We have never known the anguish of political exile in this country, but we know all too intimately the pain of exile when our lives are moved from their moorings against our will.

When we pray for a negative result, while waiting in that oh so sterile white room and a positive report comes walking through the door and we are left to report to our families. 

When instead of bringing home a paycheck to support the family there is a pink slip.  No contribution to Jamie’s college fund, sorry.  No family vacation this year. Only the empty time off…. struggling, wandering, and hoping to find a job.

How can we speak of family…when it is over…the house is divided.  The apron that said “#1 Dad,” no longer hangs in its place by the grill and for dinner, Styrofoam containers replace the set of well worn everyday china. And all you can do is sit down by the pool at your new old apartment and weep at the sight of family photos. Christmas cards and wedding albums that now mock the loss and anger now being experienced.

How does it feel to be in exile?  How can you ask that question?  How can you speak of life when all that remains is but an empty shell?  We are held captive in its shadow, cold and quiet, looking back on what was and will never be again.  How does it feel?  It feels as though our lives are losing all composure…

Isn’t it true that when all hope is gone, our sad songs, say so much.  The Psalm writer of 137 captures the raw voices of the temple musicians. They were the music makers, the dreamers of dreams, whose dreams became a nightmare.  Their band played on until the temple walls sunk into the ground. Now by the rivers of Babylon their harps hung with their hearts.  And they questioned, how could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?  

Robbed of the space to worship God with songs of praise they could no longer sing.  A noisy prayer of lament, full of sorrow for their loss and vengeance against their captors and neighboring betrayers were the only sounds they could muster. 

Doesn’t this Psalm seem…well, rather unseemly as far as Psalms go?  Isn’t this all a little too dark for such a bright Sunday morning? I mean for heaven’s sake, the children have barely made it out of the sanctuary today without hearing Happy shall they be who take your little ones
 and dash them against the rock! It is not very safe…not very “family friendly.”  Aren’t such things better left unsaid at church?

As a people of faith, have we lost the capacity for honest lament?  It seems as though we have fallen captive to the idea that prayers must be pious if they are to be precious to God, filled to the brim with the “king’s English” but empty of life’s more disturbing moments.

Psalm 137 invites us into a kind of prayer that runs counter to our G-rated expectations. Prayers are opportunities for truthfulness before god and us.  Times of lament should allow us to “holler” as well as hallow, to laugh, to bless, to curse and to cry out to God when there is injustice.

Expressing anger at ones circumstance and even a desire for vengeance when hurt are natural responses and cannot be ignored.  The Psalmist refuses to deny these feelings, but instead of acting, offers them up to God wrapped in prayer. Lament is painful; it requires that we remember what was lost when we would rather forget.

Clichés are used too quickly to numb the pain when we are hurting: time heals all wounds, let’s just let bygones be bygones, shouldn’t we just forgive and forget…”  What part exactly does forgetting play in forgiveness? Not forgive and forget, shouldn’t it be forgive and remember.

Elie Wiesel is a holocaust survivor.  He remembers its horrors well, and resists the temptation to forget them. “I can tolerate the memory of silence, he says but not the silence of memory.”

Lament is a gift to us…a gift that allows us to remember and to live on.  Surviving exile with our identities intact is dependent upon our remembering. Memory of what was will guide us towards a new life, even when we find ourselves in strange places.  Fueled by the grief of his own lamentations, Wiesel remembers, but allows those memories to become reasons for compassion instead of hate.

Memory, after all, is at the heart of the Christian faith, “Do this in Remembrance of me.”  At the table, we don’t just speak of the salvation that Jesus came to give, but we remember the life he lived and lost and that we must lose in order to become a part of the family of God. “This is my story, this is my Song” becomes the memory that lasts and creates for us, in us and through us a new people.  These stories are important to our family.

Stories were important in my family. But none more important than the stories told that sustain us. Divorce entered so early that its exile is all that I remember.  Relatively few meetings aside, life with my older siblings were more a collection of stories than shared memory. My two brothers and older sister are our father’s from a previous marriage and after the divorce they went with him and me with my mother.

This was a painful time for them, a story that I am just now beginning to understand.  They lost a mother and a family that I, at age 2, never really knew. The person who had been mother to them for a time, who cared for them, who sang comforting songs to them when they were sick, was now gone. Once they divorced she no longer had a name – What is an “Ex-step-mother” anyway?

 Their ability to name their loss in lament was interrupted by my father’s pain. Silence was their only sound because it was too just too hard to talk about it. For my mother, her lament was vocal. She grieved and by keeping the family stories in the forefront of my own memories. She found a way to pray that one day we could find a new way to be a family… to hear “father” and “mother” spoken again by all, even if “husband” and “wife” were not. Years passed and each in their own way and in their own time began to gain composure. 

Some returned to their old way of speaking: “Mother.” For others that word could not come as easily... always polite, but with a formal distance that indicating separation.  Learning to sing together again was work…we were out of practice. First, from nothing at first to then a name to something a little more familiar, the lyrics were being rewritten for us, as time went by.  Now another generation begins to speak that know nothing directly of the pain we experienced.  They only know words like “Grandmother” or our more colloquial version, “Maw Maw.”

Sadness and loss are still with us as many of the notes from our original score are still missing and for that we continue to grieve, but God has done a new work we are beginning to make music again.  Through the exile of our lives we may begin to sing the Lord’s song again, when we begin to imagine how even through tragedy we are still God’s children.  We are still loved, and adored and valuable in God’s sight.  The other side of lament is song.  My family is being recomposed, by having the imagination to sing in a new way without denying the pain of what has happened.

The temple musicians had to do the same when they were taken away from their space of worship into a foreign land.  The people of Jerusalem had to find a way to speak to God in the midst of their captivity. Their first response was lament, but they had to move on the speak to learn to sing exhile’s song in a new way

You might be familiar with this story inspired by Itzhak Perlman, who is considered one of the greatest violinists of all time. He was stricken with polio when he was a small child. Polio removed took his ability to walk straight to run or even to dance but God gave him the ability to create beautiful music.

On November 18, 1995, Itzhak Perlman came on stage to give a concert at Lincoln Center in New York City. Because of the polio, he has heavy braces on both legs and walks with the aid of crutches. Just to see him walk across the stage one step at a time, slowly . . . is an incredible sight.

He walks painfully, yet majestically, until he reaches his chair. Then he sits down, slowly puts his crutches on the floor, undoes the clasps on his legs, tucks one foot back and extends the other foot forward. Then he bends down, picks up his violin, puts it under his chin, nods to the director and begins to play.

But on that occasion in 1995, something went wrong. Just as he finished the first few bars, there was a loud POP! One of the strings on his violin broke! You could hear it snap all across the concert hall. Everybody in the room realized what had happened and they all wondered, "What on earth is he going to do?" Would he re-attach his braces, pick up his crutches, and go looking for a new string or another violin? He didn't.

Perlman sat there for a moment, closed his eyes, and then amazingly, he signaled the conductor to begin again. The orchestra began, and Itzhak Perlman recomposed that piece in his head and played the entire piece with incredible power, and passion, on just three strings!

When he finished, the concert hall was silent until the people burst into applause from every corner of the auditorium. The music he made that night with just three strings was more beautiful, more sacred, and more memorable than any he had ever made before when he had four strings.

Perlman smiled, wiped the sweat from his brow, raised his violin bow to quiet the crowd and then, not boastfully, but quietly, he said: "You know, sometimes it is our task to find out how much music we can still make with what we have left." [See Jack Riemer Houston Chronicle 2/10/2001, possibly spurious]

Lament give us the time to sit down for a minute, close our eyes and remember what was lost.  When we are through lamenting then we must open our eyes and see how God can take our lamentations and recompose them into a beautiful song.

We must be willing to allow God to rewrite our lives, to make beautiful music with what we have.

Refuse to be silent. Allow even your notes of discontent to be offered as a prayer to God.  God hears your sounds not as noise but as the beginning of a new song.  If you will allow the composer’s pen to guide you, the symphony awaits . . . are you willing to be heard again?

Amen