A Babylon Song

"Sing us one of the songs of Zion."
Psalm 137:3a

(Although I wrote these lines more than twenty years ago, they somehow seem more relevant today than they did then.)

By the Euphrates,
We sat and we mourned
And thought of our home,
While our captors, in scorn,
Demanded a song,
So to misrepresent
The faith of God's people.
Yet, did we consent
To sing so in jest
And to add to their mirth?
To turn from the One
Whom we seek for rebirth?

How can we sing
In a foreigner's land,
Denying our Savior
At worldly command?
And how can we join
In an alien song,
Describing a land
Where we do not belong?
Our chorus must point
To the Author of love
Guiding even our captors
To mansions above.

We play to the Father
And not on demand.
Our song's our response
To the works of His hand.
For He has restored us
And called us by name
To heavenly homesteads
We someday will claim.

One day . . .
Persecution will surely fade;
Joyful hearts and hands will raise;
And we'll fall down and worship
The Ancient of Days.

Psalm 137

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?

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 remember you,
if I do not consider Jerusalem
my highest joy.

Remember, O LORD, what the Edomites did
on the day Jerusalem fell.
"Tear it down," they cried,
"tear it down to its foundations!"

O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is he who repays you
for what you have done to us-

He who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.

Passage cited from the New International Version (NIV), © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society.