me. Let me pray about this for the first time in a month. Let me lay my soul bare. I know I shouldn’t feel this way about this person. I know that I have sin here. I know that there are all sorts of crazy emotions wrapped up in this. I know that there’s stress and distress. Father, I’m giving it to you.” And there began to be peace. What tumors are you carrying around and won’t bring to the Lord? Deal with them in the presence of the Lord. Are you?
He prays his anger, but he limits his anger. What does he do in this Psalm? Listen, what’s going on in the Middle East right now? I don’t know; somebody’s always killing somebody. All I know is that for as long as I’ve been alive, they’ve been killing each other. Why? There’s something in the human soul that says, “I’m going to pay you back!” In fact, there’s something kind of unique about Middle Eastern culture that says, “I swear before my countrymen and God, I will pay back!” And so a Palestinian shoots a missile into Israel, and Israel shoots a missile back into Palestine. I know it’s not that simple, but underneath it is this vengeance, this culture of vengeance. It’s in that culture that the Psalmist says, “I will not take vengeance. I will not swear to take vengeance. I will not take things into my own hands.” In fact, he takes a radically different approach. What does he do? In verse 7 he says, “You remember, O Lord.” You remember. You remember little Hannah. You remember the Edomites cheering. You remember the murders, the atrocities done to your people.
Hebrew scholars agree that the whole Psalm is set up like a trial. He swears himself in in vv. 5-6; he gives evidence in v. 7; in vv. 8-9 he suggests a sentence. What’s the sentence he suggests for Babylon? “God, let the same thing be done to them that they did to us.” And you'd pray the same thing; in fact, you would have prayed that on your best day if you had been there. At your most sane moment you would ask for that. And you know what? That did happen. Fifty years or so later, the Persians (the next big fish) swept through Babylon and Babylon didn’t exist anymore. And in a couple of hundred years, the Greeks did it again just for good measure. Some of these same atrocities that the Babylonians committed were committed against them. But the Psalmist doesn’t care about any of that; he’s saying, “God, I’m leaving it in your hands. God, you take care of it.” The Psalmist is realizing what maybe we don’t – “I don’t judge justly. I’m going to leave this in the hands of the only One who sees the whole picture and always does the right thing, the One who always judges justly and can do something about it. I’m going to leave it in the hands of God the Judge." Now, some of you are very nervous. We start talking about the judgment of God and you begin to get real nervous, for a lot of different reasons. Maybe you grew up in a church where the judgment of God was all that was ever being talked about. Well, hold on a second and walk with me for a little bit.
I’ve mentioned before here a man named Miroslav Volf. He is a professor at Yale University, a professor of religion and ethics. What makes him kind of interesting in this area is that he grew up in Croatia, and he was an eyewitness to genocide between the Serbs and Croats and all of the horrible things that happened. In fact, his own brother was killed as part of that conflict. Now he teaches at Yale, and he talks in class a lot about justice and how the need is for a God of justice. He said in this interview (this is paraphrased, not direct), “Oftentimes what will happen to me is a student will come up to me and say, ‘Mr. Volf, I believe in God. This whole idea of a God of justice makes me very uncomfortable. I can believe in a God of peace, mercy, and love – I can believe in all of that. But a God of justice? That’s an old, ancient, dangerous view of God.’ I know one thing about them: They’ve lived a very sheltered, easy life.” He says that if you’ve ever been a firsthand witness of the horrible things that happen in genocide, you don’t take such a simplistic view. Here’s what he says: “The notorious Serbian fighters called the cetnik had been sowing desolation in my native country, herding people into concentration camps, raping women, burning down churches, and destroying cities.” This is what had been happening. And then he asked himself the question, “Why shouldn’t I take vengeance upon them? Why shouldn’t I get the Serbs back for what they did to me?” Here’s his answer: “I’m going to leave it in the hands of God.” Do you understand? If God isn’t a God of justice, then nothing that’s ever been done that’s unjust, in your life or in anybody else’s life, will ever see justice. If God is not a God of justice, then you have to take up the rocket-propelled grenade launcher and shoot it at the guy you hate because God’s not going to do it. And nobody else is going to do it. “I have to get vengeance; I have to get justice.” I would say that it is dangerous if you don’t have a God of justice.
But there’s another mindset. Some of you are going, “Yeah! We believe in a God of justice! We believe that God is going to get the bad people. Bring it on; it’s about time! Somebody make the bad people pay.” The implication is that “I’m one of the good people. I’m of the moral majority, the right theological persuasion, the right political party, and you are part of the wrong theological persuasion, political party, and I am morally and ethically superior to you. I’m one of the virtuous ones.” And here’s something I know about you: If those things even begin to creep into your thinking, you don’t understand the gospel. You may be able to verbalize it -- “Jesus died for sinners” -- but it hasn’t taken root into your soul. How do I know that? The Bible tells me so. In Romans 3, God sets out a courtroom scene and every single human stands before God and everybody has their mouth shut. Nobody says a word. As we compare ourselves to one another, like the Serbians, yeah, maybe we’re morally superior. But the Bible lifts the camera and says, “Hey, there’s another Being in the world, and if you compare yourself to him, you’re going to be really quiet. You’re going to be a little more humble in your approach to him.”
Here’s what that means. You know the old preacher illustration? “At midnight tonight, I want everybody in the universe to get what’s coming to them. No mercy, just justice. Well, you better not make plans for 12:01, right?" That’s what the gospel says: “Listen, I’m a cetnik.” Can you say that, honestly? That you're a moral rebel, even if you haven’t committed the same outward crimes...but have you ever hated someone? Jesus says they’re on the same level. I’m a cetnik before God. But you know what? He’s embraced me. That’s what Volf says. “Can I embrace a cetnik, the ultimate evil person? Can I do that, embrace the ultimate evil person?” You know what the gospel is? God embraces the ultimate evil person: me. You might say, “That’s too strong of language.” No, it’s not; you don’t know me. He embraced me. Do you understand the gospel?
What do we do with this Psalm? Three things.
Number one: Don’t underestimate the cost of God’s forgiveness. We talk a lot in our circles, rightly so, about the forgiveness of God, and it’s sweet and it’s wonderful. But don’t underestimate its cost. When Jesus was coming into Jerusalem, at the end of his life when he’s about to be arrested in a few days and is about to die, you know what Psalm he was thinking about? Psalm 137. He begins to weep and weeps over the city of Jerusalem. Why does he think about this Psalm? What’s going to happen to Jesus in a few days? The ultimate slaughter of the innocent. Do you understand that Jesus volunteered to be thrown to the ground for us? That’s why Psalm 137 is on his mind. He doesn’t stand and say, “Jerusalem, you’re about to kill me and you’re going to get what’s coming to you.” And he doesn’t say to me, “Toby, you’re going to get what’s coming to you.” And if you believe it, he doesn’t say to you, “You’re going to get what’s coming to you!” You know what he says? “I’m going to get what’s coming to you. But make no mistake, it’s going to cost me my life. And you’re going to get what was coming to me: fellowship with the Father. Sweet fellowship with the Father." Let’s not make light of what our forgiveness cost.
Number two: Listen to the whole conversation. I got on atheist.com this week. It’s a pretty interesting web site, a pretty good site in some ways. There’s a section on atheist.com (it is what it sounds like) and it had “Top 10 Bible verses to show to Christians,” and the implication was that if Christians ever read those verses they wouldn’t be Christians anymore because it would be self-evident. Guess what was on the top 10 list? Psalm 137, verse 9. The implication is that if they would just read this, they would see how horrible things are. Maybe that’s you this morning. Maybe you’re a cynic, you’re a skeptic about all of this Christianity stuff, and I’m glad you’re here. But you don’t really believe it, and this verse is one reason why you don’t believe it. Well, let me request something of you. You get angry when somebody takes a little snippet of a conversation you’ve had and they take that little snippet over here and spin it, and they quote you, and maybe they use it in ways completely different from how you intended it to be used. And you hear it and say, “That’s not what I meant at all!” Or maybe you’re in the middle of a conversation and you’re making a point and someone repeatedly interrupts, and you say, “Let me finish.” Let me encourage you to give God the same courtesy that you are asking for: Let him finish. One verse in one Psalm -- there are 150 Psalms. One book out of 66 books. Listen to the whole conversation. Please don’t draw your conclusions about what Christianity is and is not from one verse; you wouldn’t want somebody to do that to you.
Number three: Forgive as the Lord forgave you. When the Bible talks about forgiveness, it doesn’t say, “Forgive." It says, “Forgive as the Lord forgave you.” That means something very particular about the Lord’s forgiveness. Here’s something that’s very general about forgiveness: If you're going to ask forgiveness of someone you go to them and say, “I need you to forgive me.” You do this with your husband or your wife. (If you don’t do this with your husband or your wife, you’ve got problems.) What are you owning up to when you ask for forgiveness? You’re owning up that you have committed a wrong or injustice against this person and you need something to happen. Your spouse, for example, has a choice at that point. He or she can not forgive you, or say they will but still make you pay, or he or she can absorb the cost, which is what real forgiveness is. If there is ever going to be real forgiveness, somebody’s going to absorb the cost. And the gospel says this: Jesus absorbed the cost. Do you understand that the Cross is the most offensive message that there can be? It’s an insult to us. What’s the insult? You are so flawed that nothing less than the death of God could fix you. You don’t need a fine-tuning, you don’t need a self-help book; only God dying is going to help you. Completely insulting, and completely affirming of who you are. You’re so loved and valuable that God would do that. Do you understand that these two things come together?
Now, here’s what the Lord says: “I have given to people that don’t deserve it. I’ve given to people so fundamentally broken and flawed, I have given them everything. Now you do that.” With that person you thought of earlier that you’re mad at. With that person later on today that you’re going to be mad at. I’m not saying there doesn’t need to be conversations; I did a whole series on conflict in January. But who am I to hold up my rights when Jesus laid his down? Forgive as the Lord forgave you. I’m no longer going to replay tapes in my mind, hoping that the outcome will be different and they’ll get what’s coming to them. I’m no longer going to take the passive-aggressive approach and just gossip behind their backs and tear them down and rip them to shreds. I’m not going to do that anymore. I’m going to forgive as the Lord forgave me. Will you do that?
