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By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.\xa0 There on the poplars we hung our harps, for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy; they said, \u201cSing us one of the songs of Zion!\u201d How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land? (Psalm 137:1-4)

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This is one of the few psalms that comes with a definite historical context.\xa0 The exiles, weeping before the taunts of their Babylonian captors in a foreign land.\xa0 In this land of exile, memory plays a central role.\xa0

Memory firstly brings forth lament.\xa0 Things have changed: drastically, violently.\xa0 Everything familiar has been ripped from place as the people themselves have been ripped from place.\xa0 And yet, the memory of home is not so easily dislodged.\xa0 The exiles remember Zion.\xa0 They remember their past.\xa0 They remember the goodness, the joy, the laughter\u2014the songs.\xa0 They remember their God.\xa0

It is the dissonance between these two realities: between the city of Babylon and the ever-present memory of the city of God that tells them just how far from home they really are.\xa0 This dissonance becomes lament.\xa0 They remember the joyful songs of Zion\u2014the songs of ascent we ourselves just went through\u2014but they can no longer sing them.\xa0 Not today.\xa0 Not here.\xa0 They hang up their harps and weep as their captors laugh in spite and derision.

There are also days when we get our bodies to the church while our souls still linger with a moment in our past\u2014that moment when a spouse said: \u201cI don\u2019t know if I love you anymore\u201d; the moment when disease struck; the moment someone we loved died.\xa0 A similar dissonance plays out and we find that we actually just can\u2019t sing the songs of the Lord in this new foreign land of exile, grief, or confusion.\xa0 We\u2019re in the space of lament.\xa0 A space where we, like the Israelites sitting by the rivers of Babylon, simply have to hang up our harps, weep, and name the fact that we can\u2019t sing today.\xa0\xa0

The psalm also holds on to memory as an act of hope.\xa0 As exiles, these were people who held out the hope of return.\xa0 So they swore off any forgetfulness: they would continue to remember Zion, holding out hope that they would once again stand in the land of promise in the presence of their God in the city of their God.\xa0

In the Christian faith, we too hold onto a hopeful memory.\xa0 Not the memory of returning to the way things were before an accident, estrangement, or loss\u2014but rather a memory of the promises Jesus made before he left that things would not always be so painful or lonely as they are now.\xa0 We remember and place our hope in the fact that he said he would come again to set all things right and\xa0 make all things new.\xa0

The final act of the psalm is an invitation for God to remember.\xa0 And here the visions converge somewhat.\xa0 Psalm 137 asks God to remember the violence and evil that was done to his people, that God might bring justice and restoration.\xa0 That\u2019s not far off from the vision of the book of Revelation and our own, Christian prayers.\xa0 We also ask God to remember us, his people in our pain and hardship, and his promise to come and restore all things when we pray \u201ccome, Lord Jesus.\u201d

Memory is an important thing: it brings us to face the hardest places of our lives, it calls us to remember our hope, and it invites us to continue to cry out to God until he finally accomplishes his work in Jesus so that we can sing, once again.

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