Cheating

Name: Chad
Scripture: Psalm 137

How can we sing to the Lord?
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.
We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.
For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.
How shall we sing the LORDS song in a strange land?
5 If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
Remember, O LORD, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof.
O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.
Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

OAP: I think I will lose the accountability bet with Scott, but technically I haven't yet. I don't want to soap again yet; I don't want to lose; I decided to cheat.
This is an explication I wrote for my English class. I started it four hours before it was due, in my car, in between my History final and my IR final. It is my soap for tonight. I find this situation/post fairly humorous btw.

Trust, Love and Infanticide
It is easy to sing Praises in the land of milk and honey. To worship during times of trials is a higher calling that few can do earnestly. In “Psalm 137” the author, “most likely a captive Levite” (Treasury), explores the conditions of his thankfulness. No longer able to love God for pleasures sake, the Israelites are invited to continue their relationship and love God solely for God’s sake. Through a time of spiritual and physical desolation the psalmist leans on the foundations of understanding his own brokenness, God’s glory and God’s justice.
The Israelites worshiped and connected with God through singing praises in his holy city, a land promised to them. The opening line of the Psalm highlights Israelites separation from God’s creation and placement into the creation of humanity. The “rivers of Babylon” (l. 1) are not the natural rivers of the region but rather canals that the Babylonians created themselves. These canals are shallow imitations of the Tigris or the Euphrates, a constant reminder of failure as the Jews passively “sat mourning” (l. 1). The title, a frustrated question which is also mirrored in line 4, addresses a central conflict, that of keeping fidelity to God when the means of praise would be a mockery of itself. Robert Bellarmine noted that “they could not attempt to expose their sacred hymns to the ridicule of gentiles”(Treasury), for the Babylonians only “asked… for the words of a song” (l. 3), a hollow shell resembling praise. The removal of God’s felt presence transformed a tool of worship into temptation.
The individual conflict of this temptation for the psalmist becomes evident through his shifting from the plural first person pronoun “we”(l.4) in line four to the singular “I” (l. 5) in the following line. The communal lamentation evolves into a personal struggle in which the speaker declares fidelity as his only concern. Jesus will later echo this psalm stating that “if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away” (Matt 5:30). The psalmist promises if the songs of worship are not sung with the purest of intentions, if God “is not exalt[ed…] beyond all [his] delights”(l. 6), then what had previously been one of his chief joys, an incarnation of praise, is nothing but a ritual in which God takes no delight (Leviticus 26:31). Singing a song of joy has no place in this foreign land, yet the cry of frustration is in itself a song, one not of a reaction to the situation God placed him in, but of remembrance and trust in the future.
The writer has complete confidence that justice will be enacted and that he himself has already won. The Hebrew word “shadad” (Lexicon) is used both as a curse and a judgment. The tense of “shadad” (Lexicon) is ambiguous, while it may very well be as many scholars translate it, an active appositive, as “Babylon, you destroyer”, such as it is translated in the New American Standard Bible, an equally plausible translation is as a gerundive, “Babylon, about to be destroyed” as in the King James Version. Moral justification is not even a question, he is certain his cry is in conjunction with the will of God, so doubtless that those who “not with [Him are] against [Him]” (Luke 11:23) that he writes possibly the most controversial passage in all of Hebrew scripture: “Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock” (l. 9). The implications are clear, all who favor the oppression of the Jews are guilty and condemned to death, to end the generations of a hostile people is justice in the eyes of the psalmist.
“Psalm 137” is written in frustration and anger; the common tools of worship have become idols in the presence of the Babylonian. It is easy to sing praises when in the temple; it is easier still to rely on the habits of singing when in a trying time. The psalmist recognizes the time for everything “a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance” (Ecclesiastes 3:4) and yet even while he cries out for murder of infants, he cries out in trust. The psalm’s bitter stance toward worship, when taken as an honest heart, becomes itself a deeper form of praise.