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

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

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

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.  This dissonance becomes lament.  They remember the joyful songs of Zion—the songs of ascent we ourselves just went through—but they can no longer sing them.  Not today.  Not here.  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—that moment when a spouse said: “I don’t know if I love you anymore”; the moment when disease struck; the moment someone we loved died.  A similar dissonance plays out and we find that we actually just can’t sing the songs of the Lord in this new foreign land of exile, grief, or confusion.  We’re in the space of lament.  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’t sing today.  

The psalm also holds on to memory as an act of hope.  As exiles, these were people who held out the hope of return.  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. 

In the Christian faith, we too hold onto a hopeful memory.  Not the memory of returning to the way things were before an accident, estrangement, or loss—but 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.  We remember and place our hope in the fact that he said he would come again to set all things right and  make all things new. 

The final act of the psalm is an invitation for God to remember.  And here the visions converge somewhat.  Psalm 137 asks God to remember the violence and evil that was done to his people, that God might bring justice and restoration.  That’s not far off from the vision of the book of Revelation and our own, Christian prayers.  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 “come, Lord Jesus.”

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.