It wasn't so much because the walls lay in ruins and the temple was all but a charred remains that they cried. It was because all that Jerusalem stood for seemed to have perished too.
Jerusalem: the 'city of peace', which symbolised the peace of God and all the promises of Yahweh was a desolate wasteland. Yes, how they wept.
Now they found themselves living as exiles in a strange land, among a strange people, with strange customs and strange gods. And then the taunts began. 'You Jews are renowned for your singing and dancing. Why don't you sing your songs now? After all you are "God's people",' they would say, sneering. But how could they sing songs of hope and promise, when all hope was reduced to a pile of rubble? No, they would simply hang up their harps and weep.
Babylon now
That is the background to Psalm 137.
However, what may come as a surprise to many is the fact that Babylon still exists. Not the Babylon of King Nebuchadnezzar, now modern day Iraq. That perished long ago, 70 years or so after they had been crowing about their victory over the Jews. There is another 'Babylon' however, which is to be understood as a human system set up in defiance against God.
This imagery of Babylon is taken up by the New Testament. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the Revelation where Babylon is mentioned repeatedly as representing mankind in organised revolt against its Maker, so powerful and alluring but destined for destruction.
The sobering truth is that we live in Babylon. As Western society moves further and further away from its Christian heritage, Christians will feel increasingly like exiles in Babylon. The question is: how can we sing the songs of the Lord in a strange land? That is, how can we live as God's people and witness to God's promises which are often captured in song, when those around us do not understand or simply sneer?
In his thoughtful reflections on what he calls the 'post-Christian mind', the writer and erstwhile pupil of C.S. Lewis, Harry Blamires, contended: ' There is no doubt that, as the 21st century approaches, Christendom faces formidable hostility, not least in those developed Western countries once regarded as bulwarks of Christian civilization. Looking around us, we Christians cannot but be aware of how powerful and insidious is the assault on the faith we hold. The hold of this campaign on the media is such that the masses are being brainwashed as they read the press, listen to the radio or watch TV.'
The fact is that every area of life is being encroached upon by a new moral darkness - politics, education, law, medicine, the family - even the church. The philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre refers to 'new dark ages' of moral decay. Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned of the West's debilitating 'spiritual exhaustion'. In more recent years a best selling book by William Strauss and Neil Howe concerning the United States, maintains that 'it feels like it's unravelling'.
Think for a moment of the unravelling that has happened in our society. Even a few decades ago, most people, even non-Christians, would have agreed that there were absolutes in morality - perhaps adhering to the Golden Rule or the last five of the Ten Commandments. That has largely disappeared as God has been sidelined. The family was seen as the basic stable unit of society, and laws were in place to support it. Much of that has now gone with moves towards no-fault divorce and the promotion of homosexual and lesbian lifestyles.
Life too has been cheapened. We find ourselves in a situation where a baby is being aborted at the rate of one every three minutes in the UK.
Think too of our children's behaviour. A head teacher related to me that the Local Education Authority in Hull considers a well managed primary class to be one in which chairs are not being thrown across the room by pupils! How far we have travelled in such a short space of time.
Not by chance
None of these things have happened by accident. They all flow from a significant change in the way people view the world. The title of the book by philosopher Richard Weaver is bang on target : Ideas have Consequences. At the risk of oversimplification, let us consider just some of the 'isms' which have shaped the way our society is now thinking and so behaving. As Christians, we must understand the Babylon in which we live, if we are to seek to witness effectively and not simply be swept out with the tide.
Materialism
This is the belief that reality only consists of that which can be seen and measured - there is no room for what might be called the transcendent. Such notions can be explained away in terms of psychology or sociology. Everything can be understood purely in terms of natural causes, leaving no room for God. If there is an overarching big story - a meta-narrative - which holds our view of the world together, it is that of naturalism, which postulates that we are all products of blind, meaningless chance.
But there is a price to pay when everything is reduced to chance. Humans can't have any significance or meaning. Imagine some spilt milk on the kitchen floor. It is there by accident. Does it have any meaning? Suppose that by some freak of nature that spilt milk gains consciousness. Just by declaring itself to have significance, does such a declaration give it any more significance than it had before? Of course not. An accident is simply that - an accident.
But that is what we are left with as a result of evolutionism. And so it will not be long before people start treating each other like accidents, as indeed, we have already seen with children in the US walking into school with guns to blow their classmates away. The recent statistics for domestic violence is of one such act perpetrated against women every 20 seconds. We are rightly shocked but we should not be surprised. Eventually people will start living out what they have been taught.
Individualism
In 1979 the sociologist Robert Bellah conducted a survey of 200 average middle-class Americans and published his findings in a book called Habits of the Heart. His conclusion? 'Many had no sense of community or social obligation. They saw the world as a fragmented place for choice and freedom that produced little meaning and comfort.' In short 'I' rule. The focus is on me, my comforts, my pleasures, my choices. The anti-authority mood of the swinging 1960s captured this for many, spawning the demanding inflationary outlook of the 70s, the 'loadsa money' generation of Thatcher's 80s and now the rave culture of Blair's 2000. Hence, the emphasis is on individual choice. To an earlier generation it mattered what we chose - do the right thing; now all that matters is that we choose, for that alone gives me a sense of value.
The bitter irony is that for all the increase in talk about freedom we seem to be less and less free as a society. Many people do not feel safe to walk the streets at night.
Hedonism
This is the pursuit of pleasure via the route of subjectivism.
Many people may not know what they think, but they know what they feel and how they want to feel which is to feel good about themselves. The recent vodka ad on the billboards of England said it all. With pictures of trendy young people celebrating the dawn with drinks in hand, emblazoned in bold type were the words 'Sleep when you're dead'.
Relativism
Which brings us to the final 'ism' - relativism. There are no absolute truths, right or wrong, good or bad - so don't judge, it is all relative to your own culture or upbringing.
We come up against what the Yale Law Professor Arthur Leff has termed 'The grand Sez Who?' He argues that if there is no God, then there is no universally accepted source of authority.We object to the Serbs that genocide is wrong. 'Sez who? You wouldn't object to killing 1,000 ants would you, so why not 1,000 people?'
This is Babylon, with its strange language where words can mean whatever you want them to mean, where right and wrong have been excluded, where the gods of pleasure and self reign supreme, and where everything is relative, therefore religion must be kept private.
Let us return to the question in Psalm 137: 'How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?'
What to do!
Negatively, don't compromise
What is the call by the pagans to God's people to sing anything else but a call to 'settle down'? 'Our tormentors demanded songs of joy' in verse 3. In other words: 'Why not recognise that this is your home for good? There is no point in moping. Simply come to terms with your situation. Join us and sing.' An earlier Christian generation had a word for this - they called it 'worldliness'. Sadly, many in the church have succumbed to just that, often without realising it.
Consequently, we have 'Christian materialism' which paradoxically manifests itself in two ways. First, in those who deny the miraculous, like the former Bishop of Durham, David Jenkins, who dismissed the resurrection of Jesus as a 'conjuring trick with bones'.
Secondly, there are those who see God only in what is called the 'supernatural'. This brand of Christianity, which the late Francis Schaeffer termed 'the new superspirituality', is demand-driven with the result that everything has to be entertaining thrills, leading to church services taking on the appearance of a circus. In effect there has been a surrender to the materialistic mindset - seeing is believing - and God has been reduced to a 'god of the gaps' or to be more precise, 'a god of the strange'.
There is also the 'Christian hedonist'. Here Christianity is portrayed as one long party, full of ups, no downs. The main thing here is the 'feel good factor'. Talk of taking up a cross is a switch-off.
Then we have the 'Christian relativist/ subjectivist'. This has been a point of contention in the local Evangelical Alliance Council in Hull, where a member from one of the new churches produced a paper which said that 'doctrine is to an extent subjective'. He went on to argue that so encumbered are we when we approach the Scripture with our own 'baggage' - preconceived ideas and commitments, that unless we have 'a direct revelation by the Spirit', we cannot have access to objective truth. The doctrine of the clarity of Scripture simply goes out of the window.
What can we say? First of all, as with all relativist arguments, it is self-refuting. If everything is so tainted by our past experiences and cultural and ecclesiastical baggage that in practice, as this man argued, truth is subjective, then this argument too, is tainted by the person's background, intellectual baggage and so on, and therefore cannot commend itself.
Secondly, it is a position guilty of what philosophers call the 'fallacy of the excluded middle' which goes something like this: either we know something absolutely and objectively or we know nothing at all because it is subjective.' It is either/or. But knowledge doesn't function like that. It is possible to know something truly, without knowing it exhaustively.
But the way of the relativist/subjectivist is very appealing when tolerance is seen as the cardinal virtue, even within the church. But the price being paid is far too high. Nothing less than the gospel is at stake, for if it can be relativised and so marginalised that it needn't be considered at all, then it's fine for you, but it's not for me.
Of course, it is tempting to sing to the tune of the world, for if you don't, persecution is just around the corner, as Daniel and his friends found to their own cost in Babylon - and - so shall we. Don't compromise.
Positively, we can challenge
We can challenge by singing as loudly as possible the Lord's song, which, for Christians, is the gospel: 'Let the word of Christ dwell in you (plural) richly as you teach and admonish each other with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, with gratitude in your hearts to God.' We might well legitimately construe such 'singing' as a metaphor for gospel proclamation.
At least the people depicted in the psalm had the right priorities: 'If I forget you O Jerusalem may my right hand forget its skill. May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth if I do not consider Jerusalem my highest joy' (verse 5). Having been put into exile as punishment for their sin, the people were at last waking up to the fact that God and his covenant came first as symbolised by Jerusalem. The temple may have been destroyed, but not the God of the temple. Neither his power nor purposes had diminished one iota.
It is the same divine power and purpose which find their fulfilment in Jesus who came to deliver God's people from a spiritual exile far worse than that experienced by the Jews. Christians not only can but must sing the Lord's song in this strange land, because of what God has achieved in his Son Jesus.
'Always with you'
Remember it was the risen Christ who, in sending his disciples out into a hostile world, said: 'I will be with you always' (Matthew 28.20), not 'I will keep an occasional eye on you', but an emphatic I will be with you, so don't be intimidated. It is Christians who form the new temple being built in 'Babylon', as the gospel is proclaimed and people are added to the church with Christ dwelling in their midst by his Spirit (1 Corinthians 3.16). In other words we can sing because God is present. As we sing God's message by word and deed, we declare God's truth and so challenge an unbelieving world which lives a lie. And if we are not doing that, it is simply a measure of the extent we have decided to put down our roots in Babylon.
What is more, this 'song' is also a song of judgment. Verse 7: 'Remember, O Lord, what the Edomites did on the day Jerusalem fell. "Tear it down" they cried, "tear it down to the foundations!" O daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us.' I haven't come across that many choruses which carry that sort of sentiment. But although the Psalmist may have used language which hurts our sensitive ears, he strains towards an important truth, namely, that the Judge of the earth will do what is right. One day the Judge will return and we shall be called to give an account (Acts 17.31). Then no one will be able to hide behind the claim that truth is simply a social construct.
Furthermore, it is as God's people start to live as people of light, incarnating the truth, with Christian communities showing there is another way, a better way, singing the Lord's song in all its fullness, that the darkness can begin to turn to dawn.
