Blue Christmas 2011 Sermon
Psalm 137
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?
John 1:1-5
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
This past weekend, I took my annual tour with a group of friends to look at the Christmas windows on Fifth Avenue. It’s a fun time every year of eating chestnuts, catching up, and gazing at the lavish displays of creativity.
This year, I was struck by the starkness of the Saks windows. They depicted a made-up scene of a girl descending into a cave and finding a labyrinth of people in very elegant (of course!) black and white clothes, all working strange machinery to create bubbles.
A storyline at the bottom of the windows says that the girl named Holly went from room to room, wondering at the bubbles and why they were being made. She never really gets an answer, but she does get exposure to some very pricey and beautiful fashion.
It left me feeling a bit hollow. It seemed just like art for the sake of selling clothes. It felt as cold and hollow as the plastic bubbles themselves, bouncing mechanically from top to bottom of the window.
For many of us, that hollow feeling might feel familiar about this time of year. Whether it’s due to loss of loved ones recently or long ago, a rift in the family, a loss of dreams or expectations, the dazzling lights and joyous songs of the season can seem just like bubbles, encased in another world behind the glass of our grief.
This clash of cultural celebration and emotional state is nothing new to those who have grieved, now or in centuries past.
Psalm 137 is a particularly poignant example of grief “in a strange land.” You who are hearing the hollow echoes of “all I want for Christmas is you” pumped in through every store’s intercom system might empathize with them.
This psalm was composed in response to one of the most tragic events of Jewish history. Their temple, which they understood to be not just a place of worship, but God’s very house, had been sacked, destroyed, and defiled.
The Israelites had been captured by the Babylonians and taken as slaves to this foreign land. There, the captors mocked them, demanding that they sing their upbeat songs of Zion, of Jerusalem, of joy for their God – the God who had not protected them. They were exiles from their homeland, and exiles from joy.
It is utter despair. We hear in this verse, and in the several that follow, almost every element of grief:
• Disinterest in former things
• Remembering of better times
• Weeping
• Anger
• Disbelief
• Torment
As the psalm continues, the psalmist even imagines gruesome images of revenge.
But here is the beauty of this passage; it, too, is in our holy book. This psalm, with all its pain and despair, is honored as a prayer to God just as equally as Psalm 150, which consists mostly of the repeated phrase “Praise the Lord.”
This prayer of grief comes, as commentator Kate Huey has said, “from deep within the very human hearts of a people who knew what it was to suffer and to question, to believe and then to doubt, to feel loss and devastation, rage and a desire for revenge.
Aren't those all just as much at the heart of the human experience as feelings of joy, gratitude, and praise?
And isn't prayer the place and the way we can take those experiences, for better or worse, to the God who knows our inner hearts better than we do ourselves?”
What strikes me as so powerful about this psalm is that it is a prayer, which in the Jewish culture means it is also a song.
They are singing even when they say they cannot sing.
They are not singing the jovial tunes they were known for, but they are singing from their hearts to the heart of God,
singing with all the hope they have left,
singing out the deepest, cruelest, most painful thoughts they have ever had.
In the midst of grief and mocking, they sing.
Five hundred years later, the Jews were again experiencing a time of great distress. Their land, which they had regained, was now occupied by Roman soldiers. Grumblings of revolt were often on the margins of society.
The people were desperate for a messiah, someone who would rise up and throw off the Roman mantle, someone who would save them.
It is into this environment that the writer of the Gospel of John speaks his opening – and world-changing – words:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
The light was not what people anticipated; it was not a military victor come to defeat the Roman Empire.
Instead, the light was what the Jews had been longing for since that first siege of the Temple; it was a touch of God in their midst. It was a fleshy, human message from God declaring an undying love and support.
It was a new hope.
Now, two thousand years later, we have this story to remind us each year about this deeper truth. God, who may not appear in ways we expect or desire, will, in fact, appear. The light will shine in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it.
The Christmas story comes around once a year, whether we are ready for it or not, whether we feel like singing “Deck the Halls” or whether we feel like a cold plastic bubble in a story with no ending. The Christmas story is relentless. It comes. It reminds us that, no matter our despair now, there is hope for the future. God is not finished with us yet.
In this Christmas season, we sing of joy not because we have it, but because in the process of singing it, we bring ourselves closer to it.
The photo on the front of your bulletin was taken in Bethlehem this spring. Two thousand years after Jesus’ birth in that city, there is a new kind of oppression; after decades of conflict erupting from both sides, the nation of Israel has created a giant wall between itself and Palestine.
Bethlehemites are stuck behind this wall, forced to apply for permits and wait in hours-long lines just to go the six miles to Jerusalem. Most Bethlehem teenagers have never been to Jerusalem; they dream of going someday.
The wall, the stark grey symbol of oppression is covered in graffiti, some of which would make the writers of Psalm 137 blush. But most of it, miraculously, tells this story of hope. Most of it is covered in prayers for peace, for hope, for redemption. It tells of a belief that darkness will not last always, that there is a light that will overcome the darkness.
I offer this image to you as a gift tonight. Whether your sense of hope is crystallized like a Swarovski ornament on the Rockefeller Christmas tree, or scrawled with spray paint over the other, more painful graffiti in your life, it is there. It is real. And in some unexpected way, in some dark corner, joy will spring forth again. The light will shine in the darkness.
Amen.
