March 8, 2026

Psalm 137 is one of the least read psalms in church history. Researchers actually study things like this. In terms of what is read in church settings, this will never make the most read list - ever - so thanks Wendy for bucking the trend and reading it for us.

Psalm 137 comes from a specific event. In 586 BCE, the Babylonian Empire destroyed Jerusalem.

The city burned. The temple destroyed. Families torn apart.

Children killed. Women assaulted. Survivors marched hundreds of miles into exile.

No doubt, The psalmist here was not in a comfortable place. This is a psalm processing trauma.

The psalm begins:

“By the waters of Babylon,

there we sat down and wept

when we remembered Zion.”

Imagine the scene.

The Israelites are sitting by the river.

They are refugees.

They are enslaved.

Their homeland is gone and they want to remember it.

All while their captors mock them.

“Sing for us. One of those happy songs. You know, one about God? Or love? Or hope?

How deeply cruel is this? The oppressors demand joy, as they traumatize.

In other words, Be grateful. Be polite. Be calm.

Don’t make people uncomfortable -

Isn’t this place just grand? Can’t you just be happy and sing?

But the psalmist says:

Are you kidding me? How dare you ask me to pretend like nothing is wrong?

Therefore, Shutting down the notion that this injustice could be pushed out of the everyday understanding of their lives. That this spoken grief could be anything but the most faithful response to injustice.

As a white, cisgender, middle-class woman, I have not experienced oppression in the way many people in this world have.

I have not lost everything to war.

I have not been enslaved.

I have not watched my homeland burn.

But many people have.

The Hebrew people forced into Babylonian captivity.

Africans stolen from their homes and brought to this country in chains.

Those in Gaza who live under occupation and everyday violence. Those in Ukraine who have seen their home reduced to rubble. To name just a few.

We must remember that for many people, Psalm 137 is not shocking.

In fact, It’s familiar. It speaks the language of people who know what it means to be powerless.

Scholar and pastor Eugene H. Peterson once read this psalm and asked:

“Who let this raw hate into our prayer book?” And then wrote: We have been brought up, most of us, interpreting what is wrong in the world on a grid of moralism. Moralism trains us in making cool, detached judgments. Deep down, the moralist suspects that there are no, or at least not very many, real victims. People get what is coming to them. In the long run people reap what they sow. The rape victim, the unemployed, the emotionally ill, the prisoner, the refugee – if we were privy to all the details we would see that, in fact, “they asked for it.”

The Psalms will have none of this. The Psalms assume a moral structure to life, but their main work is not to train us in judgmental moralism but to grapple with evil. Their praying insights have identified an enemy and they respond in outrage. They hate what they see. On behalf of all the dispossessed, the mocked, the dehumanized of the earth they pour into the ears of God their sightings of the enemy, not “siphoning off hate”, but channeling it in effective ways, in covenantal shapes.

We sometimes want to make sure that people express their anger appropriately - and what if Psalm 137 actually does this?

There is a difference between vengeful violence and holy anger.

Holy anger is what rises in us when we see injustice.

When a knee is pressed on a man’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds.

When a child is used by governmental agencies to coerce the parent’s deportation.

When truth is twisted and propaganda tries to make violence sound like peace.

When refugees carry their whole lives in a suitcase because their homes are no longer safe.

If we see those things and feel nothing—something is wrong.

Anger is not the opposite of love.

Indifference is.

The psalmist was angry because they loved their people.

In the words of Tish Harrison Warren, “The imprecatory psalms (which is a fancy label for Psalm 137) name evil. They remind us that those who have great power are able to destroy the lives of the weak with seeming impunity. This is the world we live in. We cannot simply hold hands, sing ‘Kumbaya,’ and hope for the best. Our hearts call out for judgment against the wickedness that leaves fathers weeping alone over their silent sons. We need words to express our indignation at this evil.”

Through this psalm, We get words to bring to a God who is listening and hurting about the evil in this world too. Psalm 137 channels rage toward God, not toward violence. Like a child crying in the arms of a loving parent when all they want to do is have revenge, we can take our emotions to God. I am thankful we can because when anger stays inside us, it festers. When anger spills out on others, it destroys.

Esau McCauley says it better than I can in Reading While Black -

"These are the words of a people who know rage, a people who know what it is like to turn to those with power hoping for recompense only to be pushed further into the mud. These are the words of those who walk past homes and families living in luxury knowing that this wealth is bought with the price of their suffering. The oppressor’s children live at ease while children of the oppressed starve. The rich man's wife has the latest fashions while the oppressed man's wife remains in rags… we must listen to the injustices that give rise to the anger. It is an anger born of powerlessness; it is a cry to the only one who is left -to right these wrongs, God. To whom could the battered and bruised of Israel turn if not God?

If you flinched a bit when Wendy read that verse about dashing the Babylonian children against the rocks, good. Its disturbing.

Babylon killed Israel’s children. Israel now imagines Babylon’s children being killed. Evil replicates itself.

The psalmist is refusing to reduce or sanitize that pain. In fact, it shows the depth of the wound.

And that may be the hardest part - we have to sit with the uncomfortable nature of all of this and not just try to use our sharpies to redact it from our Bibles or our hearts.

But the gift of this and other psalms is that all the emotions are present sometimes in one psalm.

They share a language of the full range of human emotion with us.

I wonder if this Psalm would help you and us identify places where you feel this strongly? How are you carrying grief? Where are the places where injustice has wounded you? And through the pain, where are the places where anger lives in your body?

Psalm 137 says something radical:

Bring it to God.

Bring the sadness.

Bring the questions.

Name the injustice.

Bring the rage.

Bring it all to God.

Sometimes the most faithful prayer sounds like this:

God, this is not right.

God, remember the suffering.

God, do something.

Because holy anger is not the end of the story. It is the cry that justice must come. And Christians believe something extraordinary:

One day, justice will come.

Because the God who hears the cries of Hebrew exiles is a God who is still listening when the oppressed cry out today.

Let it be so!